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Someone
found the perfect way to sell me a book. A few magic words
hooked me immediately and ensured that I would give them my
money. While I was checking out Diary of Indignities
on Amazon, I clicked the "search inside this book" feature.
I flipped to the first page and was greeted with the sentence:
"Oh, I just remembered—one time I made out with this
retarded kid in church."
Sold.
Diary
of Indignities is a collection of Patrick Hughes' self-effacing,
embarrassing anecdotes from his blog "Bad News Hughes." Hughes
spares absolutely no secrets in this collection. If a man
is willing to relay the tale of his ex-girlfriend talking
him into using a vibrating buttplug ("Magical Anal Rootin'
Around") or write about getting a wart removed from sensitive
areas of his body ("My Taint is Also the Worst Place on Earth"),
he probably will not be leaving much out. It takes a special
type of person to tell a story of the psoriasis in the crack
of his ass and make it both humorous and charming.
The contents
of the last paragraph may lead one to believe this collection
of tales is solely about things going in and around Patrick
Hughes's rectum. This is, thankfully, not the case. What Diary
of Indignities contains is Hughes's back catalog of really
good stories. A youth of Dr. Who fandom and "weirdo"
status affords him tons of embarrassing childhood tales of
trying to fit in and coping with healthy levels of familial
abnormality. These stories read like a midpoint between the
youths of David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs.
Meanwhile,
a teenage-through-twenty-something career as a punk rock fan
supplies him with a treasure trove of stories of characters
with names like "Chuck from Hell" and "Ben the Vampire." The
first category offers those easily relatable, endearingly
awkward moments of life anyone can get behind, but cranked
up to eleven. The punk youth narratives read like Chuck Klosterman
if there were any chance that Klosterman would get into a
brawl with some skinheads and hang out with dudes who leave
something called "the party melon" on their living room coffee
tables (as opposed to just making snarky comments about MTV).
It would
be easy for many of these stories to fall into the realm of
pedestrian, Steve-O-like "stupid guys doing stupid stuff."
Fortunately, Hughes is a charismatic and eloquent storyteller,
despite the writing's non-professional feel. Rather than a
David Sedaris/Sarah Vowell/David Rakoff "piece" that will
eventually tie up nicely into a moral or profound thought
of some type, Hughes's stories read like those of a friend
who simply knows his buddies would enjoy the story of the
time his friend Frog hooked up a bunch of amps and delay pedals
and was bellowing "PEOPLE OF EARTH-TH-TH! YOUR DEMISE IS UPON
YOU-OU-OU! THE APOCALYPSE HAS ARRIVED-IVED-IVED!" at the police
and crowd during a bomb scare where people were running screaming
through the street. And he's right. It's fucking hilarious.
This
book contains more laugh-out-loud moments than anything I've
read in recent years. Hughes' easy-going curmudgeon demeanor
makes it easy to like him. He's grumpy and makes fun of everything,
but he stops well short of being annoying, and his low-self-esteem
guise has more of an "I really can't believe I lived through
a stunt as stupid as this and should probably have better
things to do with my time" feel than anything self-pitying.
His self-deprecatory charm shines in such things as his middle-of-the-book
photo essay about his trip to the Renaissance Faire, which
he subtitled "Here I Poke Easy Fun at People Who Are Much
Happier Than I Am." Everyone has at least one friend who will
begin a story with a sentence such as, "So I was watching
these two girls play Super Mario Brothers 2 while I was on
acid…" and keeps the audience riveted and entertained throughout.
This is the role Diary of Indignities plays. Hughes's
writing isn't about to win any National Book Awards, but his
familiar, personal style is relaxing and enjoyable. He has
an amazing sense of pace and buildup but isn't afraid to go
into a lengthy tangent about his lesbian mom's predilection
for herbal cures if it'll assist the story later.
As funny
as it all is, Hughes's style fuses the tales with a strong
sense of humanity and familiarity as well. "Butterfly Knife
Romance" is beautiful, touching, and extremely relatable for
all those people who still think about that first girl or
guy they ever loved and lost. A story that contains sarcastic,
desperate teenage logic such as "My duties as magistrate of
the Tarpon Springs Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Club helped
distract me…Life was full" has to be recognized for the true-life
heartbreak such a thing embodies. Diary of Indignities
is full of real-life moments that are too unique and personal
to be made up. Granted, most of the stories are about getting
into fights with goth kids and weirdoes pulling knives on
the narrator, but there are beautiful and touching things
in here, too, should readers get bored of laughing their asses
off.
(September,
2007)
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