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Help, I'm having an existential crisis or damn you Chuck Klosterman

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by JayFarrar, Nov 6, 2007.

  1. JayFarrar

    JayFarrar Well-Known Member

    Maybe I'm not having an existential crisis, truthfully, I'm not even sure what that means but I think I do blame Chuck Klosterman.
    It all happened earlier tonight.
    Because of Tivo, the channel was on a station that shows Friends this evening and it was the one where Monica or Rachel or both turned 30. The show was filmed in 2001 and I would have turned 30 the year before, yet I didn't identify with the characters. Even though it seems like I should.
    And I can't figure out why I don't like Friends. The TV show. It was a show that hit my age demographic perfectly. Friends is just not a show I really watched. I think some of them got married and the dumb one turned out to be gay, or something like that.
    It seems like a show I should like and I don't really care.
    Like I'm missing an important pop culture touchstone for my generation.
    I started thinking about this because earlier I was reading Chuck Klosterman's essay in Esquire about how out of touch he is going to be in later years since he hasn't read or seen anything Harry Potter.
    Not because he has an aversion, just because he didn't feel like it.
    I identified with that because I too have missed out on Harry Potter.
    And now I'm having this weird moment because I feel I have a disconnect with people my own age.
    It really kicked in last week. For my paper, I went to my alma mater to cover the football game and one of the kids on the team, a senior, I graduated from high school with his dad. He's my age and he has a son that is 17 or 18. The next day I went to my oldest niece's birthday party. She just turned 12.
    Sometimes I think I have, in a way, wasted the best years of my life.
     
  2. Frank_Ridgeway

    Frank_Ridgeway Well-Known Member

    If you stop reading Klosterman, you'll be fine.
     
  3. TyWebb

    TyWebb Well-Known Member

    He does have some fascinating insights into Saved by the Bell, though.
     
  4. John

    John Well-Known Member

    Klosterman has written a lot of stuff over the years that I've enjoyed -- Fargo Rock City among them -- but I rarely like much of his Esquire work. Every piece seems to adopt some strange theory, which he seems to go out of his way to undercut about 500 words in with lines like: of course, the exact opposite is true, as well.

    It often just feels like a lot of filler.
     
  5. hockeybeat

    hockeybeat Guest

    Maybe you, like me, found the show to be 22 minutes of crap.
     
  6. PCLoadLetter

    PCLoadLetter Well-Known Member

    If it helps, I thought "Friends" sucked.
     
  7. mike311gd

    mike311gd Active Member

    I really enjoyed Klosterman's book, "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto."
     
  8. GBNF

    GBNF Well-Known Member

    Love Klosterman, love SBTB, love Friends.

    Of course, I could be wrong.
     
  9. PCLoadLetter

    PCLoadLetter Well-Known Member

    I thought that was pretty entertaining, which made it particularly annoying that "Killing Yourself To Live" was such an utter piece of shit.
     
  10. mike311gd

    mike311gd Active Member

    I liked Friends. Given the choice of Seinfeld or Friends, and I'm taking Jerry and the Gang every single time. But I didn't mind Friends at all.
     
  11. mike311gd

    mike311gd Active Member

    I got Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs from a friend who wasn't going to read it again. I was hoping to get the latter from her as well. Perhaps I shouldn't any longer.
     
  12. Bubbler

    Bubbler Well-Known Member

    What? You're not cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs anymore?
     
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