Ben,

I’ve got a project I’m working on. At last! It sprang to life last night for no reason while I was talking to SW. We all know that I am at my best when utterly obsessed by something specific. Well, for the next 36-72 hours, I will be! Unfortunately, this means that by the time the Sega CD gets here, I’ll probably already have moved onto something else that’s NOT building a robot that can play Desert Bus. C’est la vie.

I’ve also been trying to write a song about Voyager (the craft, not the 3rd rate Star Trek series) for the new Housewives and Hard Drives album. I think the hardest thing to write about is something you’re sincerely passionate about. Everything I write feels pretty trite. Is that because I’m trite? Or am I tricking the idea into being casual and aloof? Regarding your last letter, I don’t want this to turn into a cutesy Juno Moldy Peaches thing. That’s the last thing I want on Earth, or on the outer edges of the solar system.

-C

Charlie-

Do you know a movie that stars Jesse Eisenberg and the little girl from Little Miss Sunshine? It has a scene where Jesse Eisenberg reacts awkwardly to being seduced by a girl more sexually confident than himself. Sound familiar? Probably, right?

Anyway, some guy was watching it on the subway this morning on his iPod Touch – behavior severely frowned upon by David Lynch – and I, in turn, was watching it over his shoulder. For a second I thought one of the actresses was Ellen Page and then I started to imagine a celebrity deathmatch royal between Jesse Eisenberg, Michael Cera, Ellen Page, and the girl from Little Miss Sunshine whose name I’m not even going to spend the ten seconds to look up.

This fantasy was very satisfying. I took the liberty of ending the fight by having Diablo Cody fly in on a bunker buster bomb, killing the insufferable brood along with herself and ending a decade of people dressing like off-beat teenagers but acting like they’re defeated fortysomethings.

I mean what do all these pseudo-ironic, pseudo-dorky, pseudo-independent movies even tell us? That sad, quirky people who go through life’s challenges and adventures with indifference and hesitation will be rewarded with either a return to the status quo or a fleeting moment of local stardom and then a return to the status quo. I mean, look, to be fair, I’ve barely even watched any of these movies. I can’t do it. I can’t watch anything with Michael Cera that isn’t Arrested Development. So maybe I’m wrong. Let me know if I am, but I have a strong intuition that I’m not. Case in point, there is an article on the web explaining just what the difference is between Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera.

I don’t know why I’m so worked up. I think I just got myself there so I could write a remotely interesting letter that wasn’t about what I had for dinner last night, which was really amazing – homemade bread, homemade ravioli, homemade sauce (even home-canned), and locally grown veggie salad (mostly thanks to T-bot) – or my subway commute this morning – oh wait, I guess that’s how this letter started. Fuck me.

-Ben