Thoughts for a Monday...

"Why do we get out of bed?" Mitch wondered.  "Is there any feeling better than being in bed?  What could possibly feel better than this?  What is going to happen in the course of my day that will be an improvement over lying on something very soft, underneath something very warm, wearing only underwear, doing absolutely nothing, all by myself?"  Every day, Mitch awoke to this line of reasoning.  Every day, the first move he made outside his sheets immediately destroyed the only flawless part of his existence.

- Chuck Klosterman, Downtown Owl

Wish I wrote that...

I was clumsy, easily distracted; I was "always in a dream."  [He] dug out the form of this hapless personality for me; out of perversity, defiantly, I felt myself pouring into it and setting hard.  I wasn't pretty or charming or malleable.  I went around with a suffering face.  I read my book with my fingers in my ears.

- Tessa Hadley, "Clever Girl"
Published in The New Yorker on 6 June 2011

Overqualified

I've been on a book buying binge rather than a book reading binge this summer.  I blame it on my new laptop and the discovery of a game called "Cake Mania."  However, I did read and then re-read a wonderfully intoxicating short book called Overqualified by Joey Comeau.

Literally five minutes after reading an excerpt from this book in the 2010 version of Best American Nonrequired Reading, I had purchased Comeau's book online.  At first I thought it was just a collection of off-beat and humorous cover letters; actual cover letters written by Comeau and sent to various companies.

"Dear Goodyear,

I'd like a job, please.  You probably don't hire strangers.  I used to climb mountains of your tires in my grandfather's salvage yard.  My name's Joey Comeau.  There.  Now we aren't strangers anymore."

What I didn't realize was how revealing, bittersweet and wry these letters would also be.  Comeau wrote the book after a devastating drunk driving accident killed his younger brother.  This is revealed throughout the narrative of the letters, as well as the pain that Comeau experiences as his life continues to move on.  Family, regrets, uncertainty of the future, love, childhood...it's all in this book, in 95 short and truly sweet pages.

Favorite Passage
Dear Nintendo,

Thank you for taking the time to consider my resume.  I am writing to apply for the position of game designer.  We have a chance here to help children experience games that are more true to life than ever before.  Computer graphics have improved and improved and improved, and some day soon we're going to have to ask ourselves where we can go next in our search for realism.

We need virtual pet games where you clean and feed and love your furry little friend, but where that car still comes out of nowhere so smoothly, a god of aerodynamics and passenger safety.  Where your mother says, "Good thing we kept this."  And she takes a shoe box down from your closet.  Where you hear your father's quiet joke that night, when he thinks you are asleep.

We need an airport simulator, where the planes carry your whole family from A to B, job to job, and dad still drinks in the shower when you have to pee.  Your older sister still comes home at three in the morning and wakes you up so she can sit on the edge of your bed and cry.  Where you try to make friends faster at each new school, so you tell jokes even though you don't know anybody and nobody gets them.  Everybody says you're the weird new kid.  So at the next school you don't say anything at all and then you're the weird quiet kid.  The plane touches down and you all lean forward in your seats because of inertia, and again and again someone says, "I hate to fly."

We need a new Mario game where you rescue the princess in the first ten minutes, and for the rest of the game you try to push down that sick feeling in your stomach telling you she's "damaged goods," a concept-detailed again and again in the profoundly sex-negative instruction booklet, and when Luigi makes a crack about her and Bowser, you break his nose and immediately regret it. Peach asks you, in the quiet of her mushroom castle bedroom, "Do you still love me?" and you pretend to be asleep.  You press the A button rhythmically, to control your breath, to keep it even.

Yours, 

Joey Comeau

And one more short excerpt...
It's Joey, not Joe or Joseph.  My grandfather was Joe Comeau, and Joseph is my mother's name for me, but I have always been Joey.  I worry sometimes that it's a childish name. Would a "Joe" tell jokes in bed, perform puppet shows after sex, and give every body part a different high-pitched voice?  It seems unlikely.  The names we choose for ourselves aren't meaningless.  They're self-fulfilling prophecies.

So, I'm Joey and I will never be Joe.  When my grandfather died, I lost my chance to know him as anything more than a kiss on the cheek and a drive to the video store.