Green Eyed Monster

So, this isn't super surprising, probs, but I am often jealous of fictional people. I am much more often jealous of fictional people than I am of actual people, because, whatever actual people, do your own thing. But people on television and in books, I am often envious of. This is probably not the way most normal people confront the universe. But it's what I've got. So anyway, I have been barnstorming through our soon-to-be Book Club Book Emeritus, the Savage Detectives, and it got me to wondering in a particular way about these jealousies, to wit: I started to wonder whether the oblique way in which Belano and Ulises Lima exist has eclipsed the occasional way in which television characters exist, as the mode of going about life of which I am most (and most unrealistically) jealous.

I should say that, ever since I started waking up to watch the 3am to 5am block of Nick at Nite programming (Dick Van Dyke, the Lucille Ball Show, and maybe F Troop?) when I was in fifth grade, I have felt as if living in a television program would have been the best way to do it. In my own, actual life, I would say I generate enough activity of interest (to hold my own interest, I mean) for maybe an hour or two, with, which skillful editing, could be brought down to about forty-eight minutes, a week. So I could be an HBO show or something. The rest of my actual time I spend doing things that even I think would be better left off camera -- sitting around, waiting for things, updating my cache of quotes that are clever enough to text to people. I used to think that what would really be the best, would be if I could have to pay attention to what I was doing for those forty-eight minutes -- with music and montages -- and spend the rest of the week, I don't know, doing something else. This happens to me especially when I drive home from work, having had a successful night of playing Trivia Whiz on the Megatouch at the bar in Lockport, and a song I really like comes on the radio while I pull into my driveway. This, I think to myself, ought to be the end of this episode, and it seems like a big anticlimax that I actually have to get out of the car and brush my teeth and all of that.

Anyway, those montages are great and all, but now, more and more, I find myself wishing that the best way for my life to be talked about wouldn't even be in episodes, but in peripheral interlopes into other people talking about what they were up to when I ran into them. This morning I wore pajama pants and a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah t-shirt to go buy an air freshener and a frozen pizza at the grocery store, and the whole time I thought about how fantastic it would be if instead of something like this blog post, my trip to the grocery store was chronicled in somebody else's story about how they were picking up a sandwich tray and saw some guy in a CYHSY shirt ambling towards the aisle with scented candles and incense and such. And, say, that's how you'd know I spent a year here outside Buffalo. Just like Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, I wish to be hovering around whatever narrative arc that I'm currently propelling, in the muddled way that I'm propelling myself. Is that a strange thing to want? Periphery? And what do you guys think is better, that one, or episodes? Please, let somebody write that they too are jealous of the invented. Please?