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I went back to New Jersey for my 20th college reunion last spring, and toward the end of a day of thunderstorms and mud and Rolling Rock I found myself speaking with a classmate named John Zele. John said he'd heard me being interviewed by the sonorous Bob Edwards on XM Satellite Radio, and he thought I'd handled myself with a modicum of dignity. But he also felt compelled to tell me that I'd made a mistake.

He said I'd spent too much time gasbagging about Nirvana. "Nirvana was not a Gen X band," John said.

I might've been taken aback - I mean, huh, wasn't Nirvana the Gen X band? wasn't Kurt Cobain supposed to be our John Lennon? didn't everyone automatically know that? - except that John was echoing something that I wound up hearing over and over when X Saves the World came out in hardcover.

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It shocked me yesterday to hear that Lux Interior was dead, because I was under the impression that he'd been dead for a long time. I don't mean that I had a memory glitch. I mean that Lux, the panting and frothing and writhing and moaning and crotch-rubbing and microphone-sucking frontman of the Cramps, played the role of the sexed-up rockabilly horror-movie zombie so utterly and brilliantly to the hilt that it never even crossed my mind that he might actually be a human being.

I mean, the dude never broke character. I own four or five Cramps albums and I don't even know what Lux's real name was, and I don't want to Google up the obituaries and find out, because I feel as though that would be oddly disrespectful.

It's better to remember Lux Interior for The Thing that he built with such dirty and beautiful precision: a creature from the black lagoon of American lust and fear and psychosis.

When I say that Lux Interior and the Cramps meant more to me than Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger and the rest of those boomer bores, I'm not exaggerating or striking a useful book-promoting pose. I mean it. I think the guy was one of the funniest, most riveting, most kinetic and inspired performers rock & roll has ever demon-spawned. (If you'd had a televised Battle of the Libidinous Yowlers between Jagger and Interior, I'm telling you, Lux would've won hands-down.)

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My spine aches. My shoulders are sore. I'm sitting on an American Airlines flight to Chicago - my publisher is sending me there to talk about X Saves the World downtown at The Standard Club - and I'm wondering why I choose, time and time again, to inflict such agony upon my muscles and joints. 

See, it's my fault. I'm entirely responsible for the wear-and-tear that will one day force me to hire a chiropractor and take up Ashtanga. Moments ago I pack-muled my way through a terminal at LaGuardia with, oh, roughly two or three tons of cultural paraphernalia in my bags - and probably half of it never had to make the trip.

I became a magazine writer because I love magazines, so of course I've got a floral assortment of glossies splaying out of my shoulder bag: The New Yorker, Time, Wired and Fast Company (yes, I know they compete with each other, but they both said nice things about my book and I happen to be equally fond of them), Vogue, Stop Smiling,  Tricycle  (that last one's a sentimental holdover from a two-year fling with Buddhism; my meditation practice became completely shot to hell a few months after I got the contract to do XSTW). Wedged in between the magazines, like sprigs of baby's breath in a bouquet, are odd portions of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The New York Post. Yes, I subscribe. Yes, they're delivered. Yes, on paper.

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"At times I pity it, a century lost inside another one like a toy boat / floating in the pump room." - Sarah Manguso

What are you doing? Well, you're reading this, of course.

What are you supposed to be doing? If you're anything like my weary comrades on this morning's commuter train into New York City, you're swamped, you're buried, you're mired deep in the weeds, and new weeds just keep sprouting up wherever you've slashed the old ones back. You're busy, man. You should be meeting deadlines and working the phones and printing out a new cover sheet for your TPS reports. You should be doing, you know...your job.

And yet for whatever unfathomable reason, a series of random clicks has led you here, past that old Whitesnake video on YouTube, past your Facebook page (where you presumably felt compelled to announce that you're a fan of Echo & the Bunnymen and burnt toast), through some wired Borgesian labyrinth of tangents and whims, all the way to the Penguin blog. Howdy!

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An important note to those who are tracking this season’s Oscar race: Groundhog Day came out in 1993, the same year as Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, and as far as I can tell from a couple of totally random and lazy Google searches, it received zero Oscar nominations.

Let’s consider this. No Best Actor nomination for Bill Murray? Not even a Best Screenplay nod for a script that has since been hailed as one of the most structurally brilliant and philosophically beguiling pieces of screenwriting in the past 20 years?

This should tell us a lot about the bogusness of Oscar mania. I can think of so many movies from the last couple of decades that have held up terrifically, over time, but which never had a prayer of being named Best Picture: Flirting with Disaster. Election. Boogie Nights. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Breaking the Waves. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Waiting for Guffman.

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Jeff Gordinier is one of our guest bloggers during the week of February 2nd. If you have any questions for Jeff Gordinier, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some more information about X Saves the World:

In this simultaneously hilarious and incisive "manifesto for a generation that's never had much use for manifestos," Gordinier suggests that for the first time since the "Smells Like Teen Spirit"breakthrough of the early 1990s, Gen X has what it takes to rescue American culture from a state of collapse. Over the past twenty years, the so-called "slackers"have irrevocably changed countless elements of our culture-from the way we watch movies to the way we make sense of a cracked political process to the way the whole world does business.