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Greetings, sons and lovers,
The month of February is upon us, and with it, the imminent Valentine's Day holiday. For one day, the country lavishly dotes on loved ones. Perfect dates may already be planned, reservations booked, hints dropped, floral arrangements ordered, awful chick flicks released, perfect gifts selected, boomboxes hoisted over heads in vaguely stalker-like acts of desperation outside of your window, lingerie dusted off, and handcuffs oiled. Perhaps our readers would benefit from a Valentine's book-giving guide, with our expert choices on romantic tomes for every taste, and some fine erotica for more adult tastes. That would probably be helpful. But it's currently Friday night, and while my roommate and his girlfriend are out on a triple-date with two other couples, I'm alone in my apartment drinking wine directly from the bottle. Fuck your bullshit consumer-whore holiday for needy assholes. The world is ending.
Yes. The world is ending. Perhaps not in 2012 like John Cusack and a bunch of dead indigenous people would have you believe, but it has come to my attention that everything is horrible and we're probably all going to die soon. This is due to the amount of nonfiction I've been reading lately. Specifically a run of Eating Animals, The World Without Us, and Anarchism and Other Essays, which was preceded by a collection of post-apocalyptic sci-fi. So, in about a month, I have been told how corporations are screwing us, everything humankind does is basically a cancer on the earth, and that my government needs to be taken down for the good of people everywhere. The whole experience has left me with a large urge to start some sort of solar-powered farm in the middle of Montana in order to grow my own crops and live out my days watching whatever's on cable (hopefully Kill Bill).
But that's what I get for getting a little sloppy with my mission of diversifying my reading habits. After a feminist lady-friend pointed out how woefully bereft of female authors my bookshelf was, I made an effort to include more estrogen in my reading (hence the Emma Goldman anarchy essays). To give a hint as to how few female authors I read in the past, my list for 2009 included four. That was after a year of making more of an effort to include more of “the fairer sex.” My bookshelf is a total dong-party.
But, in my traditional mixture of white liberal guilt and OCD, this effort grew and mutated, incorporating my love of spreadsheets and statistics, into the practice of keeping track of the gender and nation of origin of the author, as well as the genre of book. My lady-friend was right. And not only were my reading practices devoid of women, but they were largely a white male affair. Dennis Miller saw my bookshelf and said, “This thing couldn’t have more white males on it if they were signing the Magna Carta on top of it during a Rush CD signing.” He truly is the king of references.
So, I’m afraid I’ve doomed us all by not keeping my reading sufficiently diverse. I know that’s a lot of blame to heap on one man, but I do help run an internet book review site and I’m a DJ on college radio. I obviously wield a lot of power. But, as they so often are, my lady-friend was right. It would behoove us all, so fresh into a new decade, in a month that celebrates love, to make an effort to expand our minds to diverse points of view and perspectives. I implore you to learn from my example. Perhaps it’s too late (college radio DJ, remember?), but hopefully you can help save us.
But if we're doomed to a world where survivors feed off of the hopefully-uninfected corpses of deceased family members while nature reclaims civilization in an effort to purge the planet from our ecologically and politically irresponsible actions, I guess it wouldn't hurt me to say "Happy Valentine's Day, readers." If nothing else, it may get me laid one last time before I'm food.
XOXO,
Kyle
(February,
2010)
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