Bookz
Today I was leafing through the pages I had dog-eared and underlined in one of my favorite novels: Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
Lately I’ve started to become more and more interested in the stories of entrepreneurs and small start-ups that have made an impact. There’s a certain sense of underdog excitement that surrounds a fresh idea, despite some of the ludicrous steps it sometimes takes to achieve it. I like how this quotation describes that feeling.
“And in San Francisco, for better or worse, there are no ideas dumb enough to be squashed, or people aren’t honest enough to tell people the truth about their dumb ideas, and so half of us are doing dumb, doomed things- And there is no prestige like the prestige in working for Wired, wearing one of those new black shoulder bags they just had made, or having been at the party thrown by the people from Survival Research Laboratories, who make giant robots and have them fight each other- and though the material rewards are a joke, and the apartment rents are already starting to get silly, we say nothing and complain little because when the cherubic bald anchorman on the news says that this is the ‘best place on Earth’ we cringe but then kind of even believe it, in a way, believe that we have to work eighteen hours a day, whether for ourselves or one of these tech start-ups or whatever, because we’re in a certain place, are lucky, feel lucky even though it’s been only a few years since the hills burned, since the highways collapsed- But so we are gathered here, each and every perfect warm-but-not-too-warm day, each day lathered in sun and possibility, probability, and while everyone drinks their lattes and eats their burritos pretending not to be checking each other out- there is a feeling that we are, at least at this point in time, with our friends, on this lush grass, at the very red molten-hot core of everything, that something is happening here, that, switching metaphors, that we are riding a wave, a big wave- of course, not one that’s too big, not like one of those huge Hawaii kinds that kill people on the coral- “
This also serves as a good example of Dave Eggers’ writing style. Check him out.
