Reading the Tea Leaves of Monkey's Anger

Since I have a second while my new favorite show, Gossip Girl (more on that later), goes to commercial break, I just wanted to clarify a few things about ASM's recent posts.
First, dastardly Chris Noth's birthday is actually on the 13th... it's just that Monkey procrastinated again and didn't get his post in until Midnight.

Second, as for the vitriol directed at Sasha Cagen -- yes, she does suck that bad -- it's just part of Monkey's make-up to drink until he dry heaves and cries as a way of marking Chris Noth's birthday, which I guess is what gave way to his uncontrollable rage directed toward his erstwhile acquaintance. However, had he been more lucid when he was blogging last night, he may have had the presence of mind to Google Sasah Cagen, and remember that she is also the famed appropriatress of the term "Quirkyalone" which also became a book back in 2004. Now, I can't tell if her goal was to up-sell narcissism, or rather to try to put a brand name on normalcy that only narcissists would adopt as something life affirming. Either way, the same dynamic is at play in this new effort. All I can say is that it ends up with her coming out as a kind of humorless version of Dimitri Martin's Trendspotting persona on the notable Daily Show segment.

Now the question that this raises for me is whether she resorted to the To Do List concept because some guy called Bill Keaggy had already taken up the Grocery List niche, published earlier this year in the form of a book as Milk Eggs Vodka.... And ultimately, when people are provided everything (educational opportunities, summer homes, grade inflation, coteries of New Yorkers) does it then become impossible to actually generate original content? Does one then become content to merely pick through the garbage of the quotidian in order to become the first sly devil to trademark what other people have done? Has our cultural production become the book/blog equivalent of trading in derivatives? The rapid decline of contemporary French literature (before Houellebecq came along to save it from irrelevance) was similarly marked by the same flavor of narcissistic, bourgeois revelry in the status quo.

And on that note...