Eight Thirty Eyes

So for most of today and most of last night I have been reading ‘Killing Yourself to Live’ by Chuck Klosterman. It is fantastic and by all reading standards I should be done with it by now, but I keep getting distracted by my own thoughts as I’m reading his. I guess this is part of why I am loving this book. For anyone who has known me for more than let’s say an hour and knows anything about Chuck Klosterman, you are probably really surprised I am reading this book and/or that I am enjoying it. This particular one is about a road trip he took while working for Spin magazine traveling to all the places where musicians have died, but I’ve also read ‘Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs’ and ‘Chuck Klosterman IV.’

I have nothing in common with this guy, who by his own count has 2,233 CD’s, but his thought process is great and I really like his writing, which explains why I have been reading this book all day. It does not explain though why I’m not done with it yet. That comes from what his writing is making go through my head. While he does write about some songs I’ve never heard of and some musicians I couldn’t care less about, what has stuck with me the most is how many events in his life he relates to a specific song – not one song, but various songs for various events, etc. This is somewhat of a foreign concept to me. There are not too many songs that make me think of specific events and I would never think about them backwards like he does.

For example, whenever I hear the song Ghetto Superstar (I know fantastic right?) I think of my friend Annie from high school that died a few years after we graduated. She made up a whole dance to this song to be done in a car – i.e. it has no leg actions. I can still do that dance too. But, if I am thinking about Annie for any other reason, I never then also think about the song. Another example would be the Macerena. All kidding aside and nevermind the fact that you don’t really hear this anymore, but this song if heard will remind me of being 15 and driving to Pittsburg, KS with my friend Terri to see her older sister, and the subsequent evening of trying to talk a police officer out of arresting her sister for providing a 15 and a 16 year old with alcohol – so much alcohol in fact that the reason we were talking to the police officer is because he found my friend Terri wandering around the streets with no clue where she was going. This always brings a smile. If for some other reason I remember Terri (who I only hung out with one summer) it never leads me back to the song. The funny thing is that neither of theses songs is probably included anywhere in his 2,233 CD collection, but his book has made me think of both of these things today.

It has also made me laugh and think he’s crazy – In his second day, he is talking about his road trip of death and starts to talk about sometimes he thinks he has Cotard’s syndrome (which is something that I hadn’t heard of until now) and how sometimes he thinks he’s dead and that living on earth is purgatory and that he’s the only one that knows and that none of the other people know we are dead, but then he says that this possibly makes him a prophet, but also possibly means he has Cotard’s. This made me think about how people could think about death like this. I only think about death in the sense that someone is dead or going to die, I don’t think about it in an abstract sense and it’s interesting to read a book by somone who does – especially if said person is writing a book about places people have died.

Anyways, all this is to say that I’m really enjoying the book and would probably stay home reading it all night if my friend didn’t call and invite me to dinner. I figured I should do something social instead of continuing to read this crazy book…