Now I Don't Know How To Feel, I've Got Bulldog Skin

I don't understand it.

I'm vacillating - oscillating, really, between two sets of feelings - One shining and pure, the other a sense of waste on many levels and in many interpretations. In order, the last few books I've read (and this might give a clue as to the source of my emotional pinballing) are: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, The Hobbit, The Fellowship Of The Ring (only so far as Frodo's arrival in Rivendell), and Generation X by Douglas Coupland. The last I just picked up today for 99 cents in a thrift store on the South Side (along with a fistful of oldies on their original labels, natch) and interrupted my revisit to Middle-Earth to check it out. I'm still not finished with the novel, but it's a strange tale of Southern California hipsterism, apparently published just before it was cool. And it's a vividly shitty and emotionally empty view of the world.

My reading list has turned into the emotional equivalent of the liar paradox, almost; and I sit here emotionally supertasking for almost no discernable reason. I can only guess that the sense of depression I got from reading the first Larsson novel and following up a few days later with the second needed healed with Tolkien's fantasy world, about as richly and glowingly conceived as the Sweden of Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist seems to be dulled and darkened by filth and sex, the SoCal of Dag, Andy and Claire weatherbeaten and warmed-over (or cleverly hand-distressed to appear as such?). I'm bewildered and depressed, yet again, by Coupland and his knack for picking apart the lives of twentysomethings who feel equal parts smothered and abandoned by the (post-)modern world. Strangely, I feel as though Tolkien gives to the hobbits returning home at the end of The Return Of The King the same chance to remake their world in their own image as the disaffected youth of Coupland's novel seem to long for. Saruman as mass marketer? A strange instance of applicability, especially as opposed to the disavowed allegory alluded to in Fellowship's foreword.

Cut away the garbage, the hype, the careers, the fads and the fast food, and you get to what makes people, well, human. Somehow, tragedy and challenge make characters, make strong and real ones; and comfort and plenty and reward, bizarrely, will in like fashion unmake them. I still don't get it, but I think I know what it is I'm not getting.