The Klosterman Files : X - A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century

My dog died, last Friday.

I’m sorry if you expected a more Klosterman-oriented opening, but it’s all I’ve been thinking about since then. Scarlett was suffering from a degenerative spine disease and there was no option left than to take the decision every dog owners dread having to take. If I’m leading this piece with this announcement, it’s because I finished re-reading Chuck Klosterman’s X : A Highly Specific, Defiantly incomplete History of the Early 21st Century, that night.

You might believe the only link between these two occurrences is unfortunate timing and you wouldn’t be quite wrong. But you wouldn’t be quite right either. The last section of X deals with death. In order, the deaths of Lou Reed, Warrant’s accidental genius frontman Jani Lane, Klosterman’s father and pop music icon Prince. I had little to no memory of that section in my previous reading, but I re-read it on what was the saddest evening of my life.

Death (and Other People)

Perhaps my grieving brain is playing tricks on me, but it feels like Who Wants to Live Forever? (the last part of X) is the only one Klosterman cared about. At least as a subsection of an essay collection. My encyclopedic knowledge of his work backs this hypothesis. In earlier collections like Eating the Dinosaur and I Wear The Black Hat, Klosterman invariably put the most personal at the end, so you wouldn’t read them without understanding who he is first.

The most poignant essay in Who Wants to Live Forever? is (1928-2013), which is a recollection of the evening of his father’s death. He watched a college football game where Eminem was interviewed by Brent Musberger and Kirk Herbstreit at half-time. There was no logical reason for this to happen. It was a promo negotiated by Eminem’s label in order to promote the use of his song Berzerk as bumper music for ESPN’s college football broadcast.

Of course, the interview was ridiculed for being awkward and oddly paired. I believe Klosterman wrote an essay on this interview because it’s the last thing he did before his father passed. He might’ve been the only person moved by the vulnerability and earnestness shown by Eminem during this interview. At least, when it first aired. Not only it shows borderline supernatural levels of empathy, but it exemplified what makes him such a fascinating writer.

Klosterman understands himself through others, whether they are close to him or not. The meaning he constructs from the Eminem/Musberger interview is personal, but it is valid. They embodied the generational/technology gap in the best possible way. One acknowledges the influence of the other on his life (Eminem) and the other recognizes the value of people he doesn’t understand without seeking to do so (Musberger). Shit like that makes me hopeful for humanity.

But you have to be spectacularly aware of how culture influences your judgement to see it. I might’ve not seen it if Klosterman did not have the courage to tell us what he did that night and why he thought it was important.

The Value of Culture

In this reading of X, I was interested in essays that felt personal. Now, I usually fucking hate personal essays, but Chuck Klosterman’s mind is so interwoven in the world around him that reading him makes me hyperaware of my own. There’s Something Peculiar About Lying in a Dark Room. You Can’t See Anything was originally a foreword to a Peanuts anthology, but it’s also a reflection of how Klosterman thinks about himself.

He explains that while most young people felt hopeless about the world, they felt great about themselves and their future. For Charlies Brown, it’s the opposite. Because he is basically an adult explaining adult problems to kids. If the bald protagonist of Peanuts keeps missing the football and paying for an untrained psychologist that doesn’t try to help him, it’s because he is trying to be someone who he cannot be, like every child does.

I don’t know how long Klosterman has understood that problem, but it is something that dawned on me in recent years only: what is important to you and what shapes your understanding of the world is going to become obsolete long before you die. This is what being old feels like. You either step out of yourself and try to surf whatever the culture offers you or you become yourself old and start sharing memes about how everything was better in the 90s.

This is a problem you don’t understand until your generation changed the world and then the following one decides to change it again. Not only you’ll never kick the ball, but eventually people will cease to understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. What every kid is not being told is that you have to invest your time in things you can do, otherwise the world is going to pass you by without you having gained nothing.

Ten, not X

I am not going to discuss any more particular essays from X, because I’m grieving and because I’ve already done so. I’m only going to tell you that it covers a lot of aging musicians, sports icons and carefully constructed pop stars, all with equal intellectual curiosity and respect. I would love to be this detached from how culture affects me and shape my judgement, but I can only aspire to see it the way Klosterman does. He is Steph Curry while I am Dion Waiters.

I’m going to tell you this instead. When the veterinarian injected Scarlett with the product that would eventually stop her heart, he told me: “She might perk up, like she’s trying to breathe. It’s because not every part of her body is dying at the same time. Life is hard to put out sometimes.” Josie and I spent the following minute looking at our dog in cold horror, ready to intervene and hold her until the last moment, but it wasn’t necessary.

Scarlett went out like a candle. Because she was a good dog and because it was the last thing she could do for us. Why am I telling you this? Whatever or whoever you choose to give attention to and construct you identity from is a reflection of who you are as a person. Scarlett went out the way she did because Josie and I always did right by her and it was the natural thing to do right by us. She made me feel like I was a good person one last time.

How does that tie-in to culture? I don’t fucking know. But I’ll tell you that. You have to be proud of who you are and what you like. Same goes for who other people are and what other people like. Because life is a series of beginning and ending and the only choices you make reflect how you want to exist in the world and if your choices are the right ones, the world will tell you that you’re an OK person and that you don’t always fuck things up.

Goodbye, Scarlett.

I love you. Thank you for letting me know I was enough

27.07.09 - 20.11.20