Much to say, but my brain's still a bit scattered. Maybe today will be a two-entry day. Mercury went direct Wednesday, and my brain's more able to put words together in the right order than it has been in a couple weeks.

To that end, here's entry number one.

I'm reading, like many people I know (and many more I don't), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I just got to the end of chaper four (the end of the "nice novella length" section of the book). Many people have liked it quite a bit, others have been rather unimpressed (although those readers invariably comment that Eggers is a good writer, but the story isn't holding them).

I've found it almost too close for comfort. I'm enjoying it quite a bit, in contrast with Amanda's opinion of it, but it does strike a bit too close to home sometimes and I have to put it down. I think this is because even though Amanda and I get along quite well, and ironic distance seems to be the only way many people we know face life, her ironic distance is much more deeply ingrained than mine (and apparently Dave Eggers'). Eggers, like me, has used and continues to use irony as a buffer, a way to keep things from bubbling up to the surface and being painful every day. But where he and I would appear to be similar, and different from Amanda et al., is that somewhere under there we're still trying to work out those things that we bury underneath the irony. I suspect many people of our generation have resigned themselves to the ironic life and left their emotional baggage packed, the suitcases arrayed neatly by the door but carefully stepped around daily. Eggers and I (and others, it would appear), can't help but unpack, but we don't do a very good job of putting things away, so we keep packing and unpacking, rearranging, trying to figure out how to make the pile of baggage go away or get smaller.

While his tragedy and mine are different (he lost both parents, 35 days apart, to cancer; I lost my older brother to an unheeded stop sign and a cement truck), there are many similarities in the way we've gone through life since then. We're roughly the same age now, but he was 21 when he lost his parents and I was just shy of my eleventh birthday when Mark was killed. It's weird to read his book. His neuroses parallel mine: he does these entire scenarios in his head in the pauses of daily life; he envisions entire futures spawning from the slightest change in plans, reaction, or behavior; he fancies entire conversations with other people (well, Toph at least; I imagine he does it with other people too although perhaps not in the book) where they both portray themselves and say the things they probably would say if those conversations actually happened, and where they play the role of his subconscious or the Greek chorus of his life, telling him the things he already knows but refuses to deal with.

I've met lots of people who rely on irony to get them through the day. Hell, they're most of my friends. Where we differ is in how we deal with stuff, where we choose to be direct and handle problems up front, where we instead avoid the problem and hope it goes away on its own. Suck recently harped on the suddenly overused "elephant in the room nobody's talking about" metaphor, but in my case I keep talking to the elephant in the vain hope that he'll see things my way and leave of his own accord. When that doesn't work, there are a million distractions to be found. Eggers resorts to the drawing of a stapler. But he also wrote the book, in the apparent hope that catharsis might help.

Dear Elephant,
Please go away.
*Heart*, me.

I see much of myself in the way Eggers portrays himself. If I had a little brother (instead of being the little brother myself, as was the case) I'd probably do the same things he did. He keeps trying to fill all of Toph's time, trying to make him super-normal, constantly keeping him (and himself) distracted. That's me. Because all the time we're not distracted, we're back to talking to the elephant. As an eleven-year-old, I built ever more complicated structures out of my Legos. Now I buy CDs. That constant need for distraction is still there.

Weird.

We'll see how I react to the rest of the book.

(2000-03-18)