Sometimes the content of a book is completely irrelevant. It’s recommended to read books, but they are sometimes equally as valuable as decoration or the legs of a table. You can chuck books at people’s heads, and if you have a copy of “The Bell Jar,” you can pretend to read it at Malott brunch. I remember very little about “Leave Society” by Tao Lin, and it was a complete headache to finish, but it is still one of my favorites. The words on the page struggle to produce any kind of complementary mental image, but, for me, the physical book elicits an intense experience entirely separate from the text. Instead of sitting down to read it. I will tell the story of how I found it and use it as a stage prop.
I probably had too much fun my junior year. It was my type of fun, which normally culminates in disaster or shreds years off my life. My buddies and I built a miniature steam room out of plywood, a steel tube and a garbage can. The heating element was faulty, so the entire box would fill with smoke whenever we got it running and fire would shoot out the chimney. I went on a road trip in a vehicle referred to as the ‘goon van’ and got it stuck in the mud twice. I got scabies from sharing a blanket with my friend on a particularly cold night in said van. In addition to scabies, I got horrendous poison oak on a backpacking trip to Big Sur that went off-trail. The prednisone I was prescribed for the poison ivy complemented the general feeling of mania I felt that year and I became so sleep deprived I started hallucinating.
I saw very few issues with my extreme risk-taking because every horrendous failure was accompanied by an equally epic victory. I remember the brief moment when the steam room worked, how beautiful Big Sur was and finally driving the van out each mud pit.
The moment I laid eyes on “Leave Society” was the moment I realized my rollercoaster of a year had been designed by a complete lunatic. It wasn’t bringing me to a gentle stop back where I started, but was flinging me clean off a cliff into a sea of sharp twisted metal.
Due to everything that was happening that year, I hadn’t put too much thought into finding a job for the summer. About a month before school was out, I found a job working on a farm in Humboldt County through the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) program. I had met other WWOOFers while working on my uncle’s farm last winter, and I didn’t vet the hosts as much as I should have. Also, I was itching so bad I could barely think.
That was my first issue. My second issue was that I had sold my car to buy the van I got scabies in. My only transportation was my girlfriend at the time, who was dropping me off on her way up to Oregon.
“ The relationship was under some strain from the poison ivy, the scabies, my lack of planning, my insistence on repairing a smoker all day instead of packing, her concern that the van was a ticking time bomb and my various fermentation projects. ”
The relationship was under some strain from the poison ivy, the scabies, my lack of planning, my insistence on repairing a smoker all day instead of packing, her concern that the van was a ticking time bomb and my various fermentation projects.
Another issue revealed itself on the drive up to the RV I was supposed to be living in. It was right next to a pond littered with other RVs, broken down cars and weeds. The main house was located on top of a hill overlooking the pond, and a dense forest surrounded the property. The cattle ranch and glamping operation advertised was notably missing from the scene. The host helped clear up our confusion and gave us a quick tour of the place.
“Yeah … so the cattle rancher is actually my brother-in-law … he lives about an hour down the road but this is our little operation here [points to a patch of dirt]. Yeah … we used to have a little grow operation here, but you know with legalization it’s so hard to turn any kind of profit anymore. Sorry … the place is a bit of a mess. The last guy who used to live here was an ex-tweaker and was living off his girlfriend’s disability and just smoked pot and cigarettes all day [points to a jumble of rusty implements, a swarm of flies and an RV with a massive hole in its door] so it’d be nice if you could clean up a bit.”
I nodded my head like everything he was saying made perfect sense, while my girlfriend stared at the RV in horror.
The inside of the RV was so thick with grime, dust and bugs scurrying about that it looked like the Upside Down from “Stranger Things.” I wouldn’t be shocked if a cobweb reached out from the cabinet and lashed me to the bed to be devoured by spiders. I decided I didn’t want to be devoured by spiders so I got the hell out of there. Before I left, I grabbed the only souvenir that didn’t seem to pose a health risk: a copy of “Leave Society” lying on the kitchen counter, which I think the previous tenant kept around for swatting pests.
Escaping the property with no real form of transportation or cell service was quite an ordeal, and so was a good chunk of the summer that followed. A good majority of these ordeals weren’t tempered by victories the way they had been that school year. I keep the book around as a reminder of that summer and how horrendously some of my antics backfired. “Leave Society” is a paperback, but it’s about 400 thick pages. The book has some real heft. Looking at it on my bookshelf, I can imagine someone whacking me over the head with it in an attempt to knock some sense into me.
Liam Riley PO ’26 is from East Tennessee. He likes giving book recommendations, the outdoors and labyrinths.