Jake Jabbour
Contents and Fair Warning: A Preface
Contents
This book is sixteen days on Amtrak trains for an improv podcast. Starting in L.A., rolling through nine cities, and wrapping up in New York. There’s a little of what you might call getting my affairs in order up top and a pinch of unwinding at the end. It’s exchanges with friends, travelers and strangers. It’s the thoughts and feelings I have when I’m left to my own devices. It’s dissections and comparisons and diatribe and rants. It’s me considering the accuracy of my own sensibilities. In short, it’s a road trip with me.
It’s also quite a bit about me. It’s a collection of significant and insignificant experiences. It’s about weddings and breakups and funerals and grief and food and death and podcasts and debt and surviving sixteen days on an antiquated machine. It’s about lots of the stuff I love, and plenty of stuff that scares the shit out of me. It’s got ambition. And defeat. It’s as self-indulgent as the Academy Awards, with only slightly more ramblings about how great movies are.
There’s also a fair amount in here about what interests me. I talk about rap music, and The Sopranos. And let’s get this out of the way up top- I don’t always have good taste. Sure I talk often and at length about Terminator 2, but there’s also a lot about Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and FaceOff./ I also write fondly about Tom Cruise. There’s nothing about sports in here. Teach For America comes up, and The UCB and improv, and ok a little sports. There’s Halt and Catch Fire, and special education, and Infinite Jest, and everything Die Hard, and some Netflix, and just a tease of pornography, but really not enough sports to have expectations for it, so let’s say it isn’t in here. And television shows shot in L.A., and trains, and movies, but not train movies, and a lot about fatherhood. There’s stuff with my mom and sisters, but not as much. That will probably be in a second book.
This book is for me to see if anyone thinks like I do about the stuff I think about. Not in some genius unique way, but in the way you snap to attention when someone’s guess during a board game or during mind meld (an improv warm-up where two improvisers try and say the same word based on two other words i.e. “water” and “sand” might lead to “beach”) is exactly what you were thinking. It’s a little comforting to know your brain isn’t totally out of step. Right? Or is that only me? See. This is what I’m talking about. I want this book to be in my voice but I wouldn’t mind finding a quartet to harmonize with.
The monoculture is evaporating and I wonder how many of us have the same experience. Is the zeitgeist extinct or just on the endangered species list? I wonder if it’s possible to love something for the same reason as your neighbor, your co-workers, your generational peers, your friends even. And if that matters. Or if it’s more meaningful that we do nothing the same. Am I less happy than someone who has a more refined taste? If sports bore me, is my life less fulfilling? Specifics aside, is my relationship to culture unique or universal? I will spoil this for you. I never get an answer. I uncover some subjective truths and gentle lies, but I am on the whole void of absolutes. But if you read this book and you see the big T truth, please tell me. I’d sure appreciate it. Or send me the link to the book you write.
Which I encourage you to do. Write a book for yourself because this one is for me. That’s right. I’m sorry. This book isn’t for you. I mean I hope you like it, but you’re honestly not the audience. I am. I wrote it for me. But only because I had no other choice. I tried writing it for you, but I don’t know you and so that made it very hard. Truthfully I don’t know me that well either, so I thought I’d write a book about me to eventually read and know me better. So perhaps you can read it as inspiration. I’m not confident enough to say what I write here will inspire you, but I can say with confidence I did write here. On these pages and that should be enough. I wrote enough letters to make words and enough words to make sentences and enough sentences to test your patience. I did that. This book exists. Whether or not you like it, and that is very cool. And something you too can do. You can create a book that will exist independent of people liking it. I’m proof of that.
So if this book is for me, then why all the preamble? Well, because I’d still like it to be accessible to you. It’s much like my life in that way. For me, but I can’t not think about how an outsider will interpret it. So now you have all the info. If you still want to proceed, then thank you. Because that means you’re giving me your attention, which is to listen to me, which is to be selfless. Considering we don’t know each other that’s kind and so I thank you. Or maybe we do know each other, in which case, you’re even more kind. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you __________(insert your name here). And I mean it. I promise you sincerity. I don’t fuck with sarcasm.
Fair Warning
This is a sad book. There’s no way around it. I’ve read it a bunch for editing and every time I return to it, I find it a little more sad. I’m speaking of the train trip of course. The essays aren’t very sad unless you count the hours spent thinking about Demolition Man. The flip side to that is it’s also proof I’m getting happier. But I also didn’t want to lighten the mood through editing because I think it’s important not to gloss over the sadness. This book is the honest answer to anyone in 2017 who asked “how’s it going?”
Also, I’m not an expert. This book is not a presentation of what I know. What I know is only important because it helps to highlight all that I don’t know. This book is a messy autopsy on my cultural and psychological make-up. It’s an attempt to figure out what and how I relate to the people in my life, and why I like what I like, especially if it’s noticeably different from the norm. What influence does any of this have on who I am or the quality of my life? Is there a better way to do it? These are the questions someone has either freshman year of college when their first relationship ends or in the middle of their life when they sit in their minivan and sort mail into bills and fliers. Basically, any time life’s present conditions depart from a preconceived ideal. For me it was the time between October 2016 and October 2017. My most trusted shipmates and reliable navigation instruments either went overboard or set sail for calmer seas. And so this emigration forced me to consider my map. Is it accurate? Am I me and am I doing it right? Is what makes me me, the same that makes them them? How am I me without them?
It’s kind of bullshit to just posit a bunch of questions, but questions are what I have. I know I can’t answer the big, life affirming ones, but maybe if I answer the small, inconsequential ones, I can at least decipher some of the code. On the Venn Diagram of idiosyncrasies, knowing whether I’m crowded in the sliver of overlap, or floating alone off the page because I didn’t measure the diameter of the circle correctly, should at the least calibrate my point of articulation. I think that’s the fascination with pop culture. Its meaningless makes it very accessible to examine our position on the spectrum. It’s often conflated with being an authority on right and wrong. But it can’t affirm or disprove. It can only serve as an indicator of “in relation to,” judgment withheld. True it’s a scale, but not the one held by Lady Justice. No verdicts in this book. Just some (hopefully) compelling evidence as to the person I might be.
I’m here to unpack my life one tiny engagement at a time. I’m not looking at any one subject in its entirety, but at my relationship to the subject as it is- incomplete. All the research for this has been done through living and thinking. Often passively. Sometimes compulsively. Frequently both. If I can zero in on what emotional or social nutrition I get from chewing on the Die Hard franchise, I can hold that up to other people’s interests and look for overlaps in our lifestyle lenses. One of my favorite things is to spend time with someone while they passionately enjoy something I have no interest in. See Just the T-2 of Us So this book is also that- my journey into the causes behind my predilections, knowledge-lite.
Just one more little thing I can’t leave alone
I am writing this paragraph right here almost a year from when I started this book. I am one month into a second draft and I realize that many of the declarations I made no longer ring true. Whether they be observations of the culture or just my articulation of the way I felt at that time. With some hindsight it has become apparent in some instances I was describing how I thought I was feeling, but not how I actually felt. At least that’s how it feels. There’s no way to really know, but I can safely say I know more today than I did a year ago, even regarding how I felt in the moment. This presented quite a quandary. Because as I’m revising this, I am looking to make my thoughts and feelings as clear on the page as they were in my head, but the thoughts in my head were not that clear, so do I try to rewrite with the emphasis on clarity that some distance has afforded me, or do I try to just polish up what 33-year-old Jake was trying to say, regardless of its accuracy? For some guidance to this, I turned to a literary hero, Chuck Klosterman.
Now in the early stages of my writing, I referenced Klosterman a lot, then I set up a Google alert for him, and found how often young(ish) writers do this and I decided to not reference him at all, even though so much of the writing and theme of this book is influenced by him. But then I faced the dilemma of preserving or updating, and then Klosterman came to town for a reading, so it seemed not only fitting, but serendipitous that I seek his counsel.
It’s March 25th, and I’m sitting in Skylight Books to hear Chuck speak and to hopefully ask him if he faced a hindsight challenge when writing Killing Yourself to Live, his personal book about traveling the country in search of infamous rock star death sites, while simultaneously navigating personal relationships. I’m weary about attending this event. I’m toggling between excitement and fear. I’m excited to meet someone I admire who has had a great influence on my life and fear I’ll be disappointed, which is often the case with these kind of encounters. Once I met the rapper Slug from the group Atmosphere, and he gave me his autograph and was nice enough to take a picture with me. But in the picture he put his tongue between his index and middle finger, which is the well-known, if not universal, sign for cunnilingus. So the photo is me smiling and Slug saying “eat more pussy.” Sound advice but a little off what I hoped would be a meaningful exchange. Worse examples include improv heroes getting drunk and hitting on my girlfriend, or staying on my couch and being homophobic. They say not to meet your heroes and whoever they are, they are my hero because it’s sound advice.
But you know what, Chuck is incredible. He invites everyone to have a discussion about the royal wedding and tabloid celebrity. He does about an hour of Q&A, going so far as to share his personal feelings about having kids and how it fulfilled his life in a complete and total and unexpected way. Which holds its own significance for me as you’ll soon read. He signs books and is gracious and thoughtful. Except I didn’t get to ask my question. At first I was apprehensive, so I only held my hand up partially which is almost like forcing him to ask me a question. Then by the time I went full raise, it was nearing the end. Riding high on an excellent encounter, but restless with my query, I tweeted @ him. And you know what, he responded. He said he kept the original intent from when the book was written, even though it was published two years later. And with that, I have done the same because I like his book and I want to like mine. So while you may read this and go “that’s not how things are, or even were,” know that you may be right, and in fact I may agree with you, but neither of us can presently experience that time through a different me’s eyes. To paraphrase John Steinbeck, another inspiring author who traveled the country “I cannot commend this account as an America that you will find. So much there is to see, but our morning eyes describe a different world than do our afternoon eyes, and surely our wearied eyes can report only a weary evening world.” So the world in this book may not ring the same bells for you or me, but it’s the world a self-conscious, grieving, culture curious, wide-eyed introvert witnessed.