There's a growing number of notes on my Treo that I've been meaning to get to, that are neither random notes in nature (one or two paragraphs) nor interesting enough for full entries (1,200 words, or 2,400 if I devote that day's entry exclusively to that subject). So, I thought I'd just gather a small number of them today and get them all out at once. Enjoy.

So the new Bret Easton Ellis novel is out, and a lot of litbloggers I respect have been trashing it, just like a lot of people I respect always do when a new Ellis novel comes out. Which leads me to this question, which I ask each time a new novel of his is released - am I such a bigger fan of Ellis because I happen to see something there in his writing that a lot of my peers don't? Or am I a fan simply because I first became a fan while in my late teens, and now find it impossible to completely shrug off my fandom, because it's been buried so deeply in my psyche?

This is a fascinating subject, I think, and one I've talked about here before - about how our relationship with an artist we admire changes profoundly, based on the age that we originally become fans. Like, there are lots of artists I only discovered and became fans of in my thirties - Neko Case, Radiohead, DB Weiss, etc - and I actually do admire these artists quite a lot, and in some cases are in awe of the things they've accomplished. But none of these people I've discovered in my thirties will ever be able to hold a place in my heart as someone like David Lynch does, who I first became a fan of when I was eighteen and saw Blue Velvet for the first time (in the theatre during its original run, which should give you a good idea of just what a decrepid old fuck I am).

My admiration for Lynch during college was a much more intense, obsessive one than any I form now in my thirties; and I'm convinced that it's because we know so little about subversive thought when we're teens, and have so far been exposed to so little of it. Anytime an artist inspires a profound change in how we see the world, there's always a chance of us developing this obsessive fondness for them, one that seems sometimes to get hardwired straight into a section of our brain we can't control, so that we remain obsessive fans no matter how old we get, no matter how much their future projects just start sucking more and more.

So maybe that's the case with me and Bret Easton Ellis, because of me reading Less Than Zero way back in 1986 or '87 or whenever the book first came out, and having it so profoundly show me some of the things that can be done in contemporary literature that I never realized possible. But then again, maybe I'm a big fan of Ellis simply because he's a great writer, albeit one who a whole lot of people seem to have a hard time understanding. Like, I thought his last novel before this one, Glamorama, was pretty much the most brilliant thing he's written yet - just an almost perfect marriage of what he was trying to do in American Psycho (but without most of the gross-out scenes, which is what ultimately ruins that book) and what he was going for in such projects as The Rules of Attraction (that "reality" in fiction doesn't have to be the same physical reality we know in the real world, even if the story itself is set in a similar environment). Needless to say, I'm looking forward to reading the new book!

So, it's been now, what, six weeks or so since first implementing the Getting Things Done time-management system in my life, and things are still going fantastically - among other wonderful accomplishments, I've gotten nearly 200 old emails in my inbox now responded to and taken care of, with only 100 or so left to go before I'm finally caught up. And I had a new thought about GTD the other day as well, and wanted to throw it up here for all of you to contemplate too:

Like most time-management systems, GTD incorporates a calendar as part of its methodology. (And in typical GTD form, David Allen doesn't actually specify what kind of calendar one should use - I myself, for example, simply use the boring ol' built-in one that comes with my Treo.) But unlike a lot of other systems, Allen is very, very specific about how such a calendar should be used - namely, he says that the only things that should be added to your calendar are the things that have to absolutely be done that particular day or that particular moment, that will not get accomplished if that window is missed. And the reason for this goes back to the overall goal of using GTD in your life - of getting every single random thought, every single to-do item, out of your brain and into an external form of sorted documentation. And the key to all this, he says, is to have your documentation system be so pervasive and so well-organized that your brain will finally quit worrying about all the things listed there, and go back to fully concentrating on the one task at hand. And this, he claims, is the real undoing of most time-management systems - that even after implementing them, your brain is still sitting around worrying about all the stuff you forgot to write down, and all the stuff in back lists that you've forgotten you wrote down in the first place, etc.

And, you know, damn if he isn't right! When first implementing GTD myself, I was severely tempted all the time to list things in my calendar that I wanted to get done that day, but that didn't necessarily have to get done that day (i.e. "Get back to this certain email," "Get to the grocery store," etc). And in fact I actually did this a couple of times when first implementing the system, and then immediately realized the point that Allen was trying to make - that when my calendar items were a mix of stuff that absolutely had to get done that day and stuff that could get blown off if I ran out of time, my brain tended to just ignore everything there. And so an event alarm would pop up, and I would have to think, "Okay, does this really have to get done right now?" And if it didn't, then I'd have to stop and re-add the item back into my GTD to-do lists, and worry about forgetting it if I didn't do it right that second, and blah blah blah.

But now that I'm using my calendar the way Allen suggests, I am indeed approaching the "mind like water" state that he claims is the ultimate goal in GTD. Anytime an item pops up from my calendar now, my brain knows for a fact that it's something that absolutely cannot be ignored; and since I set an alarm for every item I add in my calendar, once I do enter an item my brain can then safely forget about it for good, and just wait for it to be reminded when that alarm pops up (or when I quickly check my calendar the first thing each morning, which is something else I do). And so now, for example, I think I have something like 30 or 40 things all stacked up in my calendar, and damn if I can remember what any of them are now, because that's the whole point of GTD - to get it out of your brain, so that you can use your brain to simply concentrate fully on whatever particular task is at hand (like writing today's entry, in this example).

With every passing day, I am more and more impressed with GTD, and am profoundly starting to understand why there's a religious-type cult built around it on the web. I can whole-heartedly recommend it without reservation to all of you as well, which I do.

Hey, here's a surprise - yet another company here in Chicago pissed me off the other day. It's an utterly ridiculous and stupid story that's not worth going into here, so I won't; my point, though, is that it's gotten me thinking this week about just how profoundly disappointed and angry I seem to be these days concerning just about every single goddamn company I have to deal with in my life. And it's made me wonder - is it that companies in America are just generally getting shittier with every passing year? Or is it my expectations as a customer that are rapidly changing, in this age of transition we're now living in?

It's tempting, I think, to be a revisionist when it comes to this subject - to long for the "good ol' days," in other words, back when companies actually cared about their customers, back when companies actually took more profound actions to keep their customers satisfied. But you know what? That's bullshit. Companies have never cared about their customers, all throughout human history, and mostly see them with a mixture of anger and fear. In fact, before the Industrial Age, back when small teams made consumer goods from beginning to end by hand, it was pretty much standard operating procedure to discriminate against your customers; I mean, if your handmade Colonial furniture company can only produce 50 pieces a furniture a year, that means you only need 50 customers a year, and you are more than welcome to tell everyone else to go fuck themselves.

This is one of the profound changes of the Industrial Age that doesn't get talked about a lot - that when your company suddenly has the ability to make millions of items, and to ship them around the planet with a minimum of fuss, suddenly the entire world population becomes your customer base. These companies didn't stop hating and fearing their customers just because of this, but simply were forced to take a lot more of them on than they ever did before. And the difference between then and now, I'm coming to believe, is in the attitude of the customers themselves. Because let's face it - if you spent your entire life literally not being allowed to buy a nice, quality armoire, and if a company like Sears suddenly does let you, you're going to be grateful to Sears for giving you that chance. You could care less about customer service in a case like that, because you're just amazed that you have the chance to buy that armoire in the first place, at a price you can afford, with it being shipped to you no matter where in America you live.

We don't live in that age anymore; we live in one where we just assume that we can go out and buy anything we feel like buying, anytime we feel like buying it, and to have it delivered within two or three business days no matter where we are. Now that we take that for granted, we customers are changing our attitudes about what we want - we now want companies to have a relationship with us, to take care of our problems they caused, to treat us with the simple human respect we've developed in the 150 years since slavery first became illegal in this country.

I'm coming to the belief that this is why I seem to be getting more and more pissed off at more and more companies these days - because I as the customer am transitioning into this new attitude, while the companies themselves are not. Most companies, in fact, are still clinging to that Industrial-Age model like a drowning sailor clinging to a life preserver - that customers are to be hated and feared, that they exist for no other reason than to be fleeced as much as humanly possible. That bad news about the company should be hidden from these customers as much as humanly possible. That there should be a "wall" between the company and their customers, and that it should be as difficult as humanly possible for a customer to break through that wall and actually get in contact with somebody at that company.

I am certainly not the only customer on the planet who's feeling this way these days - there are millions and millions and millions of them, in fact, getting more and more and more pissed off at the way these companies are treating them. And I'm convinced that this whole subject is going to progress much the way the Labor movement did in the early 20th century; that is, that things are going to get a whole lot worse and a whole lot bloodier than they are now, before they even begin to start getting better. Like, one of the things that I'm almost positive is going to happen in the next twenty years is the rise of underground "customer vigilante groups" - people who get so pissed off at a particular company, that they form an organized, systematic way to actually physically sabotage these companies on a regular basis. I mean, there was an actual example of that here in Chicago a number of years ago, when Starbucks opened their first location in the then-hipster Wicker Park; namely, there was a group of punk kids who spent months throwing bricks through the place's windows in the middle of the night, every single time the store replaced them, which didn't get better until Starbucks finally installed an expensive survelliance system of cameras and movement monitors.

I'm convinced that such a thing is going to take a dramatically larger turn in the next ten or twenty years - that there will be groups of hundreds, of thousands of people, working in a coordinated way to burn down stores, to break into regional warehouses and ruin product supplies, to sometimes even assassinate CEOs and other smug corporate executives. You may laugh, but I'm serious - this is exactly what happened in the Labor movement, if you read your history, with thousands upon thousands of deaths taking place before the government finally stepped in and started enacting some real legislation. Mark my words - this is going to happen in this country, and all you asshole retail managers are going to be the first ones dragged up to the guillotine when it does. So, you know, enjoy your little customer "fuck you" moments right now when you can, because that's all coming to an end a lot sooner than you think; and in the meanwhile, motherfuckers, I'm compiling an enemy list as we speak.

And finally, two short appeals to my readers before I go:

1) Would any of you just happen to be an employee at Fermilab, or know someone who is? Regular readers of course know that my friend Alamar will be visiting here next month from Giessen, Germany; and he happens to be an applied-physics grad student, and I guess for applied-physics majors a trip to Fermilab is a bit of a mecca for them, kinda like when I visited Apple Computers during my trip to California in 2001. Anyway, he's having problems getting ahold of anyone at Fermilab about taking a tour, so thought I'd throw a little appeal up here.

And 2), do any of my readers happen to do construction for a living? I'm in the process right now of finally finishing up my business plan for this arts center I'm trying to open, and this includes trying to get estimates on the various start-up costs I can expect. When it comes to things like computers and sound equipment, that's easy - just go out to a store, look at pricetags, and write them down. I'm having a much harder time, though, figuring out estimates for the construction work that'll need to be done - HVAC, flooring, electrical, etc. Anyway, if any informed sources out there would be willing to look at the specs for my center, and give me a ballpark figure for such work that I can include in my business plan, I would really, REALLY appreciate it.

That's all! Field report from Lill Street Gallery tomorrow!