4 out of 5

It’s always strange / frightening / interesting to me when I identify, strongly, with what would seem like an alienating point of view in any given song, or movie, or comic, or book.  The question arises: If this is appearing in a commonplace source, why is it an isolating thought?  …I.e. I’m obviously not the only one feeling this way, multiplied by countless others who are having the same revelation, and / or creating similar art, so is this sensation actually the norm?

It’s the catch-22 of all thinking beings necessarily having to be the center of their world; the world exists in relation to you, no way around it, and yet our existences often seem geared toward trying to align that inherent individuality with, like, a sense of community.  But still be an individual!

Stepping slightly back from that precipice, we can rationalize a bit: There’s some observational bias, drawing me toward attitudes similar to my own, and no need to go all black and white: Yeah, we all get lonely sometimes; we all want to he alone sometimes.

Still: What does it mean to identify with the chameleonic ‘Benjamin’ in Shawn Vestal’s Please Give Me On Good Reason Not to Hate You?  He’s on a hiking trip with people he doesn’t necessarily like, privately fretting over how much he hates it, and revealing, via narration, that this hiking persona is a farce, just as countless iterations of his personality previously, in countless previous towns.  He speaks of the curse of wanting to he around people, which only cyclically leads to wanting to be on his own.  So a new town, new identity.  A personality vampire as needed, an idea that – perpetuating how enduring this feeling is – stretches back, for me, to Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, written in 1974 and read by yours truly sometimes in the 90s.  I recognized it then, was frightened / intrigued by it then, and feel the same now, when reading Vestal’s spin on it.

The hiking trip unspools along with ‘Benajmin’s’ thoughts.

Perhaps, yes, we all feel this way at points, but it’s the skill of a creator to bring it to the fore; to shape it into something that makes us stop and prattle on about it.

There’s some late-in-the-tale ‘about faces’ in the narration – Ben addressing the reader, or perhaps himself – that are a bit too in the nose and give the read some unnecessary slack, but its equally an acceptable way to punctuate the experience, and make it clear that this ‘story’ goes on, even after the turn of the final page.