Minus the Spine

Straight from the reading nook, a selection from the new issue of Toasted Cheese, The Path to Mental Health by Brandy Langenwalter. It’s much quirkier and wryly funny (or funnily wry) than the clunky title suggests–and brings up an interesting question that I’ve been wondering about (not for the sake of my mental health but something that I’m writing): can supreme sanity and the subsequent lack of drama in fact cause insanity? In other words, can life be so fucking boring that you have act crazy in order to shake things up? Yes, of course. Sure you’ve fought with your partner just to vary the interaction, or worn something unexpected in order to solicit looks on the street. We have all been drama queens. But back to the story, the main character becomes unhinged mainly in order to give in to impulses that she’s always denied herself, ever since she’s been doing everything right–and boringly. A fugue state, in a way. An interesting little quirk that the story has is the presence of footnotes, in a kind of David Foster Wallace or Michael Martone way. Some of them were funny and effective, but in general the jury is still out for me on whether the gimmickry is worth the effort of paging back (or scrolling up) to remind myself of what they referred to in the first place. Sometimes yes and sometimes no; here, both.