So today I was eating lunch at Chipotle, which is the healthiest lunch restaurant option around my office. Today was supposed to be a travel day, but my afternoon appointment was canceled, so I was cleared to take a full lunch-hour, with an emphasis on
hour. Thank my lucky stars. I could enjoy eating and the prospect of an easy afternoon.
As I was standing in line, I was behind two guys who I guess were early in their college years. I can make guesses like that because I just completed my undergraduate degree, and I put myself into enough debt to be able to ascertain such things. Credibility: assured. I digress, but one guy asked the other guy what he had been reading. Before I get ahead of myself, let me describe them by their appearances. Dude #1 had the
'Ages of Empires' enthusiast caucasian look down pat, complete with overstuffed backpack. Dude #2 was wearing all-black and mirrored aviators, not like he was doing coke and listening to Fischerspooner in 2002, but rather, like he was spearheading some ill-advised beatnik resurgence. So dude #1 is asking dude #2 what dude #2 is reading these days. I'm trying to discern what kind of burrito I'm going to have. I love the Chipotle. If hell had beer and Chipotle, you now I'd be on evil like white on rice.
Dude #2 answers, without looking at dude #1, "This book, man. And it's changed the way I look at things." The attitude itself reinforces the all-black outfit and mirrored aviators as some messianic intellectual thrusting into the face of some sort of oppression that dumb white kids face, like boredom or perceived mundaneness. Then he holds up the book: Charles Bukowski's
Post Office.
Because I can't figure this kid to be between jobs or women, I have to assume this kid is a little too into what he's perceiving to be the unmitigated allegory of what life is. I also assume that this boy must have been adhering to the same social norms and role in a way similar to his counterpart prior to indulging in the Bukowski novel. While I commend the boy for finding a work of literature he somehow connects with, I even as a life-long nerd sympathizer can take solace that I never so dramatically reveled in the book I was at the time reading. Certainly, among my favorite books, Howard Zinn's
A People's History of the United States or Thomas Pynchon's
V never inspired me to hold the volume up high like some artifact delivered from on high, and never in a chain restaurant.
Intense fandom of things results in either prodigious inspiration and the continuance of something, like why people still go nuts about ensure the legacy of Black Sabbath (for example), but without conscience or the ability to have their dreams smashed every once in a while, a Mark David Chapman scenario could possibly occur.
Once someone wrote, that the Loch Ness monster was nothing more than a brontosaurus that never got its shit together enough to go extinct like the rest of the dinosaurs. And it makes sense to some degree as a social analogy. Perhaps we've been galvanized in our moronic ways so much by hydrogenated oils in our food supply and reality TV that when we find some work of art whether it be a novel or an album or whatever, we hold up high in a Chipotle, as a trophy won in a challenge we never knew we were forced to play.
If the Loch Ness monster / Brontosaurus analogy does make sense, I want to be among the first to go extinct: direct me toward where the doomsday comet will strike.
