I can usually rate my gratitude for a day by the amount that I've accomplished and feel pleased about having accomplished. Today was a good day, a great day maybe when considering all the days I've had in 2013 and in the thirty-four years that I've had to experience days one at a time. Not that I ever have anything to really complain about. I have far too much for which to be grateful than to throw out a bunch of complaints, but there are some revolutions around the sun that are a little better than others. This was one of them.
I finished Rage this evening after the surprise sushi soiree for Barbara, and I am really pleased to have waited until this time in my life to embark on the literary journey that I've undertaken. I don't think that I would have appreciated it at any other point, and I really appreciate the wisdom that Stephen King managed to shove into a relatively short (especially by typical King standards) volume. It's complex and surreal at times. In my Goodreads review, I called it the Stockholm Syndrome on acid or The Catcher in the Rye on mescaline (or shrooms maybe - I dunno, the psychadelics were never really my thing), and it is both of those wrapped in a Travis Bickle-like antihero with a penchant for sexual ambiguity and droogish ultra-violence a la Anthony Burgess. For all these reasons, I really understand why Stephen King has taken the book out of print and now calls it a potential catalyst for a sick mind looking to justify similar actions in real life.
The aspect of the novel that really intrigued me was the sudden and complete willingness of the hostages to side with their captor and follow through on what psychiatrists would call groupthink. Everyone was quick on the draw to push each others' buttons and expose each other for their innermost fears and secrets. This was more apparent in no other point than when the story's outcast, Irma (the Carrie White figure), goes from a driveling, raving moralist to one of the gang, even returning to the room after having the opportunity to escape when she was allowed to leave to use the restroom. The most frightening section isn't the initial senseless violence that opens the story, but the cataclysmic, climactic moment when the students turn on the room's scapegoat, the only member of the group of hostages to speak out against their fearless captor. Stephen King was obviously a very bright individual, finely tuned to the inner psychological mechanics of the human mind at a very young age (in the introduction to The Bachman Books, he mentions that this was something he originally wrote in his late teens). The work comes across much more in the style of Bret Easton Ellis than King himself - long before Ellis ever wrote Less Than Zero during his stint at Bennington College in Vermont.
Moving in chronological order of publication, my next stop should be Night Shift, a collection of short stories that I actually read only two years ago (maybe three - I wasn't exactly sober at the time, but I do remember it fondly) and I fully intend to read again (as I do several of the others that I've completed more recently; remember: this concept was originally embarked on to solve the riddle presented by The Gunslinger and the supposed tie-ins between all of his works and his magnum opus, the Dark Tower series); however, an issue has presented itself to which I've pondered the outcome of since first seeing the previews for the upcoming Under the Dome series on CBS.
I want to watch the series as it airs, yet I don't want to disrupt the natural flow of things. Simultaneously, I hate to keep moving so far ahead of the Stephen King in 2013 book club, which will only be reviewing 'Salem's Lot at tomorrow's meeting. Weighing a few pros and cons, I decided to go forth and read Under the Dome before the series begins (next week?) and supplement it with interspersed reading of the shorts of Night Shift. We'll see the way it goes, I guess.
In other news, the universe played one her great tricks with chance (...kismet...fate...destiny...serendipity...whatever it turns out to be is what we'll call it later) today in the form of the physical manifestation of the three-month-in-the-making unicorn who gets tagged in a bunch of these posts. What are the chances that EXACTLY three months to the day after our first conversation, the stars would find it necessary for us to meet by utter happenstance in the parking lot of a Walgreen's on a Saturday morning when I'm looking like shit, un-showered, but riding fresh and serene on the coattails of the morning meeting at St. Luke's? Pretty good if you were walking in my shoes or the shoes of a unicorn today.
Now, it's time to post and pull out the sturdy notebook and pencils to work on the other writing endeavor. I have a few pages due by Tuesday, and I want to make sure that my first effort at this is as pure and perfect as I can possibly make it.
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