Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

by Chuck Klosterman

It will take three hours to decide which compact discs to put in the backseat of my Tauntaun. This is the kind of quandary that keeps people like me from sleeping; I never worry about nuclear war or the economy or if we need to establish a Palestinian state, but I spend a lot of time worrying about whether I need to purchase all the less-than-stellar Rolling Stones albums from the 1980s for cataloging purposes (particularly Undercover, which includes the semi-underrated “Undercover of the Night”1).

I have more CDs than 99 percent of America, but fewer CDs than 40 percent of my friends; if an acquaintance has more CDs than me, I feel intimidated and emasculated.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a theory that life on earth is purgatory, because life on earth seems to have all the purgatorial qualities that were once described to me by nuns. It’s almost like we’re all Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, but nobody on “earth” has figured this out yet, even though it will suddenly seem obvious when we get to the end.

If Diane is like the woman from the song “Jolene,” Lenore is like a combination of the girl described in “Chantilly Lace” (minus the ponytail) and the individual depicted in Mötley Crüe’s “Looks That Kill” (although not technically bulletproof). I met her at a party in Fargo, North Dakota; actually, I didn’t meet her. I saw her. About 15 of us were watching the documentary Unzipped, and she arrived late and spent 10 minutes trying to open a bottle of wine. We never spoke. Three days later, I sent an e-mail to my friend Sarah Jackson. All the message said was, “I don’t know who that blonde girl was, but she is superfoxy x 1,000.” Sarah forwarded this message to Lenore, which (of course) was precisely my plan; anytime you tell a woman something positive about one of her female friends, the friend will be informed of this statement within 48 hours. I had no real aspirations of dating Lenore when I did this, because that seemed absolutely impossible. We were not, as they say, in the same league (she was in the NBA and I had a 10-day contract with the Quad City Thunder). But this is something all men do: Men always want to make sure that attractive women are informed of the fact that they are, in fact, attractive. I have no idea why this happens, but it happens all the time. I guess it’s the hope that—somewhere on earth and against all odds—there is a beautiful woman who has managed to live her entire life without anyone mentioning that she has a desirable physical appearance, ...

To me, that’s what makes the Great White tragedy even sadder than it logically was: One can safely assume that none of the 100 people who died at the Station that night were trying to be cool by watching Great White play 20-year-old songs. This was not a bunch of hipsters trying to be seen by other hipsters; these were blue-collar people, all trying to unironically experience music that honestly meant something to them when they were teenagers.

I remember everyone gossiping about the Station fire the day after it happened; people would concede that it was tragic, but no one could discuss it without a fraction of a smirk. People were sending e-mail one-liners about the fire while the cops were still counting the bodies. Somehow, it was acceptable to condescendingly chuckle at the death of the overtly uncool people in Rhode Island, sort of how you can immediately make a joke about a massive earthquake as long as it happens in some distant place like Iran or China. I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they’re all so envious of it. It’s almost like they want to be burned alive, because that would prove they had grit.

There are very few Americans who honestly care who Lindsay Lohan is dating. But it’s still information they need to have. This is because those people care about something else entirely; they’re worried about the possibility of everyone else understanding something that they’re missing. This is what they’re afraid of, and this is how they deduce societal truth. And that’s the same fear that made me hate a totally friendly person from 1985 to 1986: It somehow made sense to hate him. This is also why it seems weird not to laugh at a woman on reality TV who likes the Olive Garden. It somehow makes sense to laugh at what isn’t funny.

“I am taking you very seriously,” I say. “I am taking you more seriously than any woman I have ever met in a restaurant.” “Ha,” she says, but she does not laugh. “What I’m wondering is if TV taught people how to have longer dreams. Because TV is always flashing forward: If sitcom characters are in the living room, and then a commercial for Tide comes on, and then those same people are suddenly lying in bed when the show returns, we all automatically understand that time has advanced. We just take for granted that the story has moved from daytime to nighttime. This is something we have all come to understand completely, and without even trying. Books do this all the time, too. Like, I’m reading One Hundred Years of Solitude right now, and—” “What in the hell is going on here?” “—and the unspoken encroachment of time is the crux of that entire book. You couldn’t write that book if people didn’t understand narrative time travel, because the story could never be told in real time. Nobody can read for 100 straight years. So what I’m wondering is how people dreamt before the invention of media. And not just before movies and TV but even before printed novels. I mean, how would a caveman dream? Would his dreams only happen in real time, like in Kiefer Sutherland’s 24? How could the subconscious mind of a caveman calibrate the idea of two things happening 10 years apart?”