Books like I Wish There Was Something That I Could Quit

I’ve only met Aaron Cometbus maybe three or four times, but he always impressed me as a surprisingly nice person for someone so famous, so ostensibly angry at the world, and so smart. I doubt if he’d remember me now, but he always did then, and he always managed to pick up our conversations right where we’d left off, even if it had been two or three years since we’d seen one another. Honestly, he was better at recognizing me than I was at recognizing him. Funny enough, I’ve never been a regular reader of Aaron’s zine. I would pick up a copy when I saw him, or once in a while when I found it at a friend’s house I would read it, but I don’t think I own a single copy right now. There have been copies at various places I’ve lived over the years, and maybe at one time there was one or more in my collection, but they don’t seem to have survived. The most memorable pieces I read, thinking back now, related to Berkeley history, or Aaron’s adventures on the road. This book is more like the latter than the former.It’s the story of an aging punk rock kid named Aaron, and three people in his life during a time that his van has broken down in a nameless American town. The story is written in a strange sort of first-third person omniscient, where Aaron speaks in “I” but we hear “he” or “she” when we’re in the other characters’ heads. It threw me a bit at first, but worked. The other characters are Susan, Laura, and the bizarrely-named Jemuel (a male name, evidently). These characters fall in and out of love with each other while Aaron watches, not participating, but not actually uninvolved. In fact Jemuel comes across as the more dispassionate, to his discredit since he’s actually involved with Susan, but mostly for his own selfish reasons. If the story has a moral, it’s that friendship trumps relationships, and that Aaron is lucky to be single. But I don’t think Aaron meant it to be simplified in that way. The reality that he explores is that all human relationships are complex beyond being simply “good” or “bad” and that nothing in our culture serves as a useful guidepost for young people in figuring out how to relate to one another. They have to make up the rules as they go, and they frequently do so without adequate consultation with one another. If you’ve lived within the milieu Aaron is describing, even for a little while, this book will make perfect sense to you. If you haven’t, it will seem alien and strange. Either way it is written with such sincerity and style that it is sure to leave some kind of a mark. And if you’ve ever met Aaron, I think you’ll have to love it.