Here’s how the thought process went:
I want to blog more often.
I can’t think what I ought to be blogging about.
I should keep better track of what interests me day-to-day.
Wait… Google already kind of does that for me.
(I don’t really like that, Google, but in this moment it is useful to me.)
Well. Let’s just try this, then.
Between this and “weird stuff my Google News algorithm has decided I like (and maybe it’s right),” I’m hoping I can piece together a consistent throughline out of my fractured ADHD nonsense. And possibly develop some ideas worth exploring on the nature of The Algorithm. Shall we? Let’s.
A Selected List of My Recent Google Searches:
strange things at the circle k
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
galatea
cropsy
mondragon last name
aita
sibelius violin concerto
There’s a trend in here, though it’s not apparent at first glance. I’ve recently started reading my first book of Spooky Season (I know it’s September—listen, you live life your way, and I’ll do me) and it’s My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones. I read another of his horror novels, The Only Good Indians, a couple years back, and he instantly became one of those no-questions-asked writers that I’ll pick up anything from.
The protagonist of Chainsaw is Jade Daniels, described on the publisher’s website as “a girl whose feelings are too big for her body,” and if that isn’t just a whole entire mood, I don’t know what is. The book communicates almost entirely through the language of slasher flicks—hence Cropsy and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre up there in my googling—but it also drops in a healthy dose of weird-kid media that I grew up with. (Bill and Ted at the Circle K.) Which is odd, considering that the novel is set in modern day and Jade is seventeen, but I’m not complaining. It makes me feel like I felt that time one of my techs at the Cubs described Third Eye Blind as “oldies.”
Galatea and Mondragon are also related to Chainsaw; they’re character names that wanted a little context. Every time I see the name Galatea, I think to myself, “Isn’t that the name of Pygmalion’s statue?” and then I have to go google it to find out if my pretentious liberal arts education is still functioning. And Mondragon was a name I’d seen before, but had no idea how to pronounce, which was driving me crazy. Turns out it’s Spanish, and it means exactly what you think it does: Dragon Mountain. Hell yeah.
With October on the way, it’s clear the Halloween gears have already started turning in my brain. I don’t have another book lined up yet, but I’ve compiled a list of movies to watch this year, beginning with Train to Busan this weekend. Even the Sibelius up there is helping set the mood; I found it while digging for eerie, haunting classical music, and it hits the spot. Thanks, Google search history, for helping me figure out what’s going on in my brain lately.
(AITA was just something to scroll through because I was awake and didn’t want to be yet.)
