Pride, Vanity, and the Virtues of the Techno-Whore

I'm typing this post on a brand new MacBook that I got with a free IPod Touch.  I am excited.  I don't really know why.

I suppose it could have something to do with the joy I feel when I trick my credit card companies into thinking that I'm going to pay them back.  With my money.  I know that it isn't realistic to survive on student loans and adjunct lecturer wages, but look at me.  Fuck 'em.  

Yes, look at me.  I have a camera pointed at me right now, attached to the screen of my new computer.  I'm writing about myself.  I'm uploading Red Radio Stranger.  I'm looking at my pictures.

But here I am, expressing myself, however limited the audience.  See The Residents' Theory of Obscurity.  It's good.  I guess.  Fuck 'em.

In which I again publish part of an email to my father regarding self-definition as a writer and fall into an obnoxious, modernist maelstrom

Self-definition: I'll quote Red Radio Stranger, 'impossible and unnecessary," I think. Isn't defintion a fundamentally social (by which I mean mutually informed by speaker and listener) process? In fact, the attempt at self-definition strikes me as a kind of utterance that suggests a meaning that may undermine the attempt at self definition. In other words, if a sci-fi guy protests too much, that means he's definitely a sci-fi guy. If I keep saying I'm working class or an intellectual or whatever, aren't I engaged in character development of a linguistic idea? I'm just brainstorming, here, but I put meaning and therefore definition in a shadowy place filled with static and electricity that bounces between throat and ear....

And Red Radio Stranger has posted two teaser demos on their Myspace page....