Context – writing something unrelated

Today I read The Fault in Our Stars, cover to cover, and then at a loss for what to do next I turned on this new album by The National.  Not sure why that seemed like a good idea, for now I am awash with melancholy and the existential dread that I will never accomplish anything as hauntingly beautiful as either of those things.

I mean I found Augustus and Hazel to be insufferable for their own reasons, which isn’t really fair, I’m not sure how the personality of a teenager reacts to terminal illness.  But he was so damn smug and she was so damn plain.  They were cute together.  The pre-funeral was heartbreaking.  So I guess John Green wins the “turning unexciting characters into ultimately sympathetic ones” award for whenever this book was written.

Despite it’s flaws, it was probably the best rom-com I’ve ever read.  I wonder how much of a genre that is, novel rom-coms.  I know coms are a thing.  I know roms are a thing.  But how often do they fit the mold so perfectly formed by early 2000’s cinema?

This new album by The National, Sleep Well Beast, just sort of crystallizes all the ennui the novel left me with.  I’m not sure that it’s about death or inevitability, I’m pretty bad with lyrics and themes these days, but it does seem to have a tone that resonates with the frequency my psyche is stuck in post-teenagers-in-love-dying-tragically-unromantic-deaths, so cudos to them for that, I guess.

Fair warning for what’s to come: tomorrow marks the first day of Riot Fest.  Expect nothing more than a list of bands I saw with several exclamation marks until Monday.  I didn’t have time to blog ahead, as it were, and I expect I’ll be plum tuckered from rocking socks all day.  I.  Can’t.  Wait.