Effin' Brilliant

Everyone should read Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre. Steph sent it to me out of the blue (which, I hear, is now the color of her hair) to cheer me up, and I spent whole evenings reading and re-reading passages from it to my husband. Underlining my favorite parts would be useless because there are so many, but here's one of the most original and accurate sketches I've ever read of the ragged edges of small Texas towns:

"Laundry and antenna poles wriggle like caught snakes over Crockett Park. This is a neighborhood where underwear sags low. For instance, ole Mr. Duetschman lives up here, who used to be upstanding and decent. This is where you live if you used to be less worse. Folks who beat up on each other, and clean their own carburetors, live up here. It's different from where I live, closer to town, where everything gets all bottled the fuck up. Just bottled the fuck up till it fucken explodes, so you spend the whole time waiting to see who's going to pop next. I guess a kind of smelly honesty is what you find at Crockett's. A smelly honesty, and clean carburetors."

I mean, does it get better than this? No. No, it doesn't. And the narrator is one of the most vulgar yet truly decent fictional characters I've fallen in love with. This book is taut with energy and originality, and it stays that way until the last sentence-- which is really something because a lot of books, even really great ones, have this tired slump at the end where you can just see the author sitting there in front of a typewriter, or a computer or whatever, and taking a last slug off the wine bottle and saying, "Well... 'bout time to wrap this thing up." And months jump by in single sentences, characters come to impossibly quick conclusions about Life, Love, and the Universe, and all the other characters who're even the slightest bit expendable die quick, pat little deaths.

So read this book.

About things here: it's cold enough to make Texas drivers rude, which is pretty cold. Ten urban assault vehicles (trucks and suburbans with brush guards they don't need) pinned me into my parking space at the HEB even though I was clearly trying to back up and they were all going about two miles an hour. I've found I get a lot less tolerance in traffic when I drive the rally car, like everyone just expects me to be a teenage boy with too much hair gel and an attitude.

Also, I've recently crafted a metaphor to help me deal with the fast-approaching Mystery Move. I'm looking at it like a badly produced reality TV show. It's always been a fantasy of mine to be cast in a shitty reality TV show, like "The Real World," and then to flake on my end of the deal and not provide any drama, just a few well-placed, sardonic observations that make everyone watching feel guilty for not being outside, or not talking to their families. Kind of like Jesus on primetime. Like I said, a fantasy.

In reality, the apartment smells like my husband's incredible chili. It's so cold outside that the kitten is curled up in my lap so he can stick his little suede paws up underneath the edge of my sweatshirt and warm them against my stomach. I'm going to try to lift him undisturbed so we can go downstairs and watch the Olympics...