Jason Roeder

I’ve never kept a journal. I think I’ve purchased one or two, but they inevitably remained blank or were converted into hardbound to-do lists. Instead of introspective chronicles, my so-called journals weren’t much more than expressions of my need to buy Aquafresh. A blog is something different, anyway, open to just about anyone in the world except certain raccoon-trapping survivalists. This makes honesty—especially, um, detailed honesty, a bit of a challenge—but let me give it a trial run:

“Everything is super, not just in my sundae bar of a life, but in the world at large, especially Myanmar.”

All right, I’ll work on it.

I had planned to have this up and running a few months in advance of the book as a way of generating, um, buzz. It’s a bit late for that—but now I’m writing for myself, dig? I suspect I’ll eventually resort to paraphrasing from the Declaration of Independence or the diaries of Andy Warhol. You will sense this when I seem abruptly preoccupied in holding truths self-evidently or how much heavier Warren Beatty looked the other night at Regine’s.

I live in Astoria, Queens. I guess I do actually live here now. I’ve been saying I “just” moved here, in part because it was actually true for the first few weeks of August and partly because declaring yourself a newcomer is kind of inoculation against the stigma of joblessness, friendlessness, aimlessness. When does this expire? Three months? Six months? When the town square is named after you?

Posted October 7th, 2007 | Comments are open