An entry in which I start a cross-country feud of geniuses, question my existence, and make a weak but clever allusion to a book I've never read
Friday, Sept. 10, 2004 - 20:15

So today I'm in a store and I start looking at the books and there's the Series of Unfortunate Events books on a shelf and I see there are quite a few more than there were the last time I saw them on a shelf, and then I also see that that damn Lemony Snicket has stolen the title of the autobiography that I've been planning to write for the past decade or so.

Yeah, can you believe that? The bastard. The filthy slimy bastard.

I was going to write an unauthorized autobiography! And now I can't!

Lemony Snicket, by the way, is friends with Stephin Merritt, of Magnetic Fields fame, and the 6ths, and many other projects. I, by the way, have been listening furiously to the 6ths for the past half year or so, and to the Magnetic Fields ever since I got the excellent new album i.

Lemony Snicket's on accordian in "Waltzing Me All The Way Home". He also wrote some of the stuff on Stephin Merritt's website.

And so I've been thinking about Stephin Merritt and Lemony Snicket hanging out and being geniuses together. And I've been thinking how I need to start hanging out with smart people again, because, frankly, well, the people I've been around for most of the past year... housekeepers and manual laborers... lord love 'em, they're hard workers (and they get paid for shit and have no health insurance)... they work their asses off and are great people, you know... but they're not necessarily the smartest on the planet.

And I'm doing nothing, NOTHING, and so rather than accepting responsibility for that I've decided to blame the people around me.

(I know, I listen to Modest Mouse, I've heard it too, "So I blame this town this job these friends, the truth is it's myself.")

If I could hang out with Stephin Merritt and Lemony Snicket I'd produce works of genius too.

Yeah, I've been in a rut lately. Creativitilly speaking.

My IQ is 153. Who wants to hang out with me? We'll start a club and we'll hang out all the time and be geniuses together and we'll write music and poetry and heartbreaking works of staggering plentitude and we'll paint abstractly and live in lofts and have cats named Bumblebee and Martin and we'll drink coffee in coffee shops and look bored and when Stephin Merritt and Lemony Snicket walk by we'll made snide remarks loudly about how our genius club is better than their genius club, and maybe we'll throw our half-eaten muffins at them, and we'll laugh at them when they look at us like we're childish.

I like me some 6ths, and the Magnetic Fields.

Stephin Merritt I am a fan of. But that damn Lemony Snicket.

And now I can never write an autobiography!

Which leads me to wonder if I even exist at all.

I recently Googled myself and to my horror and dismay discovered that there is another person with my name.

This came as quite a shock because both my first name and my last name are fairly uncommon, and the combination of the two, I was quite confident, had never occurred before in the history of mankind. I was the only me.

Now, only recently have people with my first name started popping up. Even that was hard to get used to, because for many years, as far as I knew, I was the only one with my first name. But, okay, okay, there are others, I'm cool with that. Some of them even spell it right.

But someone with my whole name! That's unfathomable, incorrigible, unacceptable. It's chilling, that's what it is.

This other me got second runner-up in the Little Miss something or other contest, that's why she's on the internet.

I'm pretty sure that this other me isn't the real me because:

1. I'm not between the ages of 4 and 6.
2. I've never been entered in a Little Miss something or other pageant (although if I had been I most certainly would have won and not gotten second runner-up like that poor little loser wanna-be-me because I was extremely cute. I was so cute it would have made you cry with joy and admiration. Yeah, that cute. Me.).
3. I don't live in West Virginia.
4. My parents aren't named Scott and Shelly.
5. Yeah, I'm sure, I wouldn't enter a beauty pageant anyway. I am so above that.

And the parents, Scott and Shelly, didn't even consult me. They just took my name and figured it would be okay. If they had asked me like they ought to have, I would have either told them no way Jose or I would have asked for significant monetary compensation. I might ask for significant monetary compensation anyway, because can you imagine the shock it gave me to find out that there's another me running around? Or that there's some little prima donna running around pretending to be me? It's quite upsetting, and quite confusing. Quite the conundrum. I will have to rethink my entire existence.

And I'll have to think of a new clever original title for my autobiography.

Plus, to add to this existential doubt I now have, when you search for Angelina Johnson on some search engines, you find this diary. This diary! Angelina Johnson! I'm not Angelina Johnson. I don't even know who she is. As far as I was aware, this diary was not affiliated with Angelina Johnson in any way, or if it was, it was purely coincidental.

But maybe, maybe, this is Angelina Johnson's diary, because maybe I don't exist. Or maybe I'm really Angelina Johnson. Or maybe Angelina Johnson is pretending to be me. Or maybe the diary is in charge, the diary, who calls herself Angelina Johnson. Or maybe it's the robots again.

It's the robots again, I bet.

I talked to a friend of mine recently, a musician, a guitar player, and he said that he wonders if maybe there are only a certain number of riffs, and the ones he gets, if he doesn't do something with them, turn them into songs and get them out there, that someone else will get them and use them and he'll lose them.

(What does that have to do with Lemony Snicket or beauty pageants? Very little. But I'll tie it in, just watch me. I'm a genius, remember?)

I have a sentence, actually two, that I got last year, and I would never ever put it here because I am so weirdly possessive of it. It's so good, man. It's good. It's mine, and I have to do something with it. That's why I need to start hanging out with smart people, so I can do something smart with my wonderful sentence.

And if Mr. Snicket gets ahold of it, well my friends, we'll have to go kick the shit out of him. Seriously. First agenda of our genius club will be to beat up that thief Lemony Snicket.

(Please, don't bring up Fight Club. It's too obvious.)