Status Updates From Eroi della frontiera

Chapter XXL: aptly named as it contains an extra extra-large portrait of the creative process, the birth of a song, an exhilarating romp, friends, strangers, notes, sounds… I’ve never seen anything like it. Eggers’ literary genius. Impossible to read and not be moved.

“Maybe a retired man is the real prize.”
Maybe? Definitely.

What could be better than reading a book about a family escaping in a beat up RV, while we wander in our RV? Everything stacked in the bathroom to keep it from rattling! Ha!

One second she believed fervently that it was enough to be with her children, the next moment they bored her to tears and were an impediment to all her dreams. Goddamn them, her terrible robber children, robbing her of so much, giving her everything and robbing her of everything else, her gorgeous perfect thieving children damn them, bless them, she couldn’t wait to lie down with them.

Not sure there’s a plot to this story but it does currently mirror our lives a bit. RV travel, ha!

The easiest way to witness the stupidity and misplaced hopes of all humanity is to watch, for twenty minutes, a human using a leaf blower. With this machine, the man was saying, I will murder all quiet. I will destroy the aural plane. And I will do so with a machine that performs a task far less efficiently than I could with a rake.

I’m thoroughly enjoying this story. Eggers’ characters are completely formed and each individually fascinating.

When they hit the main strip, they saw that a cruise ship had docked and Seward was full of identical couples in their seventies, all wearing slight variations on the same windbreaker and white sneakers.

The otters were maniacal they were so cute, swimming on their backs, holding actual rocks on their stomachs, using them to break open actual clams. Such an animal could not be conceived by any self-respecting creator. Only a god made in our image could go for that level of animal kitsch.

If a human were ascending a mountain, and…there were storms and avalanches and bolts of lightning from angry skies, then she could accept drama, participate in drama. But suburban drama was so tiresome, so absurd on its face, that she could no longer be around anyone who thought it real or worthwhile.