I zip my MacBook back into its Thule-case. My idea was to clack out a quick entry while my daughter plays on the playground and I multitask with a giant mug of the black stuff.
Only my screen is so dirty that I’m actually embarrassed to be seen ‘functioning’ like this. I suppose I could move so as to be more discreet (perhaps with my back against a wall) and then by design no one could peer over my shoulder and see what I’m ‘working’ on.
I’m almost sure no one really cares… and its just me who is infinitely curious1 about what people, who work out of coffee shops, are actually doing. I would totally judge someone with a screen as fingerprinted and… eh, splattered as mine. What is this? The MacBook of a serial masturbater?
[1] Notice how I refer to myself as curious, but everyone else is usually a mentally unstable voyeur.
And so I’m back in my in my subterranean dwelling from whence I, nominally, work shirk my life’s calling. (that sounds more authentic)
I finished my first book for the year. *holds up his achievement and tries to look stern* (my rather boring and horribly cliched new years resolution is to read more)
I really enjoyed this, despite picking it up whimsically, and then only buying it at the end because I’d wandered round the bookshop with it for an hour (some of which it spent tucked into my armpit). It seemed, after being subjected to that, only… eh… ethical to make the purchase.
When I was… not a gray as I am now, more athletic and had the ability to go supine (on a whim) without everything creaking ominously and threatening to tear away from their moorings, I capriciously registered myself for a Bachelor of arts degree. Part time. In any event, I was miserable when it turned out that my philosophy 101 lecturer was a hardcore Christian (of an indeterminate splintering). Ha ha. Which amuses me now because (at the time) I was likely still an upright Catholic.
I desperately wanted a hard-boiled, angry atheist. The guy I got was so damn cheerful and… sane (maybe).
In any event, in John Kaag (Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UMass Lowell) I got what I was obviously craving back then. A hardcore Nietzscherite. That’s not to say he isn’t cheerful in his writing. But he definitely does NOT have, as all people who follow the ‘Dark Arts’, all this marbles colored coded and arranged by size.
Having said that, who really has it all together? And perhaps there are just people and their degrees of willingness to talk about how crazy they are?
I think I clicked with this book because I recognize something of myself in the authors writing. Despite not being a Nietzsche-fanboy. Well… that’s not entirely true. I can (usually) find something I like (and can appreciate) in most philosophies, and Nietzsche… well, he probably has more than most.
In any event this is not a book for everyone. And this is not supposed to be a review, merely an affidavit stating I’ve crossed off my first book for the year. Yay me.
Go Darke 