For Christmas I received The Autobiography of Mark Twain. I asked for it. Apparently my wish list is the one time I try to impress my mother all year. I could just as easily get a real job or bring home a girl that doesn't have any visible tattoos or facial piercings, but no, instead I ask for 700 page pain in the ass books.
I had to start asking for books because my mother went through a period where she would just buy me books where people died in nature. Just volume after volume about people dropping like flies in the wilderness. As if I didn't spend enough time indoors she was sending me messages about the outdoors murdering good people in cold blood. There were books about people dying on Everest, Kilimanjaro, Alaska, at sea, etc. This is probably where I got my deep distrust of outside.
Don't get me wrong, I don't outright try to hurt nature. I drive a fuel efficient car. At least it probably was when it rolled off the assembly line in '97. I live a somewhat "green" lifestyle just in case M. Night Shyamalan was right about the trees trying to kill us. I want them to think I'm on their side. I just choose not to participate in outdoor activities. My favorite things are sex, drinking, and having drunken sex. The one thing all these ventures have in common is that if you do them outside, people will probably give you a hard time.
So, I started asking for books that didn't give me an onset of agoraphobia. Which is how I came to own the fourteen pound monstrosity of Mark Twain's life story (Volume One, by the way). So, I decide I have to read this book because I feel bad about the effort my mother went through pointing and clicking her way through Amazon and making the arduous trip to the front door three to five days later. After skipping the 57 page introduction (wasn't written by Twain, doesn't count) and the "discarded manuscripts" (they were probably discarded for a reason, no point in reading the shit that didn't make it) I begin to read about Twain's life.
I'm not sure if you were thinking about reading this book but if you were, spoiler alert: Life in Mississippi at the turn of the century was boring as fuck. He goes on for the first few pages about how his family had this giant expanse of land that was almost immeasurable (it was totally measurable actually, I just don't know what an acre is) and how his father bought it for $480. Four hundred and eighty American dollars. If I tried to give that to my landlord for rent on my apartment in my shitty neighborhood she would have everything I own outside in a box by dinner time. Then I start thinking that if I had a time machine I could go back in time and buy half of Rhode Island for the change that's rattling around in the center console of my car.
That's when I closed the book. Because I'm pretty sure Mark Twain did not intend for his auto-biography to invoke such dumb-ass, nonsensical retardery. This used to happen in school too. If the person I was supposed to pay attention to was boring, my mind would hijack my thought process and think of the most outlandsih, idiotic thing it could to jar me out of it. This time though, I blame Mark Twain (why not? It's not like he can defend himself).
This book should, and easily could have been much better. Mark Twain dictated this book and left instructions that it was to be published one hundred years after he died. Imagine someone says to you, "We want you to write two different versions of your autobiography. The first version we are going to publish immediately. The other version we will publish in a hundred years after everyone you know is dead."
I don't know about you but, for me, those two versions would be a bit different. The first version would be a lot like the movie Cocktail but it would take place in far shittier bars. The protagonist would be just as short but not quite as good looking (although, with the added bonus of not being a couch-jumping Scientologist). It would be forty-six pages long, and that would be mostly pictures and poorly completed pages of coloring books.
The second version would be over nine hundred pages long. It would be called Nymphomaniac Space Ranger and have a three page pull-out of my penis shown "life-size."
The point is: punch it up a little, Mark! God damn it, tell people about the time you had an interracial threesome with Harriet Tubman and Betsy Ross!* Everybody's dead, who's gonna call bullshit? I thought you had a handle on the human condition but obviously not. You did not foresee how fucked up we were going to be. How the hell did you think this was going to keep our attention? There is not a single scene that takes place in a hot tub. Even the Real World knows that you need hot tub scenes to keep people tuned in.
Your other stuff is great, but you mailed this in and you know it, Twain.
*I have no idea if these three people lived at the same time. I'm an idiot.
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