Self-Heimlich

"Thursday is Virginia Woolf. Then it's Anaïs Nin. Then there's just enough time for a session with Sacajawea before it's morning, and I have to go to work in 1734."

You might be forgiven for saying that that statement, out of context, is gibberish. Believe me, though - even in context, it makes the kind of convoluted sense only a work of Palahniuk can make.

I'm late with my review of this thing - it was published in 2003. It's set in contemporary time, featuring a man working in a historical museum job reenacting the 18th century, who gets his kicks from attending sexaholics meetings, pretending to choke in restaurants and cashing in on the idea that people, needing to be heroes, will be forever responsible for a life they saved, in order to pay for the bills of his dementia-stricken mother, who used to be an anarchist and claimed that we have reduced the world to symbols. In his mother's hospital, his sexual escapades come to a weird turn when he meets a woman who he likes - a doctor who translated his mother's diary from Italian to him in exchange for him getting her pregnant so they can take the fetus' brain and scramble it to overlay on his mother's wasted brain as a cure, which didn't happen. It turned out that the diary contained his parentage, which was that he was the second coming of the almighty savior, having been made from his mother and the foreskin relic of a historical Christ. It further turned out that the doctor was an inmate, and he was really kidnapped as a kid by his mother. The story ends with him, his best friend, his best friend's hooker girlfriend, and the inmate pretend doctor building something using rocks, not knowing what they build, and building everyday.

Good story. This story is a story about a man who doesn't have a self, and defines himself reactively by people and slogans around him. In his casual sex, his philosophy is "What would Jesus not do?" This is a story about a man who needs to be needed, and defines himself heroically by making others be the hero in his choking in restaurants.

The paradoxical thing about stories is that you have to have a solid sense of self in order to be able to lose yourself wholly in them. Otherwise, the power of the story becomes too great, and you'd end up after having read it reassembled chock-full of square pegs and round penguins. A book like this, read by something like me, can be a two-day depression swing.

You can - did you know - administer the Heimlich maneuver to yourself. You need a wall to back into, or a chair to push towards. Solid things.

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