Last night I smoked some drugs and wound up on my computer, at Post-Williamsburg, whereat it suddenly hit me that [a] 2008 is really and irrevocably over, [b] blogging is an art form at which I'll probably never excel, and [c] I needed, at that very moment, to consume a heaping bowl of Peanut Butter Crunch.

[a] As I never tire of observing, all of those cliches about "the fast-paced city life" and NYC never snoozing and all that -- these are completely true. Bearing this in mind, it does seem like the last six months of '08 passed with uncommon alacrity. I mean, shit, they're gone. This is strange. Obviously, time in New York City elapses at the same rate as it does everywhere else. When I say "fast-paced," I refer to the phenomological sensation of "pacing." But why does it even feel faster? If my life is busier here, it's not by much. Is it because the buildings are taller? The streets more populous? The signage more abundant? The commutes longer? The air dirtier? The rent higher? Or is it just because conventional wisdom dictates that New York lives should move faster?

[b] It's actually very difficult to be a good blogger, I think. Post-Williamsburg has several. The best bloggers, I've found, are very comfortable with themselves, or are at least capable of simulating self-comfort. They also don't really give a shit about abiding by the rules of writing/revision as practiced in more traditional publishing settings -- i.e., they won't set themselves aflame upon realizing that they've made a typo. The best bloggers are concise and personable. They're comfortable revealing occasionally intimate details about their lives to the world at large. Sometimes, they have personas, and they lure the reader into trusting these personas in the same manner that viewers trust latenight television hosts. None of these things describe me.

[c] I didn't have any Peanut Butter Crunch at hand, last night, and briefly considered an excursion to the nearest bodega in pursuit of said cereal. It was cold out, though. Oh, boy, was it cold out. In a moment of uncommon self-discipline, I refrained entirely from eating. On one level, this is commendable. Unfortunately, it inspired nearly seven minutes of involuted and fruitless meditation on the following topics: eating disorders, the hypothalamus and the presence of cannibinoid receptors therein, my ignorance of global starvation stastistics, fat people, vanity, the curiously recurrent motif of the bathroom scale in popular American culture and advertising, the dogmatic fervency with which the USDA's 1992 Food Pyramid was shoved down our throats as youths, the resultant banality and ineffectuality of that Food Pyramid in our lives/diets today, the unwitting humor of the idiom "shoved down our throats" when used to describe the delivery method of a nutritious eating model, how delicious (and aesthetically delightful) a literal pyramid of Peanut Butter Crunch would be, genetics, obesity, skinny people, Calista Flockhart, fat people making love, fat people walking, sleep apnea, my family tree, my body mass index, my ninth grade physical education instructor. In the time it took me to mull these things over, I could've procured, with a lot less mental turmoil, some Peanut Butter Crunch. Let this be a lesson.