Chuck Klosterman - Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

There are two ways to look at life.

Actually, that’s not accurate; I suppose there are thousands of ways to look at life. But I tend to dwell on two of them. The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyone’s life is entropy. The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected, even if we don’t realize it.

There are many mornings when I feel certain that the first perspective is irrefutably true: I wake up, I feel the inescapable oppression of the sunlight pouring through my bedroom window, and I am struck by the fact that I am alone. And that everyone is alone. And that everything I understood seven hours ago has already changed, and that I have to learn everything again.

I guess I am not a morning person.

However, that feeling always passes. In fact, it’s usually completely gone before lunch. Every new minute of every new day seems to vaguely improve. And I suspect that’s because the alternative view—that everything is ultimately like something else and that nothing and no one is autonomous—is probably the greater truth. The math does check out; the numbers do add up. The connections might not be hard-wired into the superstructure to the universe, but it feels like they are whenever I put money into a jukebox and everybody in the bar suddenly seems to be having the same conversation. And in that last moment before I fall asleep each night, I understand Everything. The world is one interlocked machine, throbbing and pulsing as a flawless organism.

This is why I will always hate falling asleep.

What you are about to read is an evening book. It was written in those fleeting evening moments just before I fall asleep, and it’s built on this ethos: Nothing can be appreciated in a vacuum. That’s what accelerated culture does; it doesn’t speed things up as much as it jams everything into the same wall of sound. But that’s not necessarily tragic. The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive, and there is a myriad of ways to deduce that answer; I just happen to prefer examining the question through the context of Pamela Anderson and The Real World and Frosted Flakes. It’s certainly no less plausible than trying to understand Kant or Wittgenstein. And while half of my brain worries that writing about Saved by the Bell and Memento will immediately seem as outdated as a 1983 book about Fantasy Island and Gerry Cooney, my mind’s better half knows that temporality is part of the truth. The subjects in this book are not the only ones that prove my point; they’re just the ones I happened to pick before I fell asleep.

In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever “in and of itself.”

1 This Is Emo 0:01

(carnivore interlude)

2 Billy Sim 0:12

(reality interlude)

3 What Happens When People Stop Being Polite 0:26

(Pat Benatar interlude)

4 Every Dog Must Have His Every Day, Every Drunk Must Have His Drink 0:42

(Monkees = Monkees interlude)

5 Appetite for Replication 0:56

(an interlude to be named later)

6 Ten Seconds to Love 0:71

(metaphorical fruit interlude)

7 George Will vs. Nick Hornby 0:86

(Ralph Nader interlude)

8 33 0:97

(Fonzie recalibration interlude)

9 Porn 1:09

(“kitty cat as terrorist” interlude)

10 The Lady or the Tiger 1:19

(hypothetical interlude)

11 Being Zack Morris 1:27

(50–50 interlude)

12 Sulking with Lisa Loeb on the Ice Planet Hoth 1:41

(anti-homeless interlude)

13 The Awe-Inspiring Beauty of Tom Cruise’s Shattered, Troll-like Face 1:51

(punk interlude)

14 Toby over Moby 1:66

(Johnny Cash interlude)

15 This Is Zodiac Speaking 1:79

(Timothy McVeigh interlude)

16 All I Know Is What I Read in the Papers 1:95

(boom!)

17 I, Rock Chump 2:11

(waiting to die interlude)

18 How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found 2:20

All tracks by Chuck Klosterman and Crazy Horse, except “The Lady and the Tiger” (Lennon/McCartney) and “This Is Zodiac Speaking” (Klosterman /Desmond Child). Additional vocals by Shannon Hoon and Neko Case on “Being Zack Morris.” Produced by Bob Ezrin at Little Mountain Sound Studio LTD., Vancouver. No keyboards, synthesizers, or outboard gear were used in the typing of this manuscript.

No woman will ever satisfy me. I know that now, and I would never try to deny it. But this is actually okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either.

Should I be writing such thoughts? Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s a bad idea. I can definitely foresee a scenario where that first paragraph could come back to haunt me, especially if I somehow became marginally famous. If I become marginally famous, I will undoubtedly be interviewed by someone in the media, [1] 1. Hopefully Charlie Rose, if he’s still alive. and the interviewer will inevitably ask, “Fifteen years ago, you wrote that no woman could ever satisfy you. Now that you’ve been married for almost five years, are those words still true?” And I will have to say, “Oh, God no. Those were the words of an entirely different person—a person whom I can’t even relate to anymore. Honestly, I can’t image an existence without _____. She satisfies me in ways that I never even considered. She saved my life, really.”

Now, I will be lying. I won’t really feel that way. But I’ll certainly say those words, and I’ll deliver them with the utmost sincerity, even though those sentiments will not be there. So then the interviewer will undoubtedly quote lines from this particular paragraph, thereby reminding me that I swore I would publicly deny my true feelings, and I’ll chuckle and say, “Come on, Mr. Rose. That was a literary device. You know I never really believed that.”

But here’s the thing: I do believe that. It’s the truth now, and it will be in the future. And while I’m not exactly happy about that truth, it doesn’t make me sad, either. I know it’s not my fault.

It’s no one’s fault, really. Or maybe it’s everyone’s fault. It should be everyone’s fault, because it’s everyone’s problem. Well, okay…not everyone . Not boring people, and not the profoundly retarded. But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one for this (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (which is kind of meaningless), I’m going to blame John Cusack.