Sex, Drugs, and Peanut Brittle

--Michael Chabon is (possibly) on drugs.

"Today started with an 8 a.m. walk around the grounds of the Tian Tan, the Temple of Heaven, where, on top of the Mound of Heaven (a kind of tiered wedding cake of white marble) you can stand at the exact Center of the Universe. That was pretty exciting.

"Then my second meeting with the Master and Fish. (“The Master and Fish” — a failed spinoff of “Barney Miller,” starring Abe Vigoda and Pat Morita?) They seemed to get deeply tangled up in prior drafts of the script. I don’t know, maybe they were feeling nostalgic. I admit I often feel that I have absolutely no idea what the M. really thinks about anything."

--Why you (and everyone you know) have such a hard time being "in the moment":

"Elsewhere, U.S.A. offers two big concepts to diagnose modern society's ills: the 'elsewhere' society, and the 'intravidual.' 'Mrs. and Mr. Elsewhere,' workaholic professionals, always feel they should be somewhere else than where they currently are, and so they betray those around them as their mind races ahead to the next encounter, or they look around for a more desirable interaction. The intravidual is the reciprocal of this dissociated society: Rather than an integrated self, the modern person is internally fragmented."

But even as your consciousness begins to resemble the peanut brittle at the bottom of the holiday tin, society seems to be stabilizing and improving, at least in some respects:

"Today's parents, despite dual careers, actually spend more time with their children than did those of the 1950s. Has residential mobility risen? No, it has decreased throughout the past century. Although divorce spiked after the 1960s, marriage has stabilized for the college-educated. And jobs 'have actually gotten broader' as routine tasks are left to computers."

My question: what the hell were parents doing in the 1950's? Really, I want to know. Driving their Edsel? Hanging out at the Moose Lodge? Or, given that it was the baby boom, were they too busy making children to spend any time with them?

--What's on Roth's Ipod?
Sometimes the Paper Cuts blog asks writers to make playlists. This one from Lev Grossman and Sophie Gee's not exactly new, but it's funny and sweet and filled with some great songs. Here's one cut:

7) 20 Minutes of Oxygen, the Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. (LEV) Unlike Dylan, as far as I know, T.D.O.T.H.T. mostly do pop-metal songs about the works of H. P. Lovecraft. (”The Innsmouth Look” is a good one.) Which makes “20 Minutes of Oxygen” a bit of a departure for them. It’s off their album “Spaceship Zero: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack,” which as far as I can tell is a soundtrack to a movie that doesn’t actually exist. The song is about a man who’s made a terrible mistake and is fantasizing about building a time machine to go back and warn his younger self not to make it: “When you’re trapped in that airtight room/Flick the red switch but not the blue.” Who hasn’t wanted to do that? Though my therapist says that kind of thinking is unhealthy.