As you can tell by my year wrap-up post not appearing until nearly the end of January, I am very on top of my shit. I briefly tried weekly blog posts in 2018, but then I remembered I’m not that interesting. Maybe I should just start stealing links from all the weekly email newsletters I subscribe to and sometimes even read.* We are but reflections of our inspirations!! For several years I’ve had a resolution of trying to publish to Medium once a month. That’s been going… not so well. But here we are.
January
I didn’t make anything too exciting in the start of the year, but I did see Xiu Xiu perform the music of Twin Peaks at Thalia Hall and St. Vincent’s Fear the Future tour at Chicago Theatre, so that was cool. …
After a life-long aversion to reading books I’ve read before, I’ve recently begun revisiting some of the “sacred texts” of genre fiction, which is why I finally find myself re-reading Snow Crash.
Neal Stephenson made his name in 1992 when Snow Crash was first published, the year he turned 33 and I turned 7. Written between 1988 and 1991, it was his third novel after The Big U in 1984 and Zodiac: the Eco-thriller (“enjoyed, though rarely bought, by many radical environmentalists”) in 1988 but Snow Crash was his first big hit. I’d first read it six years later as an impressionable 13-year-old boy in 1998 or 1999, and now, two decades of interest in virtual reality later and 33 years old myself, I’ve just finished it for the second time.
“The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone…
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