How Chuck Klosterman Discredited One of My Stupider Habits

A few nights ago, I spent an evening inside Powell's WORLD FAMOUS City of Books. There were other people there, of course. Far too many others, in fact, to fit inside the Pearl Room. Most of them were somewhere between 16 and 40, dressed in their finest vintage concert t-shirts. The large majority were attractive, or at least not unattractive - no rolls of underarm fat undulating as people moved. There was a bit of very quiet, almost sotto voce chatter that never rose above a kind of verbal Spackling, as people had little conversations into their own chests about how great their opinions were.

One man was talking to himself in this manner, with a microphone in front of him so the entire group could be privy to his thoughts, and he was the guest speaker of the evening, the author of Fargo Rock City, Killing Yourself to Live, Eating the Dinosaur, and the Visible Man, among other things.    

Chuck Klosterman was by some measure the most notable person there. Hie was advertised on the marquee outside, after all. If there were any other comparable writers at the lecture, they did not make themselves known. Tom Bissell could have been hanging around for all I know. At one point, Klosterman paused, flabbergasted to recognize a few people he knew from his North Dakota youth standing in the corner. The people he recognized were equally perplexed, because they had never been to North Dakota in their lives and were certain they hadn't attended school with Mr. Klosterman. The show went on.

Not to say this reading and Q&A session were anything but excellent. Klosterman's oeuvre of intriguing, slippery essays are both very good, and very likely to grab many people who love self identifying themselves as "Portlanders," as though that were a fucking excuse or explanation for anything. His self-reflectionate profiles of pop stars and his magazine essays are anathema to what usually passes as punditry and criticism in 2011. Instead of sermonizing and condemning all of popular culture (cf "The Closing of the American Mind") or championing it as somehow vital to our evolution (cf "Everyingthing Bad is Good for You"), Klosterman writes deliberately contemplative stuff that finds oblique pathways to contextualize  the not-exactly-empheral, not-exactly-important stuff he (and a lot of other people, myself included) spend too much of our lives grappling with. He has a contrarian streak, but not a pedantic or bullying way of expressing it, as is the contrarian's wont.  His essays about popular culture and the very complex relationship our post-modern, post-structuralist society has between this hyper-fractured consumerist society and the phenomenological ramifications of how we live is the most overblown bullshit way I can state that I do love Klosterman the essayist. It's "first rate second rate" writing.

Anyway, most likely you know what Klosterman is, and if you like him qutie a bit or find his refusal to take a stand on any idea he brings up annoying as hell, well, that's how it goes. What you might not know (what I sure didn't know) before the reading is that - hey, he can write fiction! The excerpt from his new novel "The Visible Man," which I had no intention of ever reading before this visit - just as I never had any intention of reading Lionel Trilling or Edmund Wilson's novels - was not some radical departure from the expected tone of Klosterman, but the story sounded pretty interesting and just as vital a path towards knowledge

So why have I always shied away from critics, essayists, and "public intellectuals" ¹ fictional output? What a weird bias to have! I will gobble up Virginia Woolf, Orwell - hell, I even like reading Steven King in Entertainment Weekly. It's a weird and stupid oversight on my part.

So the first thing I'm going to do after I get off this weird mid 20th century history kick is find a copy of Memoirs of Hecate County. The second thing I'm going to do is finish Castlevania Symphony of the Night again. And then I'll read it.





¹ - Klosterman most likely doesn't qualify as a 'public intellectual', although I'd sure rather read his essays than, say, late period Gore Vidal. I certainly never shy away from Flann O'Brien's newspaper criticism, or Orwell's vast body of brilliant essays. Actually, Orwell was a much better essayist than he ever was a novelist - and since his fiction is infinity times better than, say, Snooki's debut novel or Norman Mailer's "Tough Guys Don't Wear Plaid," that puts him in some esteemed company

Maybe My Lowest Moment

I use my bike to get around. I enjoy riding it, theoretically. In the vacuum of space, I can imagine the wonderful time I could have on a 10-speed in the handful of seconds before my lungs explode, likely causing my death. If I was ever caught in "Time Enough at Last," that Twilight Zone episode where all humanity disappears save one book loving nearsighted gentleman, you can't even fathom how much joy biking would bring me. 

However, I'm biking in the real world, with cars and pedestrians and other bikers. They are not all assholes. Well, all the other bikers are assholes, but I can understand why they develop their unpleasant personality traits with each bike journey I take. 

It does not help that I am not a skilled cyclist. I may never become one. To the best of my knowledge, I am the clumsiest human in the state of Oregon. Couple that with the self diagnosed developmental topographical disorientation I'm pretty sure I suffer from, and you have a recipe for quadriplegia at some later date. 

Still, I try to make the best of it. Whenever I need to take a left hand turn, I go to the sidewalk, get off my bike, and wait for the pedestrian lights to tell me what's what. I don't ride my bike across the crosswalk, because I'm a stickler for the law. In fact, much of my bike riding is more bike walking, as though I treat my bike as a sentient and exotic pet. 

What I'm getting to is, I am absolutely horrified during most bike related commutes. It does not matter how often I do it. I may be getting more skilled and less likely to cause a terrible accident, but I don't feel it. 

I discovered something about myself while biking earlier today that I wish to share with you. This is what happened: 

I rode my bike up Lombard, in the suburbs of Beaverton. I just passed Stars Cabaret. I was in my bike lane - the right one this time, the one that goes with traffic, and I felt pretty okay about myself. Then - 

HAAAAAAAY!!!!!!

was yelled directly into my ear. It needs to be seen as an independent paragraph, larger and bolded, to convey just how unexpected and jarring this yelling was to me. My inadequacies are so acute on a bike that I must be hyper attenuated to the sounds of the road if I want to live, so this screech - already bellowed with the volume of a My Bloody Valentine live show - really fucked with me. 

It is at this point we learn the difference between me on a bike and me in everyday life. As a bipedal, I shy from conflict. As a biker, I am like Craig T. Nelson: I run crew deep, and if you fuck with Dauber, I will take you out. 

 

I turned around, got off my bike, and confronted these two girls who I now recognize were high school students on their way home. 

"Excuse me," I said with extraordinary forced politeness, like Henry Rollins or something. "Why did you just yell at me like that? I wasn't doing anything and you really should be a human being and not screw around with people." 

Those may not have been my exact words, but I was not swearing or yelling. Not at that point. 

The two girls, of course, started giggling to each other as I wrapped up my introductory remarks. Now, it was at that point that I went waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay beyond the pale. I attacked their appearances. I attacked their parent's proficiency at sexual intercourse (for some reason). Did "cunt" slip out my lips? Why yes, it did. Did I call these kids "whores" & "sluts" in the same sentence I hypothesized they would "die virgins?" You bet! 

It felt good for about 3 seconds to let all that frustration out. Then it felt horrible. I didn't let that stop me. I didn't stop. I looked preposterous, flinging my bike helmut to the ground, yelling the worst things I could think of at teenage girls. Now I was too far in it to extricate myself with any kind of grace from the encounter. I wasn't going to leave these two high school girls until I'd hurt them bad with my cutting, Oscar Wilde like wit. 

Also, these fucking kids wouldn't apologize for yelling at me! I'm well aware that I had long ago ceased as the aggrieved party, but what was in it for these two chuckleheads? What did they gain by holding their "sorry" inside their dumb fat little teenage heads? In retrospect, I'm pretty sure they were too scared to say anything at the raving lunatic in front of them.

It took me far longer than it should have to notice the countenance of these two kids betrayed real fear. Yes. I scared the hell out of two teenage girls as I'd never scared anyone before in my life. And then I just turned around and left on my bike. And here I am now, typing it up. 

And now I'm going to play guitar or something to soothe this stuff out.

AGE 27 SEASON MUSINGS

When you are young you are invariably stupid, because you are so sure that the dumb and underdeveloped intuitions percolating in your silly little head are the correct and the only possible way to interpret the world, of which you are the center. Every social and/or legal milestone - 16, 18, 21, even the rarely considered 65 - seem like they will never arrive, and that seems so unfair, because you know everything you'll ever need to know, now that you've engaged in some awkward heavy petting in between heats at the track meet, now that you've read five pages of Nitchze, now that you are aware movies exist outside of comic book and toy properties.   

Eventually - and "eventually" arrives before you know it, of course, nothing in life happens as if properly calibrated - you're legally responsible for all your actions, up to and especially including your overdraft fees. Still, now you can finally buy your own goddamn liquor and cigarettes. You are free to share living space with a couple of fellows (or ladies, or a combo thereof). You can have a bunch of great ideas for websites, none of which will ever generate a profit. If a companion shares your bed for an evening, if you are attractive or pleasant or funny or persistent enough in the eyes of another, who the fuck is going to bother you about it? The Pope? How could he know, unless he was some kind of Spy Pope? Who would suspect the Pope is a spy?

The insipid overconfidence of youth begins its metamorphosis into something richer. You mature if you are doing things right. If you are doing things wrong, you are libel to curdle, to become a caricature of arrested development, lacking in self-awareness and generosity of spirit. Most people do things kind of right and kind of wrong, because most people are basically wonderful and beautiful things, capable of bringing overwhelming joy to those that love them, catastrophically flawed in some minor way that isn't of much concern to their friends and loves.

Before long, the passing milestones cease to have legal ramifications, but my stars, the physic ramifications can brutalize.

The first thing this writer noticed as he entered his mid 20's was the NBA Draft was populated solely by people younger than he. A few years later, it dawned on him that the Beatles had already filmed Hard Day's Night and Help! when they were a little younger, in aggregate, than he was that day. He remembered reading a biography of Orson Wells as a 14 year-old youngster and thinking to himself how weird it was that the man was considered a "boy genius" when he didn't make Citizen Kane as a boy; why, he was already 26 years old! Wells should've been balls deep into his grotesquely strange career by then! 

At 26, this writer was well aware he wasn't ever going to make a Citizen Kane - he wasn't even in the running to be "the Lester Bangs of videogames," which was the closest he was to being a thing, much to his chagrin - and to his satisfaction, if he's honest with himself. 

Then came 27. As the writer knows well, this is a big one. The Age 27 Season. As legendary baseball analysis and inventor of sabermetrics Bill James discovered in one of his yearly Baseball Abstracts, the age 27 season is almost always the best year of a player's career. The player has seen pretty much all there is to see, and he has learned from his 3000+ at-bats or pitches. Best of all, his body has yet to break down, and can still withstand the many strange, violent and unnatural motions that make baseball the thing it is. 

Will my Age 27 Season be the best of my life career? Maybe. Maybe not. I've found a lot of comfort thinking that it will be totally okay either way. If this is the year I become a Great Dane, wearing eight chains, I think I could handle the success. If nothing much changes, and I'm still searching my couch cushions for quarters, even knowing I'd already mined that vein dry, I won't be too bummed out. I have so many people who genuinely enjoy spending time with me, and I already have the guitars and keyboards and organs that make me so happy when I use them I can't even fathom it. I feel a bit like Adam Scott's character on Party Down, okay with settling for what works, but not entirely comfortable staying still.

All I need now is a Lizzy Caplin. Or a Kristen Bell, but she's kind of a bitch on Party Down. Now, a Veronica Mars... is out of my league. So are Lizzy Caplin & Kristen Bell. 

Also, seriously. Why do I still have celebrity crushes, like a 14 year old girl? You know what else bothers me? People who get bummed out at a celebrity marriage or pregnancy.  Christ, like you were going to get Natalie Portman pregnant. 

here it is. your kids will just call it LDBFA, that's how ubiquitous it'll be

"Potential" is such a troublesome thing. If you're still hearing friends or co-workers talking about your potential well into your 26th year, there's a good chance you never had all that much potential - you just gave off just the right mixture of perception, ambition, perspicacity, and guile that tricked people into thinking beyond whatever you are capable of -- not maliciously, exactly, just...

This is what I'm realizing now, that all that positive reinforcement I got in late adolescence calcified and poisoned me. All that praise heaped upon my "humor columns" the Sunset Scroll (my high school newspaper of record) does not make me a writer any more than your driver's license makes you Paul Newman. I don't get to act like a Method actor as seriously intense as Daniel Day Lewis just because I did an okay job in my 8th grade drama club rehearsal of the Dumb Waiter. At an International School in the Netherlands. As the only native English speaker.


 To assess your personhood forthrightly, you have to contextualize all the things your supportive family members and faculty advisers and cognitive therapists have taught you to believe about yourself. They aren't wrong, exactly, but they aren't privy to the abject horror your brain is capable of summoning up when left to its own devices. Listen closely to those internal monologues drone like Metal Machine Music when you enter that twilight between sleep and confusion. Embrace it - not always, but accept it.

There's rough honesty in that brutal self flagellation. You are telling yourself important things. There was never a greatness struggling against your worst, most mediocre tendencies and habits. You are merely the aggregate of the experiences you've accrued so far in your life -- something value neutral, essentially. Value, greatness, moral turpitude, merit -- these are legacy concerns, and while one might find the allure of veneration throughout history tempting... sometimes you have to spend a summer recording a concept album about The Bio Force Ape.

Sometimes you have to have an idea so profoundly stupid it excites you. Everyone can be dumb; it takes a little more je ne se quoi than that to make a The Bio Force Ape thing. These are the important things: be dumb; get excited at how dumb you are; spend dozens of hours painstakingly crafting a monument to that dumbness; and share that monument to the world.

So "The Life & Death of the Bio Force Ape," is an answer to a question no one ever wanted answered: What if someone took Emerson Lake & Palmer's "Tarkus" - the concept album about a tank that happens to also be an armadillo... an armadillo that hates nuclear war - as some sort of challenge to make an even more ludicrous concept record? What if the Protomen wrote rock operas not about one of the most iconic videogame creations in the nascent medium's history, but about the star of a never finished, unreleased NES game? Hell, these aren't the questions no one wanted answered -- these are the questions NO ONE EVER ASKED.


Here is "The Life & Death of the Bio Force Ape," presented to you free of charge.

You see why no one should have ever encouraged me to pursue any aspect of the creative arts. Or you will see. (Or maybe you won't. I'm not making you. But I'll be super jazzed if you did!)

Look. Not every magazine profile can be "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Not every short story can be "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Not every opera can be "Parsifal."And not every transcendentally foolish idea can blossom into "The Life & Death of the Bio Force Ape".



[Self-evaluations always bring out the worst in me.]

What We Have Now We Are Unlikely To Have Again, or A New Way to Sell A White Kid Some Crack

Making my way from the Powell's technical bookstore on Broadway to Ground Kontrol (the locale hosting the celebration of Brian's 29th birthday) I feel the unexpected pressure of an arm across my shoulders. The arm belongs to someone I have never seen before, someone who must have slipped behind me while I was absentmindedly dreaming of places where lovers have wings, and as I remove the earbuds blasting white hot krautrock into my skullspace, this gentleman casually forces a tinfoil packet into my unoccupied hand.

Keep in mind that I had not said a single word to this individual. I hadn't even noticed him until his arm was on my person. Something about my obliviousness or my manner of dress attracted this fellow to me, and perhaps he believed that while I'd intended all along to score some rock that evening, I was too timid to approach a dealer myself. Surely, he'd note to himself, once the drugs were in my possession I'd be eternally thankful for his forthrightness in the matter.

Still a little befuddled, I look at my new friend and say something like "uh, hey there?"

Arm coiled 'round my body, he says (these ar "it's premium fucking shit, man. That's gonna fucking send you to the fucking moon, ya know?"

The best I muster is a monotone "Ok." There had been some doubt before that moment as to what, exactly, was going on, but I was now certain the tinfoil in my hand was not holstering some Orbitz gum. Still, I was unclear as to what illicit substance was being forcefully sold to me -- not marijuana, I'd surmised, so most likely bogus LSD?

"30, man, just 30 for that," he says, grinning like a machine designed only to grin and sling rock.

At this moment, he half takes the package out of my hand and begins to unwrap it, making sure the shit's still partially in my possession so I can't just bolt from his presence. Inside, three slightly yellow, misshapen objects of varying sizes gleam underneath streetlamp light.

Now, I've listened to a whole lot of Raekown's "Only Built For Cuban Linx," both parts I and II. The brothers Clipse have told me that, after you've added the Pyrex and watched it gel with the cocaine, a kitchen counter top can remind you of the first Noel. But now I am confronted with real crack cocaine outside the rap milieu, and I feel rather perturbed by it. I gently push the packet towards my pusher, but he's having none of that.

"C'mon, you want this. Just hold it. Hold it and tell me you don't want it." The drugs are fully in my possession now. The fight-or-flight response kicks in, along with a patently batshit crazy idea to run like hell with the dope, because, hey, free drugs. I didn't really want to use them myself (although I'm deluding myself to think I wouldn't have smoked that rock, having no willpower and a great enjoyment of cocaine), but surely I could use this fellow's aggressive technique on another sucker. That's 100% profit. This crack could be the Troubled Assets bit in a personal TARP fund.

Luckily, I notice a phalanx of my pusher's companions nearby - running now would surely result in a ruthless ass kicking, at the very least. Still, I wasn't going to buy fucking crack cocaine on the goddamn street. If nothing else, Street Fighter III Third Strike needs my money more than this dope slinger, and I have exactly 15 dollars in my wallet.

"You know what?" I say. "I'm not spending 30 bucks for drugs tonight." The words are too ambivalent and I deliver them sheepishly into my chest. This is taken not as an outright rejection, but rather an opportunity to barter. The price drops to 15. It dawns on me that I cannot expurgate myself from this without parting with something, be it money, cigarettes, or my "getting hit in the face by strangers" virginity, so I take out the three loose dollars in my jacket pocket and hand them over.

So that was weird.

As it was written, so it shall be. The external hard drive upon which my media lived has given up the ghost, and with it so too the 100 gigs of music I'd shoved on there in the last couple years. It could have been the little-death that brigs total obliteration.

I will face this. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where it has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Thank God for Last.fm, though. My library is more or less available there already, albeit in a less-than-ideal setup for browsing.

This has been one weird week. I don't think I've slept more than 3 hours a night, I've been so busy and energetic, and still so many things remain undone.

The Past is not dead. In fact, it isn't even past.

What I've been thinking about when I should be trying to line up my next freelance gig: the scattered history of my words the internet. Well, the unsolicited ones.

1997 - My first website. It may still exist, somewhere in the miasma, buried in digital rubble under Geocties. It was a class assignment. Hartwell was the instructor, if I remember correctly. He must have been 25 when he taught that class - my age. I believe the site was about the Knights Templar -- cannily, I just posted the text of some research paper I did in Social Sciences -- that instructor was also the faculty advisor of the middle school drama club, of which I was a charter member. I got perfect marks in his Social Studies class, if I remember correctly. I definately remember shotguning cans of Budweiser with a kid named... Justin I think? -- quite a number of times before attending his class.

I am willing to bet my first webpage had an animated .gif of Gokou doing a kamahamaha.

1998/1999 - I certainly continued to goof around with HTML during this time, but the only site that ever went live was a very 1998 "fansite" regarding Dan Simmons' Hugo award winning "Hyperion." The internet not being what it is today - my intelligence was equally primitive, at the time - I was oblivious to most of the allusions to classical and Romantic literature and philosophy. I just thought Keats was a cool name for a cyborg, and Hyperion an awesome name for a crazy science fiction planet.

I wish I still had those books.

2003-2007: Ah, the livejournal. It was everything a livejournal is known to be: angsty, hormonal, embarrassing in the earliest entries (must have been before spell check was standard in every browser), quaint, occastionally revelatory. Over four years, I posted nearly 700,000 words before nuking it. All saved on my hard drive, thank God.

2007+: Who knows? There's this thing, the videogame thing, the fiction thing, quite a few myspace blog posts of substance... it's a mess. And it's almost universally terrible writing, lazy and sloppy, usually written after drinking a little too much coffee or alchohol. If there is a hell, I imagine my punishment will involve hearing the innumerable message board posts I've stupidly made recited to me forevermore.

It's ninteen miles to the coast.

Grapefruit Spoons

He looked up.

"Well?" she whispered.

"There are men out there. Men with ambitions, great ones. I have no ambitions."

"You have that paper cutout of Will Smith's face."

"I cut out the eyes. Stuck thumb tacks in his ears. Thought it would remind me of someone."

"Did it?"

"You tell me."

A grapefruit spoon suddenly manifested itself in his hand.

Looking though my archives, I came to find my "fiction" folder - wherein my scraps of half completed novels and short fictions and one act plays and ill conceived screen treatments and NaNoWriMo projects and other ephemera rest on my portable hard drive - has gone nearly a year without any alterations.

This will not cotton, no sir, and *this I vow*: once a week, every friday, at least a sentence of narrative fiction will be posted. I can automate these blogger things, right? So that every week, at least one sentence will auto post at 1:00AM Saturday?

Let's hope so.

late afternoon

No DDR at the Avalon last night. That is a serious oversight, and I hope the goddamn place goes out of business ASAP. Keeps all the cabinets in atrocious condition, too. Ground Kontrol caters to its audience; Wunderland should have no audience.

Then to the Triple Nickel, already half asleep. Blitzgreg bought me a Jameson's, improving my mood and alertness exponentially. Unbeknownst at the time, he was to end the evening incoherently drunk. We were discussing our mutual love of German style board games in measured, reasonable, audible tones when his drunkenness overtook him with stunning rapidity, like a thunderstorm in April overtakes a sunny day. God, I love Greg. I love this entire gaggle of friends trivia hath brought unto me.

Jenny is an interesting case. She's dated Michael for a half year now, but I have only been in her company a dozen times, at most. Yet a mutual respect has developed between us, insofar as I can respect someone from Florida (the Notre Dame of states).

Not writing on the subjects I should be writing on, if I want to advance my freelance career. Just writing, though - that is the key. Get my reps in. Get back in the habit of writing something, anything, every day.

I should try to set up an interview with the people behind Foo Castle. It might generate an article of interest to me alone, but that's okay. The world needs more information about Foo Castle in their lives.