Jul. 22, 2009 - Issue #718: Real as an Animal

Fade to black

Answers are hard to find, but real life isn't, in Goldbach's Selected Blackouts

 

Here there be reality. You get to decide what you make of it and there are no apologies for the harsh language or dubious morals presented. And how dubious are they, really? Hasn't every twentysomething gotten too drunk and fucked up? Experimentation with controlled substances and sex isn't exactly shocking or new, but their blasé presentation in Selected Blackouts is oddly comforting. John Goldbach has cracked a code and presented unvarnished truth for our viewing. Approval and understanding aren't required nor desired, it seems, just attention. And you better be paying attention, or you'll miss everything that's important.

The characters in Goldbach's book aren't wise, highly intelligent or supremely talented, they're just people struggling to understand themselves and the world around them. Not every action is easily dissected, not every emotion is identifiable. But that doesn't mean you stop looking, searching, wracking your brain for some insight. Question everything, all the time, and maybe there will be an answer in there somewhere. Just don't be surprised when there isn't.

In Goldbach's second story, "Easter Weekend," the character of Paul says it best when he proclaims to Daniel, the protagonist, "This is how people live." Paul is referencing the lifestyle choices of marriage, children, work, throw-away comforts, the idea that happiness is found outside of yourself. Is this how we should want to live? That's the unspoken question reverberating throughout this collection and echoing in the minds of most young adults as they attempt to create a mature life for themselves, to grow up. Commercials that attempt to indoctrinate us while we urinate, government controlled and taxed death sticks: is being aware that the charade of society is bizarrely meaningless any protection against its insidious charm? In the struggle of man versus society, must society always win? What else can a person do in our culture other than drug and drink and turn off the thinking part of their brain? Plenty, it turns out, just don't look to someone else to tell you what you need.

No one wants to feel lonely, though so many people are, including Goldbach's characters. Who are we to judge another for claiming to have found a path, a way of life that eases or even eliminates that loneliness? We can say that it's self-delusion, and perhaps in reality it is, but all that actually matters is what the individual perceives. If they perceive happiness, does it matter if it's not "real?" Who gets to decide what's "real?" Everything is always all in our heads, that's reality.

While this book contains a plethora of situations and characters that are accessible, that doesn't make the content any easier to understand. The mystery of life isn't resolved here, because it's a mystery that never can be resolved. But the charm of Goldbach's writing is that he gets it, he's in on the joke of existence, and you're allowed to laugh at it because there's no point in crying. On a first reading, so much is too familiar to really be provoking and it's only on a second reading that the reader can remove themselves from the situations described to read the subtext. Goldbach has a gift of insight and tremendous writing talent that makes this book a must for anyone in their twenties wondering, "What's this life thing about anyway?" V

Selected Blackouts
By John Goldbach
Insomniac Press
176 pp, $19.95

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