Posted 12:00 AM by Gene

May as well repeat this one from last year, with edits:

I do not like discussing personal matters but with the New Year I must. New Year's resolutions are not just made to be broken; they must preexist somewhere as lies. I have two for 2011, the same as from 2010: 1. Get published professionally and 2. Acquire a woman. Both are impossible. My masterpiece of a novel requires untold revisions -- rather demolition and reconstruction -- and I have neither the talent nor the patience to start. Well why not write a new novel? Because that would require inspiration, or experience. Our culture stinks because we don't have the panoramic life experience. Think of Dickens in his youth. Life is far easier now and we pay for it through the culture. The only places with something like the mad scramble of life are Africa and South Asia, and they don't have the masterworks because they never had Western culture. Sorry, Bollywood doesn't count.

As for the second the challenge is insuperable. Middle-age love is self-parody. Think Slick and his amours; think our thankfully outgoing guvnor EDDIE being a ladies' man. (In a way TGSM's train wreck was middle-aged because it's what a CEO might do if he had a body.) I don't have the advantage of a famous name or a famous inheritance. I fear online dating is a slog. There is no one at work. Being alone for so long I'm not sure I'd tolerate another person. The reduction of tragedy in life has made it somehow harder to mate; Matchmakers and arranged marriages existed because a spinster's fate was worse than virginity. How many more people lead unhappy love lives now that's its square to be romantically continent? The only conceivable way I'd gather a woman is through success in writing, and even if I found it I fear so many in the business would be so incompatible (i. e., knee-jerk liberals with huge egos and no irony, or overpublicized airheads) that I'd be just as bad as before, only with a little more money. So I make my resolutions knowing a higher force has already pulverized them for me.

Today the Mummers carry on with their increasingly shriveling excuse for a parade, and I'm always reluctant to head out as there are long, long gaps in the proceedings, with no one parading but policemen and souvenir hawkers, and nobody cares outside the city, but there are mobs to mingle with, and it's that or staying in my hovel all day.