My flight back from LAX tonight was delayed... and delayed some more... and... the battery to my laptop finally died.

So I bought a book. I read a lot, don't get me wrong... and not just comic books. Basically what I do for a living is read shit and then try to convince other people that what I just read is worth reading and creating tasks designed to prove to me that they are indeed doing the reading and getting something out of it. Or something like that.

My point is that I'm not a stranger to a book store.

I finally decided to read Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. It's been on my to-read list since the movie came out four years ago. Not that I didn't like the movie. In fact, I love the movie. One of my favorites. But I have this problem with reading a book that was turned into a movie if I've already seen the movie. This is why I will never -- no matter how much encouragement I receive -- end up reading the Lord of the Rings books.

It has something to do with not wanting to waste reading time on a book that I already know the ending to. As if I have a limited amount of reading time and in order to maximize my literary knowledge I shouldn't invest any effort in absorbing the same story twice. Stupid, I know, but all the same...

So I bought the book, and within ten minutes I'm hit with this:

"People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands -- literally thousands -- of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives."

Now, I consider myself to be a pretty happy, optimistic (sometimes to a fault) guy. But I do recognize that when I'm unhappy or depressed, I am incredibly low... maybe unusually so. Now I know why.

Goddam love songs.

I know there was a part of the movie where this was worked into one of Cusack's monologues. And I remember grinning to myself at the time. But seeing it in print seems so much more effective.

I like this book. When I'm done, I may even read The Fellowship of the Ring...

More good news:
People really do win.

See that link at the top of the SG pages that says "Win Midtown tickets"? I entered to win tickets to the Slim's show this Saturday. Got a call from somebody at Sony Music today telling me how lucky I am. This may be a case of a contest where everybody who enters wins... or gets something... but I don't care. Feels good to be a winner sometimes.

Yay me.