Can you believe that, after nearly three months of life at my unfortunately located new abode, I finally stuck all my books on the shelves? (They have been arranged using the following criteria: the more important to me, the better the placement; then they are arranged by size and shape. For example, my hardcover Nicholson Bakers, F. Scott Fitzgeralds and Ernest Hemingways have been awarded the good bookshelf by the window; the paperbacks and lesser works were shuttled off to the shelves nearer the back of the bus. There is absolutely no alphabetizing going on whatsoever.) The upside is that there are now only a few boxes of random crap still left to unpack, and that my place is looking like a finished product. The downside is that I have so much to read that it’s almost overwhelming. My goal is two books a week for the next few months, which historians three decades hence will refer to as the Summer of Loathe. Can I do it? Will it even matter?

WHY I’M ANGRY TODAY

I have come to the realization that possessing intelligence is actually working against me. If I were stupid as fuck, would I even care that I never got through Ulysses? Would I beat myself up for not being able to, in any real way, tell you who Gustav Mahler was—until just yesterday? Probably not. Any of you doctors or mad scientists out there want to give me a lobotomy?