It took me 5 years, 7 months and 4 days to read The Believer

Several years ago, while visiting a friend in San Francisco, I stumbled upon a pirate store in a hip district. Inside you feel like you've discovered something truly bizarre and authentic. There are trunks to look in, bureaus with lots of drawers and fun things inside all of them. Glass eyes, hooks for where hands used to be, eye patches, gold coins, maps, pirate flags and just about anything you think an aspiring pirate might need. In the middle of the store is a huge vat of lard - I think there's something in it you're supposed to look for in there.

It was the 826 Valencia store. The story is, author Dave Eggers wanted to start a place where writers could tutor kids after school and wanted it to be right in the city where the kids who needed it could have access to it. But as it was in a retail district, there had to be a store. Thus the first of many 826 locations and stores was born.


Today there's an 826 in Seattle that sells supplies for astronauts (above). 826 in Brooklyn sells superhero supplies, 826 Chicago sells spy supplies at The Boring Store (ha ha ha), and 826 Michigan provides monster supplies. (I still have not yet volunteered for 826 LA and we don't have a store. Bummer.)

Anyway, Egger's accompanying publishing company, McSweeney's, has long put out literary journals and other writings. A few Christmases ago, I bought as a gift, a book called Your Disgusting Head published by McSweeney's. With a made up PhD and hilarious illustrations, it was a spoof on kid's books except strange, gross and nonsensical. I bought a subscription of The Believer for a friend and bought myself the music edition of The Believer for the CD of interesting music but I never read the magazine. I thought everything in the world of McSweeney's was beautiful nonsense.

Then a few months ago I ordered for very cheap, ten old issues of The Believer just for the heck of it. I thumbed through them but the unorthodox layout and odd headlines baffled me again. They sat in an attractive pile in my house, untouched, while I read my other magazines. Then a friend came over, someone I didn't expect to know McSweeney's and excitedly told me how great Wholphin was, another one of their pubs. Really? Someone actually reads this stuff?

So one day I opened one and started reading and I absolutely love it. The articles are unique and completely fascinating, the kind of material I wish I was writing. Ginger Strand describes Virgil's epic, Aeneid, about the Roman empire, to illustrate how imperialism drives the absorption, destruction and use of natural resources as a way to shock and awe the enemy and those that they annex. Sailing a fleet of ships that each require 300 adult trees to build is a way of claiming ownership of land far beyond those of the ruling city. The empire she compares it to is of course, the United States.

In our quest for and refusal to reduce our dependence on oil, our leaders are saying "we claim all of the world's natural resources for ourselves." It made me wonder if environmental balance is possible as long as there are imperialist nations with as much power as the US and China. Consuming natural resources is a way of life in the States. It's what we do. Look at the cars we drive.

The largest SUVs are named after large expanses of land, mountains, huge trees, powerful rivers - Tundra, Sierra, Yukon, Tahoe, Sequoia - that will and must be conquered. Driving one is a display of that power. Look out, here comes an Avalanche! Durango is a coal mining town. Explorer, Expedition, Navigator, Mountaineer, and Trooper are the names of the types of people who conquer nature. An Armada is a fleet of warships! The favorite of Los Angeles, though, is the Escalade which describes scaling the walls of a fortress to attack. CHARGE!!!