From Publishers Weekly
Buster Casey, destined to live fast, die young and murder as many people as he can, is the rotten seed at the core of Palahniuk's comically nasty eighth novel (after Haunted; Lullaby; Diary; etc.). Set in a future where urbanites are segregated by strict curfews into Daytimers and Nighttimers, the narrative unfolds as an oral history comprising contradictory accounts from people who knew Buster. These include childhood friends horrified by the boy's macabre behavior (getting snakes, scorpions and spiders to bite him and induce instant erections; repeatedly infecting himself with rabies), policemen and doctors who had dealings with the rabies "superspreader"; and Party Crashers, thrill-seeking Nighttimers who turn city streets into demolition derby arenas. After liberally infecting his hometown peers with rabies, Buster hits the big city and takes up with the Party Crashers. A series of deaths lead to a police investigation of Buster (long-since known as "Rant"—the sound children make while vomiting) that peaks just as Buster apparently commits suicide in a blaze of car-crash glory. This dark religious parable (there's even a resurrection) from the master of grotesque excess may not attract new readers, but it will delight old ones. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
In his eighth novel, Palahniuk uses a new form--oral history--to revisit the themes that have always informed his oeuvre. Buster "Rant" Casey, a naturopathic serial killer, is dead, and those who survive him--family, friends, enemies, and hangers-on--are trying to make sense of the void left by his passing. Perhaps offering a meditation on celebrity, the author explores the topics that have always intrigued him: uniqueness and belonging, cross-generational panic, the search for authenticity, and the consume-or-die worldview. If this suggests that Palahniuk's biggest influence here is himself, this Tom Sawyer on methamphetamine (the first 100 pages depict Casey's boyhood as a poison-obsessed, priapic Pied Piper) belies the influence of William S. Burroughs (in its satire of boys'-own adventures), William Gibson (characters "boost" each others' neural transcripts of lived experience), and J. G. Ballard (Casey's clique crashes cars in order to feel more alive). Outrageous but not quite over the top, full of energetic humor, Rant (Casey's nickname is said to be onomatopoeic for the sound of children vomiting) is a memorable portrait of the cults that gather around authentically different people and a portrait of dystopia that feels unsettlingly contemporary. Palahniuk is no Studs Terkel, but Terkel's heartland probably looks more like Palahniuk's nowadays. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
“As silly and brilliant as the others.” –Russell Smith (from xyyz.ca)
“Ever since Fight Club . . . Chuck Palahniuk has enjoyed a reputation as a down-dirty, cultish kind of writer with his finger on the pulse.” –Telegraph
“Chuck Palahniuk puts out books the way The Beatles and The Stones used to release records — nearly every year, with precision and artistry.” –Metro Times
“Palahniuk’s world might be a freakshow, but it’s one that makes a disturbing amount of sense.” –Telegraph
“[Chuck Palahniuk]’s a writer of remarkable talent, willing to look unflinchingly at despairing lives and their often-warped quests for even momentary redemption. He’s a painfully deft chronicler of the meaningless job, the poisonous relationship, and of all the myriad damaging and deadening effects of so-called normal life.” –The Boston Globe
“Rant is fast and true, savagely clearsighted and intelligent, a luxury to read, and so funny that your facial muscles soon tire.” –The Guardian
“Just as Fight Club pondered the price of everyone becoming supermen, Rant goes one further and wonders the price of us all becoming gods. It is a common thread in Palahniuk’s writing: the yearning for a ground zero of social parity versus our genetically programmed rebellion against hegemony.” –Time Out
Praise for Chuck Palahniuk
“What elevates Palahniuk’s best novels (e.g., Fight Club) above their shocking premises is his ability to find humanity in deeply grotesque characters.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Palahniuk displays a Swiftian gift for satire, as well as a knack for crafting mesmerizing sentences.”
—San Francisco Examiner
“To Palahniuk’s credit, there is something here to appall almost every sensibility. The author has a singular knack for coming up with inventive new ways to shock and degrade.”
—The New York Post
From the Hardcover edition.
“Ever since Fight Club . . . Chuck Palahniuk has enjoyed a reputation as a down-dirty, cultish kind of writer with his finger on the pulse.” –Telegraph
“Chuck Palahniuk puts out books the way The Beatles and The Stones used to release records — nearly every year, with precision and artistry.” –Metro Times
“Palahniuk’s world might be a freakshow, but it’s one that makes a disturbing amount of sense.” –Telegraph
“[Chuck Palahniuk]’s a writer of remarkable talent, willing to look unflinchingly at despairing lives and their often-warped quests for even momentary redemption. He’s a painfully deft chronicler of the meaningless job, the poisonous relationship, and of all the myriad damaging and deadening effects of so-called normal life.” –The Boston Globe
“Rant is fast and true, savagely clearsighted and intelligent, a luxury to read, and so funny that your facial muscles soon tire.” –The Guardian
“Just as Fight Club pondered the price of everyone becoming supermen, Rant goes one further and wonders the price of us all becoming gods. It is a common thread in Palahniuk’s writing: the yearning for a ground zero of social parity versus our genetically programmed rebellion against hegemony.” –Time Out
Praise for Chuck Palahniuk
“What elevates Palahniuk’s best novels (e.g., Fight Club) above their shocking premises is his ability to find humanity in deeply grotesque characters.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Palahniuk displays a Swiftian gift for satire, as well as a knack for crafting mesmerizing sentences.”
—San Francisco Examiner
“To Palahniuk’s credit, there is something here to appall almost every sensibility. The author has a singular knack for coming up with inventive new ways to shock and degrade.”
—The New York Post
From the Hardcover edition.
Book Description
The provocative and mind-bending new novel from the bestselling author of Fight Club and Haunted.
Rant takes the form of a (fictional) oral history of Buster “Rant” Casey, in which an assortment of friends, enemies, admirers, detractors, and relations have their say on this evil character, who may or may not be the most efficient serial killer of our time.
Buster Casey was every small kid born in a small town, searching for real thrills in a world of video games and action/adventure movies. The high school rebel who always wins – and a childhood murderer? – Rant Casey escapes from his hometown of Middleton into the big city and becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing, where, on designated nights, the participants recognize each other by dressing their cars with tin-can tails, “Just Married” toothpaste graffiti, and other refuse, then look for special markings in order to stalk and crash into each other. It’s in this violent, late-night hunting game that Casey makes three friends. And after his spectacular death, these friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short life. Their collected anecdotes explore the charges that his saliva infected hundreds and caused a silent, urban plague of rabies . . .
Expect hilarity and horror, and blazing insight into the desperate and surreal contemporary human condition as only Chuck Palahniuk can deliver it. He’s the postmillennial Jonathan Swift, the man to watch to learn what’s – uh-oh – coming next.
Excerpt from RANT:
Wallace Boyer (Car Salesman): Like most people, I didn’t meet and talk to Rant Casey until after he was dead. That’s how it works for most celebrities, after they croak their circle of close friends just explodes. A dead celebrity can’t walk down the street without meeting a million best buddies they never met in real life.
Dying was the best career move Jeff Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy ever made. . . .
The way Rant Casey used to say it: Folks build a reputation by attacking you while you’re alive–or praising you after you ain’t.
From the Hardcover edition.
Rant takes the form of a (fictional) oral history of Buster “Rant” Casey, in which an assortment of friends, enemies, admirers, detractors, and relations have their say on this evil character, who may or may not be the most efficient serial killer of our time.
Buster Casey was every small kid born in a small town, searching for real thrills in a world of video games and action/adventure movies. The high school rebel who always wins – and a childhood murderer? – Rant Casey escapes from his hometown of Middleton into the big city and becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing, where, on designated nights, the participants recognize each other by dressing their cars with tin-can tails, “Just Married” toothpaste graffiti, and other refuse, then look for special markings in order to stalk and crash into each other. It’s in this violent, late-night hunting game that Casey makes three friends. And after his spectacular death, these friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short life. Their collected anecdotes explore the charges that his saliva infected hundreds and caused a silent, urban plague of rabies . . .
Expect hilarity and horror, and blazing insight into the desperate and surreal contemporary human condition as only Chuck Palahniuk can deliver it. He’s the postmillennial Jonathan Swift, the man to watch to learn what’s – uh-oh – coming next.
Excerpt from RANT:
Wallace Boyer (Car Salesman): Like most people, I didn’t meet and talk to Rant Casey until after he was dead. That’s how it works for most celebrities, after they croak their circle of close friends just explodes. A dead celebrity can’t walk down the street without meeting a million best buddies they never met in real life.
Dying was the best career move Jeff Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy ever made. . . .
The way Rant Casey used to say it: Folks build a reputation by attacking you while you’re alive–or praising you after you ain’t.
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Chuck Palahniuk is the bestselling author of seven novels: Haunted, Lullaby, Fight Club – which was made into a film by director David Fincher – Diary, Survivor, Invisible Monsters, and Choke. He is also the author of the nonfiction profile of Portland, Oregon, Fugitives and Refugees, published as part of the Crown Journeys series, and the nonfiction collection Stranger Than Fiction. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.
From the Hardcover edition.
From the Hardcover edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1—An Introduction
Wallace Boyer (Car Salesman): Like most people, I didn’t meet and talk to Rant Casey until after he was dead. That’s how it works for most celebrities: After they croak, their circle of close friends just explodes. A dead celebrity can’t walk down the street without meeting a million best buddies he never met in real life.
Dying was the best career move Jeff Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy ever made. After Gaetan Dugas was dead, the number of sex partners saying they’d fucked him, it went through the roof.
The way Rant Casey used to say it: Folks build a reputation by attacking you while you’re alive—or praising you after you ain’t.
For me, I was sitting on an airplane, and some hillbilly sits down next to me. His skin, it’s the same as any car wreck you can’t not stare at—dented with tooth marks, pitted and puckered, the skin on the back of his hands looks one godawful mess.
The flight attendant, she asks this hillbilly what’s it he wants to drink. The stewardess asks him to, please, reach my drink to me: scotch with rocks. But when I see those monster fingers wrapped around the plastic cup, his chewed–up knuckles, I could never touch my lips to the rim.
With the epidemic, a person can’t be too careful. At the airport, right beyond the metal detector we had to walk through, a fever monitor like they first used to control the spread of SARS. Most people, the government says, have no idea they're infected. Somebody can feel fine, but if that monitor beeps that your temperature's too high, you’ll disappear into quarantine. Maybe for the rest of your life. No trial, nothing.
To be safe, I only fold down my tray table and take the cup. I watch the scotch turn pale and watery. The ice melt and disappear.
Anybody makes a livelihood selling cars will tell you: Repetition is the mother of all skills. You build the gross at your dealership by building rapport.
Anywhere you find yourself, you can build your skills. A good trick to remember a name is you look the person in the eyes long enough to register their color: green or brown or blue. You call that a Pattern Interrupt: It stops you forgetting the way you always would.
This cowboy stranger, his eyes look bright green. Antifreeze green.
That whole connecting flight between Peco Junction and the city, we shared an armrest, me at the window, him on the aisle. Don’t shoot the messenger, but dried shit keeps flaking off his cowboy boots. Those long sideburns maybe scored him pussy in high school, but they’re gray from his temple to his jawbone now. Not to mention those hands.
To practice building rapport, I ask him what he paid for his ticket. If you can’t determine the customer needs, identify the hot buttons, of some stranger rubbing arms with you on an airplane, you’ll never talk anybody into taking “mental ownership” of a Nissan, much less a Cadillac.
For landing somebody in a car, another trick is: Every car on your lot, you program the number–one radio–station button to gospel music. The number–two button, set to rock and roll. The number–three, to jazz. If your prospect looks like a demander–commander type, the minute you unlock the car you set the radio to come on with the news or a politics talk station. A sandal wearer, you hit the National Public Radio button. When they turn the key, the radio tells them what they want to hear. Every car on the lot, I have the number–five button set to that techno–raver garbage in case some kid who does Party Crashing comes around.
The green color of the hillbilly’s eyes, the shit on his boots, salesmen call those “mental pegs.” Questions that have one answer, those are “closed questions.” Questions to get a customer talking, those are “open questions.”
For example: “How much did your plane ticket set you back?” That’s a closed question.
And, sipping from his own cup of whiskey, the man swallows. Staring straight ahead, he says, “Fifty dollars.”
A good example of an open question would be: “How do you live with those scary chewed–up hands?”
I ask him: For one way?
“Round–trip,” he says, and his pitted and puckered hand tips whiskey into his face. “Called a ‘bereavement fare,’ ” the hillbilly says.
Me looking at him, me half twisted in my seat to face him, my breathing slowed to match the rise and fall of his cowboy shirt, the technique’s called: Active Listening. The stranger clears his throat, and I wait a little and clear my throat, copying him; that’s what a good salesman means by “pacing” a customer.
My feet, crossed at the ankle, right foot over the left, same as his, I say: Impossible. Not even standby tickets go that cheap. I ask: How’d he get such a deal?
Drinking his whiskey, neat, he says, “First, what you have to do is escape from inside a locked insane asylum.” Then, he says, you have to hitchhike cross–country, wearing nothing but plastic booties and a paper getup that won’t stay shut in back. You need to arrive about a heartbeat too late to keep a repeat child–molester from raping your wife. And your mother. Spawned out of that rape, you have to raise up a son who collects a wagonful of folks’ old, thrown–out teeth. After high school, your wacko kid got’s to run off. Join some cult that lives only by night. Wreck his car, a half a hundred times, and hook up with some kind–of, sort–of, not–really prostitute.
Along the way, your kid got’s to spark a plague that’ll kill thousands of people, enough folks so that it leads to martial law and threatens to topple world leaders. And, lastly, your boy got’s to die in a big, flaming, fiery inferno, watched by everybody in the world with a television set.
He says, “Simple as that.”
The man says, “Then, when you go to collect his body for his funeral,” and tips whiskey into his mouth, “the airline gives you a special bargain price on your ticket.”
Fifty bucks, round–trip. He looks at my scotch sitting on the tray table in front of me. Warm. Any ice, gone. And he says, “You going to drink that?”
I tell him: Go ahead.
This is how fast your life can turn around.
How the future you have tomorrow won’t be the same future you had yesterday.
My dilemma is: Do I ask for his autograph? Slowing my breath, pacing my chest to his, I ask: Is he related to that guy…Rant Casey? “Werewolf Casey”—the worst Patient Zero in the history of disease? The “superspreader” who’s infected half the country? America’s “Kissing Killer”? Rant “Mad Dog” Casey?
“Buster,” the man says, his monster hand reaching to take my scotch. He says, “My boy’s given name was Buster Landru Casey. Not Rant. Not Buddy. Buster.”
Already, my eyes are soaking up every puckered scar on his fingers. Every wrinkle and gray hair. My nose, recording his smell of whiskey and cow shit. My elbow, recording the rub of his flannel shirtsleeve. Already, I’ll be bragging about this stranger for the rest of my life. Holding tight to every moment of him, squirreling away his every word and gesture, I say: You’re…
“Chester,” he says. “Name’s Chester Casey.”
Sitting right next to me. Chester Casey, the father of Rant Casey: America’s walking, talking Biological Weapon of Mass Destruction.
Andy Warhol was wrong. In the future, people won’t be famous for fifteen minutes. No, in the future, everyone will sit next to someone famous for at least fifteen minutes. Typhoid Mary or Ted Bundy or Sharon Tate. History is nothing except monsters or victims. Or witnesses.
So what do I say? I say: I’m sorry. I say, “Tough break about your kid dying.”
Out of sympathy, I shake my head…
And a few inhales later, Chet Casey shakes his head, and in that gesture I’m not sure who’s really pacing who. Which of us sat which way first. If maybe this shitkicker is studying me. Copying me. Finding my hot buttons and building rapport. Maybe selling me something, this living legend Chet Casey, he winks. Never breathing more than fifteen inhales any minute. He tosses back the scotch. “Any way you look at it,” he says, and elbows me in the ribs, “it’s still a damn sweet deal on an airplane ticket.”
2—Guardian Angels
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms (Historian): The hound dog is to Middleton what the cow is to the streets of Calcutta or New Delhi. In the middle of every dirt road sleeps some kind of mongrel coonhound, panting in the sun, its dripping tongue hanging out. A kind of fur–covered speed bump with no collar or tags. Powdered with a fine dust of clay blown off the plowed fields.
To arrive at Middleton requires four solid days of driving, which is the longest period of time I have ever experienced inside an automobile without colliding with another vehicle. I found that to be the most depressing aspect of my pilgrimages.
Neddy Nelson (Party Crasher): Can you explain how in 1968 the amateur paleontologist William Meister in Antelope Spring, Utah, split a block of shale while searching for trilobite fossils, but instead discovered the fossilized five–hundred–million–year–old footprint of a human shoe? And how did another fossilized shoe print, found in Nevada in 1922, occur in rock from the Triassic era?
Echo Lawrence (Party Crasher): Driving to Middleton, rolling across all that fucking country in the middle ...
Wallace Boyer (Car Salesman): Like most people, I didn’t meet and talk to Rant Casey until after he was dead. That’s how it works for most celebrities: After they croak, their circle of close friends just explodes. A dead celebrity can’t walk down the street without meeting a million best buddies he never met in real life.
Dying was the best career move Jeff Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy ever made. After Gaetan Dugas was dead, the number of sex partners saying they’d fucked him, it went through the roof.
The way Rant Casey used to say it: Folks build a reputation by attacking you while you’re alive—or praising you after you ain’t.
For me, I was sitting on an airplane, and some hillbilly sits down next to me. His skin, it’s the same as any car wreck you can’t not stare at—dented with tooth marks, pitted and puckered, the skin on the back of his hands looks one godawful mess.
The flight attendant, she asks this hillbilly what’s it he wants to drink. The stewardess asks him to, please, reach my drink to me: scotch with rocks. But when I see those monster fingers wrapped around the plastic cup, his chewed–up knuckles, I could never touch my lips to the rim.
With the epidemic, a person can’t be too careful. At the airport, right beyond the metal detector we had to walk through, a fever monitor like they first used to control the spread of SARS. Most people, the government says, have no idea they're infected. Somebody can feel fine, but if that monitor beeps that your temperature's too high, you’ll disappear into quarantine. Maybe for the rest of your life. No trial, nothing.
To be safe, I only fold down my tray table and take the cup. I watch the scotch turn pale and watery. The ice melt and disappear.
Anybody makes a livelihood selling cars will tell you: Repetition is the mother of all skills. You build the gross at your dealership by building rapport.
Anywhere you find yourself, you can build your skills. A good trick to remember a name is you look the person in the eyes long enough to register their color: green or brown or blue. You call that a Pattern Interrupt: It stops you forgetting the way you always would.
This cowboy stranger, his eyes look bright green. Antifreeze green.
That whole connecting flight between Peco Junction and the city, we shared an armrest, me at the window, him on the aisle. Don’t shoot the messenger, but dried shit keeps flaking off his cowboy boots. Those long sideburns maybe scored him pussy in high school, but they’re gray from his temple to his jawbone now. Not to mention those hands.
To practice building rapport, I ask him what he paid for his ticket. If you can’t determine the customer needs, identify the hot buttons, of some stranger rubbing arms with you on an airplane, you’ll never talk anybody into taking “mental ownership” of a Nissan, much less a Cadillac.
For landing somebody in a car, another trick is: Every car on your lot, you program the number–one radio–station button to gospel music. The number–two button, set to rock and roll. The number–three, to jazz. If your prospect looks like a demander–commander type, the minute you unlock the car you set the radio to come on with the news or a politics talk station. A sandal wearer, you hit the National Public Radio button. When they turn the key, the radio tells them what they want to hear. Every car on the lot, I have the number–five button set to that techno–raver garbage in case some kid who does Party Crashing comes around.
The green color of the hillbilly’s eyes, the shit on his boots, salesmen call those “mental pegs.” Questions that have one answer, those are “closed questions.” Questions to get a customer talking, those are “open questions.”
For example: “How much did your plane ticket set you back?” That’s a closed question.
And, sipping from his own cup of whiskey, the man swallows. Staring straight ahead, he says, “Fifty dollars.”
A good example of an open question would be: “How do you live with those scary chewed–up hands?”
I ask him: For one way?
“Round–trip,” he says, and his pitted and puckered hand tips whiskey into his face. “Called a ‘bereavement fare,’ ” the hillbilly says.
Me looking at him, me half twisted in my seat to face him, my breathing slowed to match the rise and fall of his cowboy shirt, the technique’s called: Active Listening. The stranger clears his throat, and I wait a little and clear my throat, copying him; that’s what a good salesman means by “pacing” a customer.
My feet, crossed at the ankle, right foot over the left, same as his, I say: Impossible. Not even standby tickets go that cheap. I ask: How’d he get such a deal?
Drinking his whiskey, neat, he says, “First, what you have to do is escape from inside a locked insane asylum.” Then, he says, you have to hitchhike cross–country, wearing nothing but plastic booties and a paper getup that won’t stay shut in back. You need to arrive about a heartbeat too late to keep a repeat child–molester from raping your wife. And your mother. Spawned out of that rape, you have to raise up a son who collects a wagonful of folks’ old, thrown–out teeth. After high school, your wacko kid got’s to run off. Join some cult that lives only by night. Wreck his car, a half a hundred times, and hook up with some kind–of, sort–of, not–really prostitute.
Along the way, your kid got’s to spark a plague that’ll kill thousands of people, enough folks so that it leads to martial law and threatens to topple world leaders. And, lastly, your boy got’s to die in a big, flaming, fiery inferno, watched by everybody in the world with a television set.
He says, “Simple as that.”
The man says, “Then, when you go to collect his body for his funeral,” and tips whiskey into his mouth, “the airline gives you a special bargain price on your ticket.”
Fifty bucks, round–trip. He looks at my scotch sitting on the tray table in front of me. Warm. Any ice, gone. And he says, “You going to drink that?”
I tell him: Go ahead.
This is how fast your life can turn around.
How the future you have tomorrow won’t be the same future you had yesterday.
My dilemma is: Do I ask for his autograph? Slowing my breath, pacing my chest to his, I ask: Is he related to that guy…Rant Casey? “Werewolf Casey”—the worst Patient Zero in the history of disease? The “superspreader” who’s infected half the country? America’s “Kissing Killer”? Rant “Mad Dog” Casey?
“Buster,” the man says, his monster hand reaching to take my scotch. He says, “My boy’s given name was Buster Landru Casey. Not Rant. Not Buddy. Buster.”
Already, my eyes are soaking up every puckered scar on his fingers. Every wrinkle and gray hair. My nose, recording his smell of whiskey and cow shit. My elbow, recording the rub of his flannel shirtsleeve. Already, I’ll be bragging about this stranger for the rest of my life. Holding tight to every moment of him, squirreling away his every word and gesture, I say: You’re…
“Chester,” he says. “Name’s Chester Casey.”
Sitting right next to me. Chester Casey, the father of Rant Casey: America’s walking, talking Biological Weapon of Mass Destruction.
Andy Warhol was wrong. In the future, people won’t be famous for fifteen minutes. No, in the future, everyone will sit next to someone famous for at least fifteen minutes. Typhoid Mary or Ted Bundy or Sharon Tate. History is nothing except monsters or victims. Or witnesses.
So what do I say? I say: I’m sorry. I say, “Tough break about your kid dying.”
Out of sympathy, I shake my head…
And a few inhales later, Chet Casey shakes his head, and in that gesture I’m not sure who’s really pacing who. Which of us sat which way first. If maybe this shitkicker is studying me. Copying me. Finding my hot buttons and building rapport. Maybe selling me something, this living legend Chet Casey, he winks. Never breathing more than fifteen inhales any minute. He tosses back the scotch. “Any way you look at it,” he says, and elbows me in the ribs, “it’s still a damn sweet deal on an airplane ticket.”
2—Guardian Angels
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms (Historian): The hound dog is to Middleton what the cow is to the streets of Calcutta or New Delhi. In the middle of every dirt road sleeps some kind of mongrel coonhound, panting in the sun, its dripping tongue hanging out. A kind of fur–covered speed bump with no collar or tags. Powdered with a fine dust of clay blown off the plowed fields.
To arrive at Middleton requires four solid days of driving, which is the longest period of time I have ever experienced inside an automobile without colliding with another vehicle. I found that to be the most depressing aspect of my pilgrimages.
Neddy Nelson (Party Crasher): Can you explain how in 1968 the amateur paleontologist William Meister in Antelope Spring, Utah, split a block of shale while searching for trilobite fossils, but instead discovered the fossilized five–hundred–million–year–old footprint of a human shoe? And how did another fossilized shoe print, found in Nevada in 1922, occur in rock from the Triassic era?
Echo Lawrence (Party Crasher): Driving to Middleton, rolling across all that fucking country in the middle ...
