Another Friday. And if you haven't noticed, this is the third installment this week. I'm doing my own little experiment - replacing quality with quantity. I got the idea from a trip to the movies last week. Everyone was buying these enormous boxes of popcorn, and slathering them with some oiley-butter substitute. Movie popcorn is repellent, but you do get a lot of it. And folks seem to be very happy with what they get. So call this Popcorn Week at Autobiographically Too Flat.

Popcorn is one of those thing I get really bitter about, actually. Popcorn and soda. They are some seriously profitable items at movies (and anywhere else they are sold). It costs (approximately) less than $0.05 to make a gallon of soda, and you get charged $2.00 for a 20 oz cup (That's not actually true: They don't sell 20 oz cups. I believe these days the smallest size for soda is 86 oz, and you have to ask for a "Kid-size"). Which divides out to something like a bazillion percent mark-up. And I don't know so much about the price of popcorn, but I can't imagine that the square foot of popcorn you get at the theater costs them anything near the $3.25 they are going to charge you for it. It comes in 6-foot long plastic bags, which is not really the vehicle for fine food. (And on that note, there ain't nothing more appetizing than your food coming in a bag that is later going to be used to take out the garbage)

Huh. That really belongs in another section of the page, I think. Sorry about that. What I really wanted to talk about a book. Which I'll get to in a bit, 'cuz it needs a little introduction. Wednesday night was another adventure in poetry. Went to the Bowery Poetry Club (for all of your too-hip poetry needs) to watch the first annual Bowery Poetry Mud Wrestling Championships. I recognize that there are a lot of things in the world that are more disturbing than young new york intellectuals rolling around in mud onstage (starting with old new york intellectuals rolling around in mud onstage, and ending with [or at least having rearguard played by] my dream last night of being chased through Bushwick by Senator Strom Thurmond who was garbed as a Cenobite and gesticulating hungrily with a knife and fork), but I certainly didn't expect to be presented with it that night. I'm not saying that I shouldn't have expected it - I did go to the venue to see just that, but I suppose I didn't prepare myself for it. In any case, pictures will be posted post-haste.

My point is that there was a guy there who was reading House of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski. Which is the best book ever (I'd explain it, but I just can't. Trust me on this, and get it out from the library. It's a horror novel, but it is in no way graphic, or bloody. It's spectacular. Wow, I love that book). So I chatted with him about it, and he was telling me that he's only about a hundred or so pages into it, but is seriously hooked, and can't put it down. Generally speaking, I don't like to talk to strangers about things, and I never really like deconstructing and analyzing art, but all I wanted to do was talk to this guy about how much I loved the book. Which was funny, because all he wanted to do (and really, all I wanted for him) was to stop talking to this jackass stranger about how good the book was, and instead just read the book. So there's that.

I want to bring this up, because I finally gave Sean and Amy their wedding gifts (along with gifts for them that I was holding for about a dozen other people). But I seriously considered withholding them until Sean started to read the copy of House of Leaves that I gave him for his birthday (or Christmas or something) last year, that he still hasn't gotten around to. And I know for a fact that he reads the blog, so this is just another reminder for him.

And the last thing I wanted to get to was to give a little nod of the head to the Heisenberg Principle by saying hello to KM. You can't send email to a blogger and not have it effect what gets written. KM has the distinction of not only being one of half a dozen people who follow what I put here, but also works in the same building as me. Which of course means that I'm going to feel kind of weird when I next write something like this, since it might make it back to the boss. On the other hand, I should definitely feel kind of weird for being in a place in my life where I can write an entry like that and have it be true, so it all works out, karmically speaking.