Wolf in White Van - John Darnielle

"It's not like I think anything's going to happen, I'm fine and I don't actually have anything better to do, and it doesn't take up TOO much of my time? But it's in my head now and I don't want it anymore so I'm going free-play here, you have to let me do this." (44)

I have been involved in one single D&D campaign. I played [name forgotten] a half-orc monk who hated people and humanoids who were better off than her but had a pet mouse on her shoulder that showed her soft side that her abrasiveness and frustration with indecisiveness tried so hard to hold up at all times. We finished a single questline that my character continually grumbled through but performed sensible actions on - creeping into the basement of a fish salesman's house to pick a sleeping missing cat (named Rock) out of a barrel of salmon and passing it out the window to my roommate - a wood elf who's main identity was turning into a bear.

Sometimes we really do play into exactly what we mean to do with these characters is what I learned. The campaign started another more adventurous quest but never finished it - stuck in the basement fighting off walking mutant mycology. I killed mushroom children in this. Oof. We fell off, Sally wasn't having much fun and Tucker and Michael's schedules got busy. I miss this orc and want her back. Orcs are obviously the best of fantastical creatures because they're the obvious other - evil and ugly to the normal humanoid society. The vested interest in a brooding and violent thing is the orc. Subjugated and motivated to overtake vast civilization that has ousted them. It's a shitty racist take yeah, since they're always placed into the position of underlings like goblins - in tribute to Sauron of course but I'm not going to read any Tolkien ever, thanks.

Wolf in White Van is John Darnielle's first of two novels so far. I got into The Mountain Goats as a late teenager - particularly via Tumblr friends and developing friendships in college. For a while, my Tumblr handle - which I gave to someone I do not know the proper name for anymore nor do I wish to communicate with as their partner (of that time) lambasted me for knowing someone who had stalked someone on the day after my brother's suicide attempt, not friends with or wanting to be even near or aware of for their other ignorant and violent bullshit - was johndamnielle. Sorry for that sentence. Still, many of my accounts on social media use a variation of airbluegown, even though I have been removing that nomenclature for reasons I think I'll save til the end of this. Today I listened to Heretic Pride as I waited for my car to warm up. I used to continually cover There Will be No Divorce and Fall of the High School Runningback at shows. There is an importance that is hard to not have, or not feel the sympathy and nostalgic pride in knowing, feeling and being Darnielle's lyrics. Especially when they make you the villain of your own word - as are his feelings of Going to Georgia or Gothenburg probably.

The story is simple, and it's a young adult novel. This will spoil some of it. A 17 year old shoots himself but doesn't die. His face is fucked for the rest of his life. He creates a mail-in role playing game where people send him money for him to send them photocopied moves he's written for them. Two teenagers attempt to do the reality of his game and one dies and the other is disabled by the cold in a way he will never recover. The family of the dead girl attempts to sue him/press charges for being responsible and it fails.

Sean, the GM, tells this story in disconnected eras, bouncing between them constantly to see how they're connected. How he became monstrous and fantasy and reality all in the same light. There are no answers and there is no more plot that matters excessively than that. It's a book that ruminates on the feeling of ones actions and Darnielle's own inflections of hyper focus. Role playing games, metal bands, obscure references to shit that doesn't matter. It's very...Mountain Goats. If it was a song it'd obviously be The Best ever Death Metal Band out of Denton or Marduk T Shirt Men's Room Incident or Genesis 19: 1-2 or fuck it, it's the entirety of The (fucking) Hound Chronicles. It's not a mess and there's good parts and it's kind of raw and obsessive and deeply, truly, well written for most of it but it's just John John John John John. No monkeys in the basement, no jam in the jar. Just a empty bag of Golden Boy peanuts and a Moving Pictures record snapped in two on top of some dog-eared Wordsworth.

Several years back for my birthday or Christmas or something, Clara bought me my copy and it has sat on my shelves in my various housing since. A book I bought them had died next to its place, but I only read it between yesterday and today because of the audiobook I found after finding Mrs. Dalloway's audio rendition unbearable on my drive to my hometown. Darnielle reads it to you, and he says H-what and H-why and H-where H-when and H-ow but he doesn't read it particularly well. With good active reader inflection. There are minor sound cues added onto the parts with the text from the game. Yes, even the text in chapter 14, which is mostly the most droll landscape list of somewhat needed references for the reader. It was not a fun part to be listening.

This year or the last, a post about Darnielle came out detailing a predatory behavior. Did you know that? He doesn't like having his picture taken. Did you know that? The kid, and I do mean kid - they were young and a Tumblrite queer kid, finding the communities by online the same way a friend used to penpal me when he moved to Michigan, but those letters stopped coming - described a painful experience of reliance and emotional undertaking. I became reminded of how I used to use the internet and flirt online with older men - mostly comic artists and musicians and writers, auteurs - hope that someone could save me from the smalltown suffering. It of course expanded into my use to discuss the "weirdo" art I like - which ain't even weird enough to qualify because I'm basically just a shitty English professor that will never be one - with others. Find community in a town where I too had become estranged and in need of somewhere to live better knowing to me.

The gist of the post was this. Darnielle would emotionally invest himself with this young person and want to hear the trauma, the pain and other items of this person's life but become obsessively apologetic and awkwardly dis-extra-involved. That's not a great summary. It was, unprofessional behavior with fans. Particularly those that were transmasculine. That doesn't summarize it much better.

New like this was of course uncomfortable to me. I have mentioned a few times on this blog in less cohesive statements about artist work that has been revealed to be made by a harmful hand. But this one felt confusing as I am still unsure of the language that surrounded it. I am unsure the reaction that the cult of the Goats had to it. I am still unsure how I am to feel about my desire towards that queer and spiritual and lonely moment of listening to something for the first time, filled with Riches and Wonders. This is not an unfamiliar moment, and nothing is so easily black and white and over and done with and out of mind as it can be with violence and conflict. When and how we can determine those violences is hard for me too. A Medium article I just pushed myself through reacts to this by quoting PWR BTTM's takedown, but I do not think of them or my unfounded distant disdain towards the post-Epoch kids that I don't deserve. I instead think of D. You won't be hearing that story but a handful know some of it and it will never make more sense than what I say in h/armed and ready, a plug amiss some pointless subtext of why I do what I do. There is meaning.

I hid a bunch of subtext here, but an obvious one is the Going to Georgia spite that Darnielle feels. He has basically called it edgy and embarrassing to him. Something he does not feel proud or comfortable reliving in his past. You have had those moments as well, I'm sure. As have I. Often, the book can feel like that song does.

I needed to bring it up because I've been relistening to things like The Coroner's Gambit and Full Force Galesburg again and had totally put them away dissociatively. And then I listened to his six hour audiobook. It feels weird. That is inadequate but I don't have to process your own guilt for you. Just mine always. You can come to your conclusions on it and I'd invite you to, especially those who I've not been talking about my feelings about this with.

I do not care if my idols end up being monsters, a wolves in a white vans (haha). I care if I do or am. I worry, as much as Darnielle does, of becoming my father again. And who places me to be him.

Anyway, that's the review.

"I bleed out on the fortune-teller's grave and then I'm dead and that's my game. I am OK and I'll be OK but this is the end and this is my story." (45)