“First, know what you’re getting here. Not an indictment of the oil industry or anything like that. A series of amusing tales related to working on oil rigs in some pretty wild locations.
It’s compulsively readable. Sort of like I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell except you don’t get that feeling that the author is trying to explain how awesome he is at any point. There are shit stories, more than one story about a monkey (although if we’re going to get picky, one story is about an orangutan, which is a great ape as opposed to a monkey, a distinction that is as stupid as it is pointless and only serves to cause people who like to prove how smart they are to correct their friends on something that does not need to be corrected. After all, how important is the exact taxonomy of an animal when the story is about how it threw feces on the glass at the zoo?)
It’s interesting to me that this kind of entertainment is often called “juvenile.” If you tell a story about crapping your pants, that story falls into the juvenile category just by nature of the fact that it’s about pants-crapping. Which really makes no sense.
What makes a story about crapping one’s pants as an adult funny is the fact that the person is an adult. If you wrote a book about your infant crapping himself on an airplane, who would be amused by that? I could see more literary tension from a book about an infant that DID NOT crap itself on a transatlantic flight. First it’s no big deal, then there’s concern about what’s building up in there, and by hour 5 things have escalated to sheer panic at 30,000 feet, waiting for the bomb. That’s some Hitchcock stuff right there.
Frankly, I think that shit stories are for grown-ups. I really do. You know what’s for kids?
I was sitting at a bar reading this very book, and I overheard what must have been a first date happening next to me.
“So, are you a religious person?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, not like going to church and stuff. This is going to sound really crazy, but I think the Native American religions are the ones that speak to me the most.”
“That doesn’t sound crazy at all, actually.”
I don’t actually know that this was a first date, but I have my suspicions because that’s the only reason I can imagine tolerating someone saying that they are into “Native American religions.” Not that those are total bullshit or anything, for all I know, but isn’t that like saying, “Oh, I believe in Asian religions”? Doesn’t “Native American religion” encompass a wide range of beliefs that would be difficult to condense into a single vision? Isn’t there probably a bigger difference between most of them than there is between Catholics and Christians? THEY PROBABLY DON’T EVEN HAVE THE SAME GUYS RUNNING SHIT! Not to mention that she sounded bored with her own answer, and then the subject was quickly dropped. So this line of talk got them exactly nowhere.
Anyway, what I’m saying is that this is what passes for ADULT conversation, even though I can’t imagine that either of them was really enjoying this exchange.
Now, it takes a special person, but if someone on a date told me their most heinous shit story, I could almost guarantee that I’d be more into her than someone who explained to me the wise ways of non-specific non-mainstream religions. That’s boring. I can read about that if I want to, and as I approach 30 I’ve become closed-minded enough to believe that if I’m really interested in something, I WILL investigate it.
On the other hand, nobody can just read a book about the time when I was 7 and crapped myself at the Grand Canyon. And I guarantee I can talk about that with far more interest and verve than I could any sort of philosophy.
I want to be entertained by other adults. I don’t mean it’s a Dance Monkey, Dance! kind of situation. Just that when talking to someone…
When meeting adults, they ask “So, what do you do?”
WHO GIVES A SHIT! THAT TELLS ME NOTHING ABOUT YOU! Tell me about the time you fell into a ditch while attempting to see some fireworks. Tell me about the time you embarrassed yourself at a wedding by accidentally collapsing a folding table. Tell me about the last terribly awkward social situation you were in. That’s fun. Even if I don’t end up being friends with you long term, at least we killed that 5 minutes with fun instead of explaining what an accounting assistant does at Stucco Rite inc.
It’s a weird argument, I know. But in all honesty, I think it’s more grown up to tell a story about peeing your pants than it is to explain how you modernized the spreadsheet as we all know it. “