7.24.2015

Ron Currie Jr. - 'Everything Matters!'

I had high hopes for this book especially after how much I gushed about God is Dead. I don't know, even though I finished this book within 36 hours, I wasn't as blown away as I expected to be.

On the plus side, there was plenty of Literary Chicago, since one of the main characters plays for the Cubs.

"Partying means drinking. It also means playing records by Lou Reed and Chicago, which I thought was a city but is also a band it turns out. Uncle Rodney explained this to me. It's a band and a city and when I'm older he'll take me to Chicago to see Chicago play, he says."

"Chicago is not the ideal place to go to when you've recently lost your mind and plan to curl up in the bottom of a bottle and wait for the feeling of having your insides ripped repeatedly from your body to subside."

"...except this time you were not a toddler but a twenty-year-old man, lying on a bench near the Dearborn Street bridge, staring straight up to where the stars would have been were they not  obscured by the megawatt towers..."

"Reggie lives in a subdivision of Washington Park, south of Sixty-third. It probably goes without saying, but given your perpetually addled state we feel we should advise you never to come in theis neighborhood without Reggie as an escort. Merely being in the presence of a black person does not necessarily convey safety, but being in Reggie's presence does, because he is The Fox, and because he's wheelchair-bound, and because he's funny and well liked and known by everyone, including the many people who would otherwise be keenly interested in discovering what your insides look like."

"His knees started to ooze a reddish-brown fluid that smelled exactly like the landfill at 122nd and Torrence..."

Probably a bunch more that I'm missing. It's interesting to reflect on this book too, a few weeks after I read it. It certainly gives one plenty to think about: how would you live your life if you knew the exact date and time that the world was going to end? Would you live differently? We do already know that our individual lives end at some point, and yet we waste so much of our short time here. Scrolling through feeds of the digital world. Could that time be spent more wisely? Then again, as Wallace Shawn criticized our obsession of having 'The Best,' do we necessarily always need to spend our time doing something better? When I go out to a bar, should I scold myself for not being at home writing? Or should I accept that I am at that bar, at that time and place, and embrace the situation I'm in, have a few drinks, chat with friends, make new friends, laugh too much or not enough?

Then again, if you had this knowledge that all life on Earth was going to be destroyed and you did nothing about it, then what the fuck was it for anyway?

This post brought to you by Titus Andronicus. Have a good weekend. 

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