Crotchety Old Man

The most annoying thing about this book is the quality of Wolfe's storytelling.

I bought this book on CD at the same time as Hogan's biography and also Blackhawk Down and Gonzo Marketing. They were all on sale at Hasting's and I thought that at the very least they would be more entertaining and engaging than the local talk radio channel.

Wolfe is a talented speaker and his words don't seem stunted and unnatural like Hogan's, but despite the quality of the presentation I don't think I'll be finishing this one.

The first section read by Wolfe was enough for me to give up on it. While I enjoy the "Boy the world's sure gone to hell" talk as much as the next guy [more so, in fact] spending almost an hour listening to it is a bit more than I can put up with. The fact that there are five more discs after this one is daunting indeed.

The section that turned me off is what Wolfe says is a free association of ideas to serve as a type of verbal time-capsule of what life is like here at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.

Pretty much Wolfe thinks it's pretty shitty.

I mean, look at all these kids and thier having of the sex and their baggy pants and their body piercings and their rap music. Look at all those dot com billionaires and their PDA's and cell phones and their casual clothes and their lack of work ethic. They don't carry attache cases and have the audacity to call them leather lunchboxes. Why, feminism and the sexual revolution have made it where guys can just get sex anytime and not worry about it and then they don't even have to get married or anything.

You get the picture.

This goes on for quite some time, and I just went ahead and put in something else after awhile.

Maybe it's because I belong to the generation largely responsible for what Wolfe is bitching about, but...

One particular thing that bothers me in his rant is when he uses blanket generalizations and forgets the fact that even with the widespread influence of various social memes that he describes, things such as terminology regarding sex [specifically in his examples] do not hold true across the board and across the country.

He refers to things like alphabet codes for different sexual encounters that girls use, but while I realize that I am not an adolescent girl, I am reasonably plugged in and down wi' it to know that I've never heard the terms he referred to. [I would imagine it's rather difficult to do deep investigation of adolescent sexual habits and terminology when you are an old, old man].

It just strikes me that he sounds like he didn't get much action when he was younger and now wants to bitch about people who do.

It does leave me to wonder where all this sex and drugs were when I was in High School. Maybe I just wasn't let into the proper clubs. [you mean that chess club geeks don't get lots of sex?]