Christine gave me a Kindle for my birthday, and while I appreciate it, I feel a bit like a traitor. There’s been a lot of grumbling from the publishing industry that Kindle royalties are far less, which means authors and publishers will be even more financially strapped than usual, which is saying a lot. So, as someone who hopes to write another book, why would I want to help hobble the industry that I hope will pay me? On Patton Oswalt’s new album My Weakness Is Strong, there’s a very funny bit in which he talks about how sad he was when he went to a grocery store and a cashier came over and offered to help him figure out the self-serve robot cashier: here she was, being ordered to instruct people how to work the machine that will ultimately replace her. That’s how I feel pushing my little “Next” button on the Kindle.

I had a lot of resistance to using my Kindle, and yet every tightly-held literary belief that I felt it contradicted actually fell apart when I considered the reality of my reading life. For instance, I like finishing a book and then placing it on the shelf, building a collection that serves as a physical record of my reading history. What am I supposed to do now, walk around showing people my digital queue?

And yet…my whole “library” theory is screwed by the fact that not only do we not have room for an epic wall of “Me am smart!” books, but we bleed more and more books every year. When we moved from NY to LA, we had to ditch a bunch. Then when we left LA to come back to Brooklyn, we ditched some more. And many of the ones that we couldn’t bear to part with are currently boxed in LA storage. Now our bookshelves feature a motley collection of old copies of Baby Bargains, yearbooks, and random novels that arbitrarily made the cut but now I wonder why I kept them at all. With our bookshelf space so limited, we also have books lined up on the windowsills in our bathrooms. Because that’s the way to tell the world you like to read: line up your Philip Roth collection right next to the shitter. They don’t really look like anything I value or have even read when they’re lined up perfectly right next to the well-worn heap of People and EW magazines that are clearly getting more eyeballs.

I also say I like feeling the heft of a book in my hand. It gives the book weight, literally as well as figurative. And, you can quickly take a look at a book and see just how far you’ve read and how far you have to go. And yet, with my herniated disc, I am acutely aware of the weight as even a smaller 250-page paperback drags down my shoulder bag. I have had a paperback copy of the 881-page history Nixonland on my shelf for months; I’ve been dying to read it, but have always suspected that if I were to lug it back and forth to work, by day three my spine would shoot out of my back.

So now I’m reading it on the Kindle. And I feel like I read more quickly on the Kindle. There’s something about having fewer words on the page that somehow propels me along faster. It’s like the clicking through of pages builds momentum. Also, the paperback version of Nixonland has very small, cramped print, the kind that begs you to zone out and read the same paragraph over and over on the subway. Those pages immediately start to blur like a Magic Eye puzzle. I wouldn’t learn much about the Nixon years, but I sure would see a lot of pictures of bunnies.

So I’ve been blazing through the book (I wholeheartedly recommend it: I’m not a big political-history reader, but it’s a fascinating, wide-ranging take on how America went from LBJ’s liberal Great Society mandate—when, like after Obama’s election, everyone was saying the Republicans were a dying party—to Nixon’s right-wing ascendance). But I will say this: It’s a little disorienting not physically feeling how much of a book you’ve made it through, and how much is left. This book is so comically long that it just keeps coming at me, and I have to take it on faith that it will ever end. The only perspective you have is on the bottom of the screen, where a bar tells you what percentage of the book you’ve read. And this book is so long that the percentage seems to take forever to tick up a percent. I’m right now standing firm at 13%, and I find myself reading faster just to see at what page I’ll finally get to 14%. And then I get distracted by math, calculating, “If I’m averaging about 3% a day, and I have around 88% of the book left to go, this will take me…GOOD GOD ANOTHER MONTH!” Then I start ton wonder what the world will look like when I actually finish this book: Will there be hovercars? Will we all live on Mars? Will my eyes still work?

Plus, I feel like I’m on the honor system that this book will ever end. If it was a hard copy of a book, I would know that it was finite. But with this, I suspect that when I sleep, someone keeps wirelessly adding more words into my Kindle. Conceivably I could never ever finish this book, and the author will just snicker as he knows that I have unknowingly made a lifetime guarantee to his book. This suspicion will be confirmed if, in about four months, I start getting to chapters that begin, “Nixon, Nixon, Nixon. I mean, what are you gonna do with this guy? I think he once had a blue car. I think, anyway.”

One other complaint: Every book has the same font. So it doesn’t feel different when you finish one book and start another. Perhaps that’s the feeling of accomplishment I’m missing in finishing a book: it’s not so much that I want to put the book on a shelf like a trophy, I just want the feel of something different in my hand, a tactile sense of the new to accompany Page 1. With the Kindle, it’s all one long book, just with many different plots and one incredibly long interlude with Richard M. Nixon.

Anyone else have the Kindle out there? And any author want to castigate me for shooting myself and others in the feet?

I am very susceptible to being whipped up into a worried frenzy by the alarmist media, but I was taking a firm stand against agonizing about the Swine Flu. I remind myself that there are many 24-hour news stations and magazines and paper that are more than thrilled to talk and write about the worst-case scenarios for hours on end, thereby making it seem like a foregone conclusion that we will all die, and I don’t have to buy into that.

And yet, when I was editing at the magazine on Tuesday, a writer included a little throwaway joke about the swine flu, and I decided to take it out, figuring that on the off chance that it did start to kill us all by next week, I’d hate to be out on newsstands taking it lightly. What a weirdly pragmatic take on an apocalypse.

My hypochondriac friend called me two nights ago in a slight panic. I mean, if anybody was going to worry about the swine flu, it would be her. I think she should get little webshooters put on her palm like Spider-Man, except instead of firing webs, it shoots out Purell. We used to get in big debates at work over whether or not her germphobic ways were extreme. Here’s one of her “things”: at the end of the day, she will never lie on her bed in clothes that she’d worn outside. She didn’t want the outside germs touching where she would also sleep. But if the germs could cling onto her clothing, why wouldn’t they also cling onto her hair? If she really wanted to be secure, she needed a Silkwood shower at her front door. She’s also my friend Most Likely To Send Around an Old News Report About How They Found Traces of Feces on Office Water Coolers. We get it, someone shits in the bubbler. Now move over while I fill my bottle.

She’s gotten slightly less sensitive about germs over the past couple of years after she had twins. Having kids really bashes any squeamishness about bodily fluids out of you. When you’re regularly wiping someone else’s butt, suddenly errant crap becomes less of a preoccupation. Anyway, the swine flu outbreak has really caused her to backslide. She called me two nights ago and said, “Ohhhh, Josh, I was walking down the street today and saw a dead squirrel on the ground. That’s bad, right?” I said I wasn’t quite sure what was so bad about that. She said, “it’s not just that. Then later I was passing another store and saw another squirrel who was really sick and acting really strangely, and the store owner was picking it up and wrapping it up with a towel.” The real issue to me is why a local merchant was toweling off a sick squirrel. This is how squirrel flu epidemics get started, people!

But my friend (whose name I am withholding, but she knows who she is, Germy) insisted that the great squirrel genocide was a sign of the swine flu, and she wanted to know who she should call. “I’m not sure you really call anyone for this,” I said. But she persisted in asking, until I said, “You should definitely call Animal Control. They will be completely shocked at the news that squirrels are not, in fact, immortal.”

I had a very good laugh at her expense. And yet as I keep reading the news, and the word “pandemic” is thrown around a little too much for my tastes, I can’t help wondering, well, what if it turns out that dead squirrels is an important sign? That’s the kind of thing that happens in movies about killer viruses all the time; they always begin with some sort of animal going nuts and dying. It’s usually a monkey, though. Very rarely a squirrel. But who’s to say a squirrel can’t go nuts and be patient zero? And here I am, mocking my friend who possibly has the warning signs that we will all wish we heeded.

Or, she’s nuts. Well, time will tell.

And now, of course, all I can picture is this blog someday being part of a museum exhibit all about what might have become the great Swine Flu Pandemic of 2009. “Look,” the tour guide will say. (Will he be a robot tour guide? Who knows what the future will bring!) “The people had no idea just how bad it was gonna get. Look at the stupid journalist making jokes on his little blog!” I’d hate to look dumb in front of those future museum attendees. I’d like to now change the subject line to, “I saw it coming.” Take that, year 2050!

As newspapers and magazines continue to fade, collapse, or otherwise shit the bed, I (and every other journalist I know) find myself thinking about a Plan B. My million-dollar idea came to me the other day when I was talking to my brother-in-law. The internet has been kneecapping newspapers because people now don’t want to pay for the news when they can get it online, and now some newspapers are going strictly online. But what about old people who still want their news, but are scared of computers? This is where my company, Old News, would come in. Elderly Luddites can call up Old News and say, “I need some news about the government” or “My local sports team just played and I don’t know who won!” An employee then finds that news online, prints it out on giant newsprint, and hands it to a grade-school boy, who will bring it to the customer. The newsboy will ride a bike, sport a newsie cap, and have freckles drawn onto his face, so his appearance will be a reassuring throwback to the recipient and make him or her feel like all is right with the world and he or she is not irrelevant. It’ll be like time hasn’t changed at all. For horny old men, we’ll have a side business renting porn kinescopes delivered by a flapper.

Granted, this isn’t a long-term business. It’s like an eBay store: sooner or later your clientele is going to get with the program and realize they don’t need you, so you just have to take the money when you can. I figure I have a good ten years before all the people scared of the internet have passed away. Who knows, maybe by then the newspapers will have come back, and I’ll have to teach a generation of 20-year-olds how to fold papers to read on the subway.