Sam Elliott Has Something Important to Say to You

February 7th, 2010Blog0 comments

If Sam Elliott sits down next to you in a bar or on a plane and starts telling you things, it’s very important that you listen.

Because this singular event signals the fact that you have just gone through a life-altering experience (whether you know it or not!) and Sam Elliott is there to gently guide you through the transition.

Sam Elliott will also have a gift for you — something you’ve been chasing for a long time but whose sudden, actual attainment will only serve as a bitter taste of everything you’ve sacrificed along the way.

And then Sam Elliott will bid you a gravelly goodbye and be gone, and you’ll never, ever see him again.

The power was out on my block all of last night, so your Mike Golamco was living like a frontier settler and reading by candlelight.

Reading The Gone Away World by Nick Harkaway is comforting. It feels like someone has taken up Vonnegut’s torch and is running full sprint with it towards some weird, wonderful new destination. This is some dense, fun prose about a post-apocalyptic world in which a war with bizarre weaponry has ripped up reality and created unreal zones all over the earth. But people are still alive and doing their thing, surviving and getting by. It’s interesting and strange and fun. The old man’s ghost is still alive in Mr. Harkaway, and the guy is building and improvising off of what Vonnegut left behind.