cause i can’t take it anymore

i think i eat up entertainment almost compulsively. every minute not occupied by work, or social obligation, or eating, or say, making out (and there’s always time for that!) — or in other words any minute of downtime — i have to be working through my many backlogs of entertainment options. netflix queue, video games to play, books to read, all that. there’s so much out there and i’m only gonna be around for so long, how can i not feel pressure to fit it all in? (wow, that sounds a lot darker than i meant it to).

anyway, a side effect of that compulsion is that the more i see/hear/read/watch/play, the more desensitized i get. what for most of america seems like a really rad movie, like, say, avatar, to a zealot like myself falls so much farther down the scale even if i can enjoy and appreciate it for what it is. by the same token, the things that get me really excited — the cool, groundbreaking, out-of-the-box stuff like synecdoche, ny or oldboy — a lot of the population would probably find impenetrable, boring, super-weird or just confusing. same thing with music. so much of what i hear i think, ‘that is garbage, how can people love that?’ essentially, i worry sometimes that i’m so far immersed into entertainment that i’m distancing myself from normal people’s experience of it. and then i worry that it’s making me a worse critic, a worse writer, possibly a worse person, and that ‘snob’ isn’t just a playful jab but a justified condemnation.

but then i hear something like yeasayer’s ‘O.N.E.‘ and think, ‘holy shit, this is just pure and simple goodness. anyone who doesn’t like this really is wrong. i don’t like it because it meets some lofty standards of rigorous intellectual examination. i like it because it feels good on a totally non-critical level that demands a proper turning of the volume knob toward radical.

then i feel better and get back to writing about how what you think is awesome is actually kind of stupid and what you think is crappy is actually really great, and i can go on with my day.