Just finished reading Chuck Klosterman’s Eating The Dinosaur. Twice.
It’s not that the prose was so poetic that I had to roll it around my tongue a little longer. It’s not that the thoughts were so pithy that I had to cud-chew it another time to get it down. There was no necessary reason to start back on page one after running my nose through the index. (A good index, perhaps the only index ever where the film Dazed and Confused is followed by an entry for the indomitable dc Talk.) No real reason at all, expect that it sat there, bashful and forlorn, on the back of the toilet. And I was feeling lonely for old friends.
Klosterman and I go way back, having spent lots of quality time in both Akron and the Dakotas discussing the same records, reading the same magazines, and catching the same bands. This relationship would be much more interesting if we’d ever met. As far as I know, our circles never crossed, though there’s probably very few Kevin Bacon Degrees between us.
Despite these gaps of a few years and a few miles, I’m sure he would have fit right in, dueling with lubricated wits against my coterie of friendly savants. These were mighty men of great wisdom. Titans who once ruled over the whims of popular opinion, before the current age, before the Strokes heard Television and unleashed the Tyranny of the Hipster upon us all.
I miss those all-nighters in 24-hour diners analyzing the misheard mutterings of rockstars. Eating The Dinosaur could have been plucked from any of those conversations: Spinning theories going nowhere, but making the journey a more interesting place to be.
