Killing Yourself to Live Reflections

My friend Caitlin regularly reads this blog and asked me to write about something other than Facebook. So I will.

I am reading Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself To Live, a book where he travels around the US to sites where important figures in rock history died. I love reading Chuck, because he says what he's thinking, no matter if that will get him in trouble or not. In this book, he talks about how he cheated on his girlfriend, and I kept wondering how he could write about such a personal subject and not offend/hurt the people involved. I concluded that he must ask the people if he can write about them, or he just cares about making money more than maintaining relationships.

If you can't tell by now, my style of writing adapts to whomever I am currently reading. I'm writing like Chuck, or at least I'm sounding like him in my head as I write.

In his book, Chuck talked about how certain things are understood by a society. He said that "this is how popular culture works: you allow yourself to be convinced you're sharing a reality that doesn't exist." He talked about how when he was growing up, there was this one kid that everybody loved, but then everybody simultaneously decided to hate the kid. Out of the blue, people started harassing him to no end. I totally understand this concept. It is seen here at ACU through how all the freshman guys wear hideously trashy wife-beaters, and it is considered cool. No where on Earth should anyone be allowed to wear only a wife-beater. They're gross. But here, everyone accepts the fact that wife-beaters are "cool," while wearing a fedora is considered nerdy. I don't understand.

Chuck also talks about how "the greatest career move a musician can make is to stop breathing," commenting on how rock stars get exponentially more famous and revered than when they were alive. He wonders why that is (that's the purpose for going on his trip, he said), and I do to. Why are you cooler when you die? Why does everything you did in your life seem more meaningful after your dead when, while you were still alive, it was just considered normal? I know that if my sister died suddenly, I would want to know everything she did in the last 6 months (hell, I'd want to know everything she ever did in her life). I'd find her close friends and have them talk about her, telling me her daily routine, what she ate, what she did with her spare time. I would want to know everything I could about her. I don't know why everything would seem more important, but it would. It's almost as if death makes us realize that people don't go to work, wash clothes, and buy groceries forever, that people have a certain number of times they do things, and after someone dies, the number of times is finished.

Right now, my neighbors are blasting rap, and it's seeping through the wall. I don't mind though. I nod my head to the beat as I remember how I'm on a rap kick, loving Childish Gambino and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I tried to get my group into rap (specifically Drew, who hates rap), but I stopped when I felt that my efforts would not produce a crop. Some people just don't like rap. I don't know why. I genuinely like all types of music, even pop, the genre I taught myself to dislike because it is not "good" music. I don't remember when I started hanging around people who thought pop was below them, but it happened, and now I have to let myself realize that it's okay to like Lady Gaga or Kesha. I have this fear that if I tell people I like pop music, they will value me less because they won't think I have good taste. I never take that train of thought further and ask myself if I'd want to be friends with those people if they judge so harshly. I just allow myself to be scared into a stereotype that fits into a reality that doesn't really exist.