Entertaining Ourselves to Death
Tyler C. Gore's "My Life of Crime"
My Life of Crime: Essays and Other Entertainments by Tyler C. Gore, Sagging Meniscus, 2022
An improvised existence. A paradoxical life. A rejection of continuity that clings to the continuous. Wandering with Tyler C. Gore through his world feels rather like joining Thomas De Quincey on a stroll through London. Gore’s hallucinations, however, are fueled not by opium but by the fact they aren’t even hallucinations—the world is weird, even on its plainest day, and Gore revels in this like in an unshakeable disease. The first third of My Life of Crime is devoted to short assays on the quirks of being a flesh machine with thoughts—a reality that postures as counterfeit, a feigned corporeality that from Gore’s vantage often takes on more substance than the real. Ordering pizza, taking a walk on a nude beach, a familial history of hoarding, all dissolve into unstable entities under the pressure of the authorial vision, which, even in its most melancholic, reflective state, skews pleasurably cartoonish, in the way Hunter S. Thompson or David Foster Wallace will frequently revel in the hyperbolic. Some of my favorite pieces here lean into this seductive exaggeration—an odd trifecta of recipes, elderly widows rendered into an obscene law of nature, a childhood story that is pure entertainment, pure violence of rebirth.
Following this flurry of short pieces the reader runs into the book’s appendix. It is rather jolting to run into a book’s appendix less than halfway through, but it quickly became apparent that this is that other appendix, the bodily, vestigial kind. That kind that wants to be removed. In “Appendix” Gore goes full-on Tristram Shandy, his tale of appendicitis awash in digressions and riffs, gleefully so, stories within stories cackling like mad roosters infiltrating a gaggle of hens, googly-eyed loony toons dancing in and around this tale of the fantastic landscape that is the American medical industrial complex. In a not unpleasant way I found myself wondering when this story was going to end, while simultaneously not wanting it to end, while believing there must, in fact, be an end, while beginning to believe there is no possible way this narrative of extraction could unhinge itself from the dank alleyways of sterility and needles and bedpans and cats and Doogie Howsers. . . how could our narrator possibly emerge without having been reborn as a dead thing? There is the book to speak to that. The book, the ultimate digression from the lived life. Isn’t any book, by matter of fact, an overstatement? A multiplication of negation? To wit: I did wonder, in my reading, if this story, in all its inflamed excess, might have benefited from having an appendix.
And for your entertainment, a poem I wrote long ago:
It’s 3 a.m. when I fall out of bed, only the plants awake and mating. Six inches from my face the wall looks like deep space, a cosmos coated with pustules of glitter. At the viewing my godmother’s corpse took my hand and asked Why didn’t you save me? From the floor I see myself propped atop the lower half of the lacquered coffin, one in a line of photographs decades old, exposures like black and white parabolic reflections, telescopes scanning the night sky, catching in glass a flash: her stripped flesh slipping through the sable walls of the galaxy with the serene authority of light.