devil's workshop

That is what an idle mind, according to the old adage, is. And I can confirm that it's 100% true. My mind is the devil's workshop right now. I've been binge watching Damages since last night, and I can almost feel my neurons turning to stone inside my head right now. I haven't felt this hebetudinous since... well, I can't remember. This is one reason I don't like weekends. They're boring as shit. At any rate, Damages is an excellent show. I love dark shows about brilliant and devious people, where the good guys and bad guys are almost equally flawed and corrupt. Makes you wonder how much of our notion that humans are essentially good deep down is an illusion. I liked Daredevil, too, for that reason, but that struck me as a bit more fanciful on account of its being based on a comic book. Damages is just raw twistedness.

Labor Day weekend is coming up, and I'm probably going to spend it at my aunt's. I haven't been getting around the city as much as I thought I would. Maybe I'll have time in the future, after I've got used to grad school a bit, and ascertained whether I can afford to take time off every now and then. I'd like to drive around a bit on my own, too, since public transportation feels so restricting.

I haven't been reading much at all this year. It sucks. I've been struggling to get through Stephen King's 11/22/63 - a book that mixes time travel with JFK's assassination - and, of course, it wouldn't be complete without Stephen King's trademark unlikeable protagonist, since he claims to put characters above everything else when it comes to writing fiction. Stephen King's ideas are often great, but it's the tone that bugs me. He seems to try too hard to make his characters relatable. Maybe it's me, but I can't really relate to the blue-collar speech of many of his characters, especially when it doesn't fit the situation or the rest of the character's personality. He's also more of the descriptive type of writer, which I've never been fond of. I don't need to know that the car this dude came across in the middle of the road in 1958 has dents here and here and here. It bogs down the narrative, in my opinion, and is a classic case of missing the forest for the trees. Not Stephen King in particular, but descriptive writers in general. They seem to try too hard to dictate what the reader's mental picture of the book ought to look like frame by frame, which ironically makes it more difficult for readers (some readers, at least, including me) to picture anything.