Killing yourself to eat

I just finished reading that brilliant Chuck Klosterman book, Killing Yourself to Live. The premise is that Klosterman, a music critic for Spin magazine, drives across the country ostensibly to visit the places where famous rock stars have met their early demises, but ends up trying to make sense of the relationships in his life.

This book is not about food. But Klosterman occasionally writes about where he eats along the way. And where he eats demonstrates his outlook on his on-again-off-again relationships, all of which come to an end by the end of the book. Klosterman eats at one of two types of places: 1) chain restaurants; and 2) restaurants that he frequented in his past. Both serve the same purpose -- to make him feel a little less lonely.

In the former camp are Cracker Barrel and the Olive Garden. Klosterman elevates Cracker Barrel to the "sublime" because "[y]ou can order chicken and dumplings with a side order of dumplings." He also claims/fantasizes that he fell briefly in love with a 19-year-old Cracker Barrel waitress who brings him dumplings and apparently reads Kafka. As for the Olive Garden, he says that "the Olive Garden is good; it always makes me happy." He adds that he wanted to go the Olive Garden because it was "in the news"; a Bachelor contestant claimed to wine-not-tires-heir Andrew Firestone that it was her favorite restaurant.

In the latter camp is the Uptown Bar and Grill in Minneapolis (his "emotive ground zero"), where he sauntered in twice a week during the summer of 1994 -- and "always for supper on Sunday night[.]" Indeed, he recalls that, the night before the '94 Lollapalooza, he ate a "delicious hot turkey sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy while listening to a semi-hard rock band called Hester Moffet."

Klosterman chooses restaurants not for the food, but for the comfort, familiarity, and grounding they provide. The chains plug him into a larger community of people sharing a common experience; and like those people, Klosterman wants to fall in love and to be loved. Indeed, he frequently falls in love quite easily (see, e.g., mythical Cracker Barrel waitress above) and places value on relationships as relationships; the girlfriend, whomever she is, simply fills a role. Olive Garden makes it a piece of cake, er, tiramisu to fall in unchallenging love. The greasy spoons of his past allow him to recall those pleasant life episodes, those first girlfriends who gave him comfort. They force him to think about what could have been and to ponder whether those feelings are worth recapturing.