Deals Only

what can you do

“It takes a bit of getting used to, the idea that spending 365 days a year doing exactly as you please is a viable proposition. Getting sacked from that job was what allowed this notion — that the three years I spent as a student could actually be extended indefinitely and rather profitably — to gain some kind of purchase on my adult consciousness.”

—from Geoff Dyer, Sacked

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I‘ve been reading a lot of Geoff Dyer lately and find that I relate wildly to him, in fact I practically am him, or would be if you could add “irascible funny British guy” to my other qualifications, which include being alive and pretending to hate work.

For some reason I think of him as a kind of irritable guy who is funny almost by accident, which isn’t true—his jokes are too good and too many. Why do I think that then? Maybe I’m the irritable guy. What can you do.

I’m having so much fun reading his essays that I wish I could just share one here and call it good. But that isn’t the arrangement. The arrangement is that I share essays by me, but—and this is my natural modesty speaking—his are better.

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In Astoria, Oregon, where I used to live, there was an old concrete building downtown that housed a two-dollar store called Deals Only, and in the basement of it were some one-dollar bins, and one time when I went down there I saw a pile of five or six books, all the same, called Out Of Sheer Rage, by Geoff Dyer. Never heard of him. I looked at them and thought they must be pretty bad, given their dollar bin status, but how can you not buy a book called Out Of Sheer Rage? It isn’t possible.

I picked one up in disgust. I liked the cover. I looked at James, with whom I had been trying to share my insights about buying shit you don’t need: “it might be only a dollar but that’s one less dollar than you’ll have if you buy this crap.” James—who was holding a large rubber hedgehog and a box of mechanical pencils— pointed out that my insights only seemed to apply to crap other people wanted; never to the crap I wanted.

So I saw this crap book that I didn’t need but wanted and looked at James and said I don’t even want this, I’m sure it sucks. Then I bought it, and muttered stuff about “bad books” and “consumerism” all the way home.

Out Of Sheer Rage, amazingly, turned out to be a book about not writing—a memoir of Dyer’s attempt to write a book about D.H. Lawrence. It was brilliant—funny, great. It was great how he managed to stick it to formal, academic studies of Lawrence while dealing with his failure to write one himself.

I liked the idea of failure-as-catalyst to action, and related, because in the 9th grade I had written a paper on Lawrence’s book Sons and Lovers, received a D minus, and dropped out of school—which felt like a kind of success; one that I’ve been riding ever since.

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The other day I read, for the first time, Dyer’s essay Hotel Oblivion. I won’t tell you what it’s about. But I will say that since reading it, my life has changed for the better. It contains more laughter now—laughter that I laugh when I think about Hotel Oblivion—which, if you must know, is about trying to change your rain-soaked pants in a tiny bathroom stall while you’re tripping on mushrooms. What more could anyone need?

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