how important

Oh hayfever, you delivered a suckerpunch of the highest quality to my face on this day. Is it really something that you grow out of eventually or is that some kind of urban legend? Supposedly you grow out of asthma too, so I should have both coming to me.
I think the asthma one could be true, you never see someone over the age of about 25 puffing on an inhaler or wheezing around dog and cat fur. Pretty much.
6! More! Years!

Other than the hayfever I'm suffering, I've also accidentally exposed myself to a few things - American politics of the 1970s and a British writer I should have already been reading.
Reading is something I like at the moment. I'm reading 'Let The Right One In' by John Ajvide Lindqvist because I saw the film and liked it. It's brilliant, horrible, funny and dark and that's the kind of thing I like reading but the one thing that stops me from getting properly into it is that it doesn't feel important.
At its core it's a horror, on top of this is piled innocence, adolescence and human sexuality. AQA described the book to me as an 'exploration into the darkest of human psychosexual tendencies.' Maybe it gets to this point. I recognise it's a lot more than just a basic horror book but I want it to be something more.
There's a feeling you get from reading something that's important that you can't match with anything else. Reading the articles and books of Hunter S. Thompson, that does it, so does reading Charles Bukowski and Kurt Vonnegut and Jack Kerouac and Clement Freud and the random nonsensical ramblings of David Lynch's twitter page. When people say things and actually mean things, when they can make you laugh/smile while really telling you something of some kind of importance and exposing such a personal side to them. You know an author is important when they don't just write in one medium. Jack Kerouac contributed to 'The Americans' by Robert Frank, for example. That was important.

So now I want to read something important, that says something about something and not just says something. Watchmen, that was important. Invisible Man, that was important.

'Frost/Nixon' was an alright film, it seemed a bit pointless when it came out (to me) but you can see why it came out when it did and what it attempted to do. That's all it amounted to for me, something that was trying to say something about something but ended up just being a vaguely entertaining hour and a half or so tied together with a tense bit at the end. The performances were fine but the end feeling was a joyful "Remember David Frost?!" type thing that was forgettable after an hour or so.
Re watching 'All The Presidents Men' followed by 'Gonzo - The Life and Work of Dr Hunter s. Thompson' simply made me wonder why a bit of an awkward interview was all that met Richard Nixon after all the crap that happened in the 70s? Kent State, for example, saw a massacre of students for simply protesting. Why on earth was sending the National Guard ever seen to be a good idea? What good was ever going to happen? And then what followed was Water Gate. I'm speaking as someone who wasn't alive at the time of all this so it's futile me trying to imagine what the time was like, it just doesn't really seem fair. Right now people are upset over, and quite rightly, the heart attack (or is it internal bleeding?) related death of Ian Tomlinson. It's terrible, having to watch the footage over and over at the gym is harrowing and the death isn't a good thing, but he wasn't shot. The guy who did the shoving/pushing/poking didn't intend death upon Mr.Tomlinson, but then again the police should be trained professionals and act this way.

Anyway. My thoughts there are confused, I simply think it's all abhorrent and at the end of the day we simply move from one thing to the other to be upset and cross about. Every now and then we should probably look back at things that were once terrible (and perhaps not totally obvious) and say "Remember the Kent University Massacre?!"

Or something. Some of the students who were attacked, including one who didn't die but did suffer lifetime paralysis from the intrusion of a bullet into his body, weren't even part of the protest and were simply walking to and from classes. How'd you like them apples.

'I wish I'd worn my drip-dry suit' McGovern '72