Rashy face and behind on NW

I'm so rashy. My lower face, my chest, my neck, my back. Itchy, rashy and gross. It hurts to sweat from kickboxing under/between all the little inflammations. I am, fortunately, getting back the feeling in my lips, which felt like they had a thick skin/crust over them yesterday. Very gross, blogging about rashing up is probably a great way to gross out readers. Assuming I have any.

But the upshot is that as much as I have been behind in blogging the TLS of NW, the rash makes me less likely to get the "real George Washington" blogged.

Sigh. Jesus. Washington. The real divider between the stuff that the world wants to read and what I want to read is such a massive gulf. I do not want another bland rehash of the received wisdom of who Washington was with "new revelations" or whatever. I want a great filppin' read that illuminates stuff I never knew and makes me think in modes I'm not accustomed to thinking in. God bless Sarah Vowell and her passion for minutiae. Reading about Garfield's assassination has got to be a far more satisfying read at this point than Washington's life, although I am certain there are ways to make Washington's life worth reading about. It's just that NW doesn't have the faintest clue how to approach that way, and the readership it serves could care less about a great flippin' read. Because obviously, they hang on until the last clicheed, trite moral superiority posturing sentence. Wrap ups that cheesy can't spring from a lush, dense, wonderful text.

I am too much a reader for my profession. I love the written word a lot; not so much that I lose sight of the joy of twisting along a reader through a story. This blog is obviously not a good example of my writing; it's really tough when you are set out to plop something on spacepaper out of your own head. I don't have someone else's story to pimp, which is how I'm most comfortable working. But again, there is a real challenge to writing something factual and entertaining and I just don't feel like the newsweeklies are very good at telling the stories they have access to, that the culture doesn't want them to tell those stories interestingly anyway.

Anyway, I ran into what might be the nadir of storytelling last night, the Britney Spears reality show that is aptly titled "Chaotic." It's what you get when you mix choir dorks (in skimpy clothes) with your technologically-inept aunt's cinematography. Raunch, random crappy singing and lots of blurry pans. Again, what was the complaint against Britney's first husband? Because this lazy cockroach with greasy hair and ugly tattoos that has attached himself to her now is utterly repulsive, even in a show ostensibly shot and produced exclusively by the two of them. He looks like a second rate Tommy Lee and I can't believe an hour of my life was spent watching this trainwreck. Or shortbuswreck, really.