A couple of weeks ago, I read about Charles Barber’s new book, Comfortably Numb in Wired, and it sounded intensely interesting. It’s due to come out this month, and I’ve reserved one of the first copies to come into Golden Public Library.

At any rate, I decided to pursue his other book, Songs From The Black Chair. Honestly, when I found (in the prologue) that this was a reference to Tears For Fear’s Songs From The Big Chair, I was turned off, but perhaps in the end it was relatively appropriate. Still, I felt like it was a stretch.

In terms of the meat of the book, rarely in my “adult life” have I been so floored by a book. I got the book last week, and read the prologue on Thursday night, but finished the rest of it on Sunday and today. When class let out this afternoon, I wasn’t thinking of coming home, having a beer and watching a TV show before starting homework. Instead, I was set on finishing up the home stretch of this book. The last time I read a book so quickly (for me, this is very fast) was Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. (I reread it for a scholarship essay I wrote; incidentally, I didn’t win the moneys.)

Reading this book was like reading about my friend and myself. At first, to the point that I felt completely and utterly involved, and then so much that it was eerie, and then at last to the point that I almost felt indignant about being very eloquently how I felt. I can’t very well articulate how much its reading has affected me.

Oddly enough, at certain points it made me give more credence to the whole anarchist nihilistic punk thing - a “thing” I always regarded as, well, silly. That’s certainly not to say I don’t love Fight Club or SLC Punk, but like Stevo said, he had given no thought to the future, and when the world didn’t end, he had to grow up.