Screaming At a Wall

Screaming at a Wall, Greg Everett, Grundle Ink Publications, 2001

This is the autobiographical story of one person's journey through 1990s youth culture.

Everett is your average resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, more interested in drugs and the opposite sex than in school. A couple of teachers along the way attempt to "reach" him, thinking that he's some sort of troubled teen, when a much better diagnosis might be "smart but bored with school."

He has a variety of jobs during this time, including spending a couple of years working at a local bike shop. It's the sort of place where items like air guns and super glue are used in all sorts of interesting ways. After high school, he intentionally gets out of town, and enrolls in a sort of alternative college in Arizona to learn search and rescue. He leaves after realizing that the school is the sort of place where the faculty would rather look at the goodness inside each of the students than actually teach search and rescue. During this time, Grundle Ink Publications is born, as Greg hand binds copies of his writings and gives them to friends.

Everett eventually ends up in the college town of Chino, California, where Grundle Ink becomes more of a "full-time" job. The fact that he knows absolutely nothing about the publishing business is irrelevant; nothing like learning the hard way. Over the years, Everett also makes several attempts to kick the drug habit.

Throughout this book are a number of relationships with the opposite sex. Some of the women Everett meets are decent, reasonable people, while others can best be described as one-dimensional idiots. He is unable to break off the relationships, so he intentionally acts like a jerk, until she gets frustrated and does the breaking off. The conversations recounted are not literary masterpieces; sometimes, they consist of little more than "dude" and "(insert swear word)."

Because of the large amount of drugs and swearing in this book, it is very much not for the faint of heart. To attempt to understand youth culture of the 1990s, this does an infinitely better job than the various stories of adolescent hijinks. The writing is honest, sobering, and, in places, very funny. I loved it.