The Other: Blog 2 3-01-09

(No comments on first paragraph please) This book is the weirdest of weird books. It has surpassed all levels of weirdness. There are no words that can describe how weird this book is. I pretty much hate this book.

(Ok, now that that’s over with, comments only on this part of the blog thank you.)

This part of the book is written primarily about love, along with the dumb luck that allowed the two main characters to come across it. Before either of them came across the loves of their lives, they were still doing the stoned hiking adventures. However, John William decided that he wanted to do some hiking on his own, to hike to the seaside in Oregon, all by himself. So, Neil (with the $5,000 he inherited from his father) bought himself a plane ticket to Amsterdam. He took himself on a tour of Europe using primarily trains for transportation, however, he couldn’t get away from what he had been feeling for many years back in Seattle, “…my romantic spells were curtailed by the sight of garbage near the rails, or by a wandering dog raising a leg at the corner of a building. I just didn’t have the psychic wherewithal to incorporate these images into my affect for living; I let them dispirit me” (46). Neil Countryman was back to the depths of despair looking for a way to get out. However, his downtrodden spirit came up sooner rather than later. In August of whatever year it happened to be, he was on the side of a trail, when two young women came by carrying on a conversation in American English. Erin and Jamie were sisters who, through a long story ended up traveling through Italy together. They traveled together primarily because the sisters had a map and Neil didn’t. However, eventually Neil came across a new reason for sticking with these two. As Erin put it one night in a hotel in San Vigilio, she told Jamie, “ ‘You and Neil can just sit here without me and, I don’t know, fall in love.’ ” (58). Erin couldn’t have said it any better, because, what do you know, thirty-two years later, they were sitting together in their house watching a forgettable movie, reminiscing about the first time they met.
However, John William’s love story is talked about much differently. An article was run in the present-day Seattle Times about Neil’s relationship, as “the hermit’s only friend”, in reference to John William. After this article was printed, Neil received a call from Cindy Saperstein, who was John William’s girlfriend as a freshman at Reed. She was hoping that, from Neil’s stories and her own, they could come up with a screenplay. She then talks to Neil for eight pages about her relationship with John William, which I could only imagine to be a bit odd, considering the amount of detail she explained. The first time they met, they were at the school dance, and without even telling Cindy his name, he proposed to her, which I found to be weird, and she accepted, which was even weirder. He was apparently a different kind of guy; compared to the other men Cindy had tried to go out with. He had some quirks for example, Cindy explained, “John William, when he got done kissing, he turned around and split” (66). She felt more comfortable around him, which once again seemed odd, because John William, the first time he goes walking with Neil, did suggest that they jump from a cliff on a mountain. He didn’t really seem to be in to life. She seemed to believe that her story was a “tale of bizarreness”, and when Neil asked what she meant, she told him “I never felt urged, is the way I’d put it, to do something against my will, okay? And for a guy, that’s bizarreness” (69). Cindy was convinced that these their stories could put together a great movie, so she continued on about everything between them including a time when John William asked a question that seemed a little bit more like what he had been throughout the book up until this story of Cindy’s. He asked Cindy, all those years ago if she would kill herself, “Could you do that” he asked, “Because I’m looking for somebody who can do that” (72). She went along with the idea (and presumably with John William for a while longer until breaking his heart, because she is married to another man), but alas, the second section ends there. So, while these chapters focused primarily on the love that John William and Neil shared with other women, the two stories could not have been any different, or told any differently, or told for any different of reasons.