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August 06, 2008
Blogging Yourself to Live
So I've just finished Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself to Live, a book that came out in 2005 that I just got around to reading. What's great about the book is the three years in between when it came out and the time I read it: those 36 or so months gave me just enough time to grow to the point where this book wouldn't completely f#ck me up for life.
But let me back up for a second, because hey, it's my blog and I'm wont to do so: 24 months after this book came out, I went and got married, which was a great and wonderful thing and I came back from our honeymoon full of stories I wanted to share, and share them here I did, and the result was the not so delicate sound of apathy washing over me from the interwebs. And truth be told that's fine, that's the right of the interwebs, and looking back, who gives a flying fig what type of coral I saw while snorkeling.
But that apathy led me to cut my multipart narrative short, which means you few, you moderately happy few that actually gave a hoot about the honeymoon were deprived of the weirdest part. On what was supposed to be the last day, we checked out of the hotel only to find a hurricane had canceled all flights out of the country that day. This meant an extra day in the hotel, so we splurged by going to the super nice place we didn't think was involved in the all-inclusive deal we'd struck with the establishment.
So around 10 am, we head down to brunch, a rather crowded affair filled with people in the same boat as ours. And in the middle of the crowded buffet line stood a man who if you saw in a crowd, or without aid of your eyewear, would look just like me. But this wasn't me: it was me in 20 or so years, were I to go surly and more than vaguely Republican. So while waiting for my wheat bread to properly toast, I kept looking at this funhouse-mirror version of myself, feeling both in my body and "Being John Malkovich"-esque at the same time.
And then the weirdest thing happened: the older, Cheney-like version of me totally swiped my newly toasted bread. Just took it like it was his.
Since I was full of annoyance anyways (although most people would feel charmed to have an extra day in paradise, I had mentally prepared to return to Boston), I verbally bitchslapped The Neocon of Ryans Future, telling him it was mine, and huffing back to my table. My new bride asked me why I was so red in the face. So I told her.
"Future Me tried to steal my toast!"
Now, I bring this all up because of the Klosterman book, since that reminded me of Past Me, because this book sounded like what I used to sound like in my head. Now, obviously I'm not the writer he is, but reading the book is like reading the best version of my worst self, that hyper-aware, pathetically morose, filters-everything-through-music-to-give-my-own-shortcomings-a-buffer-zone self that showed up somewhere in the late-90's and survived through the publishing date of this book. In fact, 2005 is when my wife and I moved in together, and had I picked this book up when it came out, I'm not sure that would have happened.
An exaggeration? Probably, but this book would have affected me in the way High Fidelity had a few years earlier. I can read that book now as a historical artifact, but at the time it read like a freakin' autobiography. It's bad enough reading Killing now, because clearly it's making me write entries in my old way, which is to say it's making me write like Klosterman. But when i read Klosterman, it sounds like he's writing like me. And the 2005 version of me would have probably balked at the prospect of moving in with my now wife, and found some way to sabotage it, which may or may not have led to a pattern than would have mimicked that of my male-pattern baldness: a sad, testosterone-laced cliche.
Clearly he isn't, but there's a reason why guys like him and Bill Simmons are so popular. It's not that they invented a certain way to think or write so much as give justification to the millions of men who did this anyway and thought they were freaks for doing so. Klosterman and Simmons speaks to those men who are stuck somewhere between Past Self and Future Self, somewhat missing the old and terrified of what's to come, all the while unsure how to deal with the now in any other terms but the commonality of music, movies, and sports.
I'm not looking at life through the sole prism of a White Stripes album anymore, and I'm not yet busy swiping the breakfast foods of some prematurely balding thirty-something. I'm not Past Me, not Future Me: I'm just a big mess of Present Me. It's a great mess, but a mess all the same. The big difference now is accepting the messiness, which is hard for someone like me, but a lot easier than it would have been in 2005. The old me couldn't have done it. The old me would have perpetually sabotaged any possibility of happiness.
And now? No sabotage. And no mix tape to provide context for the meltdown. I'm not killing myself to live. I'm learning to enjoy life. And for now, that's enough.
Posted by Ryan McGee at August 6, 2008 10:15 PM