A micro-Reader's Digest in my neurons

[cosmolinguist]

"I am," I announced (in response to this), "inoculated against American weirdness."

To expound. "I can handle pushing cars out of the snow and Bible school. I have watched PBS and small-town high-school football. You can't scare me." I have a tackle box and a snowmobile suit. I ate Mickey Mouse pancakes for breakfast while watching Road Runner cartoons. I have cleaned pig pens and pulled weeds out of soybean fields that you could spend all day walking up and down, between the rows. I have been to the Corn Palace and Wisconsin Dells, where they let me drive an amphibious vehicle from World War II.

It reminds me of Joe Malik saying that he got stoned and read a whole Reader's Digest and tried to become one with it...*

"No wife, no horse, no mustache," Malik repeated. "That's all it said."

"I beg your pardon?" Case asked, intrigued by something nonmusical for the first time in his life.

"It was in the Reader's Digest," Malik explained, trying to clarify matters but not sure how much Case had already missed.

"The Reader's Digest?" Case prompted. "That was the whole point," Malik went on earnestly. "I was stoned on Alamout Black hashish, the best in the world, and I sat down to read a whole issue of Reader's Digest all the way through and become one with it."

"Become one with the Reader's Digest?" Case was in beyond his depth and sinking fast in ontological quicksand.

"I wanted to experience a totally alien, science-fiction reality," Malik pursued his theme. "Reader's Digest comes from another universe, grok, from a world occupied by millions of Americans who are not New York intellectuals. These people sincerely believe that our government has never waged an unjust war, that the hair of a seventh son of a seventh son cures warts, that millionaires get rich through honesty and hard work, that a Jewish girl once got pregnant by a dove, and all sorts of things like that, which are regarded as medieval superstitions in my normal environment. Entering Reader's Digest through the empathy of hash is a quantum jump to another reality."

There was a momentary silence in which Case distinctly heard Juan Tootreego whispering, "... nose candy from Marvin ..."

"The trick," Malik went on, "is to concentrate on the reality projected through the printed page. Every sentence is a signal from another world, a nervous system different from yours with which you can interface synergetically ..."

"You mean," Carol Christmas breathed huskily, "you were deliberately brainwashing yourself to believe in this Reader's Digest world?"

"Of course," Malik said, with an isn't-it-obvious shrug. "A single ego is a very narrow view of the world."

"So in effect I became Middle America. Bouncing off the printed page into my retina, grok, decoded by nervous system circulating through Memory Storage the words formed a micro-Reader's Digest in my neurons. I honestly began to worry about the dangers of premarital sex."

"Nothing to compare with the hazards of marital sex. Do you have any idea how much alimony I'm paying every month?"

At that point, unfortunately, Case dozed off in his chair (one joint of Colombian too many) and he never did find out about the man with no wife, no horse, and no mustache.

Ths is the only time I've ever been glad to have grown up in a Reader's Digest world. I can effortlessly slip into the world that mippy is now marvelling at when she found the issues of my parents' local paper that they bought me a subscription to: the ice cream social, bingo night at the Ellendale Liquor Store.

A couple of days later she asked me if the state fair was like an exhibition or a funfair; I said both, and regaled her with tales of livestock, machinery, more fried food on a stick than you'll ever see outside of Scotland, 4-H projects... I can't believe I didn't get around to telling her about the beauty-pageant contestants whose heads are sculpted in butter.

I did actually worry about pre-marital sex, and vow I'd never do it. (Of course that's easy to say when your male classmates are pimply FFAers who never seem to get tired of their argument about whether Arctic Cat or Polaris makes better snowmobiles.) I didn't have to learn to Just Say No because no one ever offered me anything. I didn't even think South Park was funny.

Such a reality tunnel, if you want to call it that, is not a nice place to be... but it's a nice place to be from. It's still lying there, dormant, neglected, but functional if I need exercise in switching worldview. I don't even have to get stoned.

It's good to remind myself, when I feel like I'm stuck in a rut (as I do now) where I've come from and just how far I've wandered.


* I love this book so much, it pains to me to have excised the stuff I did from this conversation, but I thought it better not to be any more convoluted than I already am here.

Comments

[offensive-mango.livejournal.com]

It is quite strange to be in a country *without* American "weirdness" (that is, normality).

[cosmolinguist]

It is. The things that get labelled "American" or "weird" still trip me up, often.

[chaptal.livejournal.com]

even now i'm a suburban kid. malls, beaches and led zeppelin as the soundtrack. the upper midwest is a foreign land to me, even as a found out about point special and the minnesota gophers hockey cheerleaders.

to me, high school football is on saturday mornings, even if i never went to the games, halloween is on october 31st, we drink soda, there is no mustard put on fast food burgers, the pizza and bagels are good, and all the people vote democrat :)

[cosmolinguist]

The cheerleaders are considered foreigners in the Upper Midwest, anyway. Who dresses like that in the winter?

[chaptal.livejournal.com]

they have leggings on, and they can skate in formation!

[cosmolinguist]

I'm with you on the voting Democrat — the only political opinion I've ever heard from my dad was about the excellence of Paul Wellstone — but not the soda. I said "soda" once, in college, and the girl next to me accused me of being from Wisconsin.

[chaptal.livejournal.com]

it's soda dammit! that pop line is worse than the mason/dixon ;)

[cosmolinguist]

It is; the first LJ comment-swarm, hundreds of them piling on top of each other, that I ever saw was over the pop/soda debate.

If anything it's much worse than the Mason-Dixon line because at least there was one clear-cut line there; pop/soda has all kinds of twists to it: local rivalries, families rent asunder, some people who insist on being outside the box because they call everything "Coke"... It's so messy.

[chaptal.livejournal.com]

has anyone done fan fic about the debate ;)

it is messy, then it gets shaken up and exploding, then it turns flat and dull - not unlike the beverage itself.

[cosmolinguist]

Oh, I am so writing linguistic-battle fic.

Though I've already done so, in fact.

Pop/Soda

[lostpositive.livejournal.com]

it's called ginger here :)

[cosmolinguist]

What do you call ginger people then?! :-)

[lostpositive.livejournal.com]

Good question :)

[lostpositive.livejournal.com]

I'm glad that our conversation inspired you to post this :) I'm not taking the credit though I blame Ohio ;)

[cosmolinguist]

The book I'm quoting from here, by the way, is the same one that I nicked the answer to "what makes somebody good in bed?" from, if you remember that.

[lostpositive.livejournal.com]

I do :)

[kalieris.livejournal.com]

Case was in beyond his depth and sinking fast in ontological quicksand.

Wow - this is how I feel every day at work. (Was this Schroedinger's Cat or a different RAW book? I clearly need to re-read them.)

Your post reminds me of the difference between the person I was before I moved out and got married, the person I was while married, and the person I am now. I haven't thought about that in quite a while.

[cosmolinguist]

It's Schroedinger's Cat, my favorite one.

I don't think about this a lot, either, which is why it's kind of dizzying when it occurs to me. :-)

Pus, the part no one tells you is that though people talk about it like new versions of themselves completely replace the old versions — like a new computer file will overwrite another with the same name — but really the new person just seems to grow over the old one, like rings on a tree, because the old stuff seems to be still there, and surprisingly accessible or important on occasion.

[patrick-vecchio.livejournal.com]

Bingo night at a liquor store sounds as if it would be a five-star hoot.

[cosmolinguist]

I'm not entirely sure that was it, but both bingo and the liquor store were mentioned, and it sounds about right. I do know the ice cream social is real, though; I played in the school band and we were the entertainment for it.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I love that phrase 'ontological quicksand' too.

I was brought up on the British version of Reader's Digest. The things I remember most vividly from it are the 'Drama In Real Life' stories about horrifically bloody accidents, the abridged novels about tragic dying children, the endless jokes about being in the army, but (most excitingly) the daring escapes from the Eastern Bloc into the glorious, happy West. In special compartments of cars! In fridges! In home-made gliders! On a catapult! No, seriously.

[cosmolinguist]

Robert Anton Wilson is all about the ontological quicksand.

A catapult! Marvellous. I'm glad to hear the rest is more horrendous, like jokes about the military, because that's all I got. And, yeah, lots of people in mountain-climbing accidents and stuff, now that you mention it. (I didn't actually read Reader's Digest a lot, but my grandparents got it and if my parents were late picking us up or I'd misjudged how long it'd take me to re-read all of the books I had there, I would grudgingly pick it up.)

[xianrex.livejournal.com]

in fourteen hundred and ninety two
fernando poo discovered fernando poo


I don't have snowmobile skills, but I have... uh, been on a hayride. And not an ironic one, either.

[cosmolinguist]

Oh gods, I forgot about hayrides. Though most of mine were in the blazing sun, jeans stuck to my legs with streams of sweat, jerking the hay bales off the hayrack and and tossing them on to the elevator to go up to the haymow where my brother and dad were frantically stack ing them up.

We did go on a hayride for school or church or something once, but I didn't really understand why it was fun as it gave me flashbacks. But I can't complain; I had a pretty cushy job really.

My dad was really angry with me one year because my class didn't do a good enough job getting the staples out of the hayrack when dismantling our homecoming float. I forgot about homecoming; that's a pretty weird American thing, too. It never made much of an impact on me, though; no boys would give me their football jersey and our hayrack was too old and inferior to our neighbors' so we only used it one year in junior high.

And then I had to pull staples out of it anyway because they were catching on the bales and breaking far too many of them, which were only tenuously held together in the first place thanks to our elderly baler.

[xianrex.livejournal.com]

I never lived anywhere long enough to really "get" homecoming. We always lived far from school, rarely near other classmates. But I was always in marching band, so I was at the games.

Hayrack! My friends with farms (in Kentucky) didn't bale - they made hayrolls, which are much harder to lift :)

[cosmolinguist]

I don't think we had enough alfalfa to make a hayroll. :-)

[xianrex.livejournal.com]

Yay! We're talkin' hay!

I'm such a faker - I love having just enough experience with something to be able to talk about it. Saves me the trouble of actually learning things. I am ze "jack off all trades", no?

[cosmolinguist]

Hey (or, hay, I suppose), I could've written that comment myself. You're among friends here.

[cosmolinguist]

In non-hay news, I never got homecoming either, and I lived in the same place my whole life. My first year I did happen to be back from college on the weekend of homecoming, but it just meant I hung out with the pep band (all my friends were (a) also band geeks and (b) younger than me, so that's where I knew to look for them).

[quuf.livejournal.com]

I thought Job was afflicted with boils, not peanut brittle. And Jonah's whale looks a bit like Flipper.

[cosmolinguist]

You've not had affliction until you've seen what my aunt calls peanut brittle.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Ah, I remember reading that about Reader's Digest and finding it quite amusing, when I first read the book. I still often refer to a Reader's Digest touring guide to Britain and a Reader's Digest guide to natural wonders of the world, or something similar on a regular basis, and always wonder at what point I am going to reach enlightenment. :)

Villages in the UK probably aren't quite as weird as small towns in the US, but they certainly have their quirks!

[cosmolinguist]

I think Reader's Digest is a good way to sum up a lot of the things I think about the place I grew up. It's nice to be able to think of it that way rather than the more vague "y'know...all that stuff" that was the best descriptive term I could conjure before I re-read Schroedinger's Cat and was struck by this scene, thinking: I'm so lucky I don't even NEED the Reader's Digest for that!

[nodressrehersal.livejournal.com]

I see the words Reader's Digest and I am immediately transported back to the bathroom of my youth. That's where it always went, the new copy, on the back of the downstairs toilet.

It seems an appropriate place as any.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, because no one would read it if they weren't glued to the seat. :-)

So to speak.

[gentleman-lech.livejournal.com]

How's that saying go? You can take the girl out of the Midwest, but you can't take the Midwest out of the girl. Or something like that. :)

Having experienced the reality tunnel myself (I really like that term, by the way), I know just what you mean about it being a nice place to be from. It lets you understand the people who are still in it. Which is quite fortunate when they're related to you.

I'm reminded of something cmpriest said to me once about having to explain the "church buffet arms race" to her New York editor. It's not just people in other countries who have trouble understanding the rural US. :)

[cosmolinguist]

It lets you understand the people who are still in it. Which is quite fortunate when they're related to you.

Exactly. I struggle enough as it is! I know Andrew and most my friends struggle even more, because they (by and large) fit in with their families better than I do with mine. And I think a few wonder how somebody like me was raised by an environment like that. I wonder myself!

What a wonderful phrase that is: it is an arms race! I can only imagine the withering looks I would get if I tried to explain this. You're absolutely right: you don't need to leave the country to find these things weird. Indeed, when I was trying to list American weirdnesses at the beginning of this, I had a really hard time finding anything even reasonably American; everything was in smaller, concentric, circles: first Rural, then Midwest then Actually Living on a Farm. I didn't want to include too many of those, though, because I'm well aware that those things are not really typical of America in general.

[gentleman-lech.livejournal.com]

The problem is, of course, that most of the uniquely USian weirdness comes from those small-town environments. Cities are, by and large, pretty much the same all over the world.

[cosmolinguist]

Very true. So much that's overlooked and underappreciated ends up seeming what's really worth looking at and appreciating.

Of course, the rest of what's overlooked and underappreciated is just tedious. :-)

[un-crayon-rouge.livejournal.com]

Whenever I was at my Aunt Helga's in the summer, I used to slink off in the afternoons, while everyone was gardening or watching car races, find the stacks of german Reader's Digest and - snort them up. I loved them, but I had to it in secret, because Reader's Digest was one of the two trillion things my mother considered were Bad For You. As with all the other things I had to indulge in secretly, like potato chips or tv, I'm still addicted to it.

When I go visit the USA, that's exactly what I'll be looking for: the Reader's Digest America. I hope it's still there.

[cosmolinguist]

I can't imagine any world in which Reader's Digest would be verboten. How interesting. I love that it was a secret addiction of yours, though.

I really would love to show you around the Reader's Digest America, though. I think it can still be done.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

-- Wow, I think I may have had dreams about that wax museum.