August 7, 2006

[run, forrest, run] ^{5:14 PM}

After many recommendations, 2 years sitting on the shelf, and 3 swim meets later, I've finished Running with Scissors.

I'm a little confused here. Not by the novel, with its wicked perverse turns, but by the reception it received. That rousing, rapturous reception that has sold millions of copies and given birth to a feature film (not to mention a stable career of writing other fucked-up tomes).

I tend to fear America, the midwest especially. I never really started to fear American until started travelling to Canada, Manhattan and the Coasts, but America does scare me. I knew in high school (Texas) I had a latent fear of being beaten to death, and the media didn't do much to sway me from that opinion. I survived, I grew up, but there's still a primal fear I have when it comes to, quite literally, Red States. To me: Red = Blood.

Don't confuse me as someone who thinks that "everyone is the same everywhere" and that I'm unfairly discounting the fair-minded people in, let's say, Kansas. I know many fair-minded people in Kansas, my Mother-in-Non-Law is among them, but still, those 10 people in Kansas don't exactly equal 2, 3, or 4 million books.

So I'm reading this New York Times Bestseller Running with Scissors. A book with a homosexual pedophile as a central character, a book that has 2 graphic chapters devoted to semi-consual, brutal, same-sex, statutory rape, and my mind is just racing.

Boy's mom walks up to me as I'm reading by the pool and says, "A lot of people have told me good things about that book." I scratch my head and muster a smile, telling her it "sure is interesting." It's like my father asking me if I've seen a show called Oz on HBO right after Beecher's been raped by the Aryan nation in the showers.

Is America this hate-filled place that willingly gives millions of dollars to Augusten Burroughs, David Sedaris, and eagerly devours the often homoerotic musings of Stephen King, Michael Chabon and Anne Rice? Is it because they're books? Is that the key? The Simpsons and South Park can get away with scathing social commentary because they're animated, and America can secretly bathe in its same-sex delight because its trapped on the printed page?

We can listen to gay music, we can read gay books, and we can think gay thoughts, but Eyes + Ears + Brain = Forbidden?

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