The edge is a shantytown filled with goldseekers

I just finished Kevin Wilson’s novel Now is Not The Time to Panic, a book I truly couldn’t put down. The book centers around this strange phrase clipped in the title of this post. It means… almost nothing on its own but to Frankie Budge it means everything. It’s a phrase she invented to create a poster with her first crush, Zeke, when they were both 16. This poster would get plastered across their small town, and its bizarre imagery creates a panic that spreads nationwide. For the artists, though, it fuels a euphoric summer of creativity.

This book is a little like the White Stripes song “Little Room.” It’s quick. It seems kinda silly but also deeply serious to the characters involved. Kevin Wilson captures teenage boredom, self importance, and the fearsome importance of the future injected by all the adults in your life, without writing a standard coming of age story.

This book describes more than the nostalgia of tape decks and pre-internet fandom. It describes a manifestation of panics unique to the time. These kinds of things happened in the 80s, 90s, early 2000s. I remember them. Parents would forbid their children from certain kinds of culture because they had inherent evil properties. Industrial music turned kids into mass shooters. Rap music into criminals. Graffiti artists were bound for gangs and prison. These would spread across the country.

This book looks at panics on a smaller level. How do people get it into their head that a weird poster was anything more than a harmless piece of graffiti made by bored teenagers? Wilson intentionally does not answer this question. Instead he just kinda plows into it. His characters more or less unphased when the evil things people projected onto their art sometimes happen. The adults are the ones who panicked. The kids are just fiercely loyal to each other and their art.

It’s also funny and well drawn. Frankie has all kinds of ideas about how sneaky her and Zeke are that are totally unbelievable. Like so many culturally immersed kids, they have vastly inflated ideas about their cleverness and are infatuated with their own taste; convinced this poster is the best thing anybody has ever made. They also, like so many adults, hang on to those harmless delusions when they become (mostly) well-adjusted grown ups. They’re so sure of it.

In the same way, I, at the age of 16, was sure every small local band that played in my hometown was destined for greatness. All that stood in their way was the great conspiracy run by major record labels and Clear Channel.1

In all seriousness, though, I loved this book. Go read it.

… we are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.

  • Is it not interesting how many of today’s top podcasts are run by iHeart aka Clear Channel who also run all the radio stations not owned by Sinclair? Isn’t it suspicious how they tried to trick us millennials into buying the same old trash! Is it not true that the big record labels and publishers steadily buy up the indies and convert them to imprints? ↩︎
  • #books #jaunty90sVacations #kevinWilson #nowIsNotTheTimeToPanic #panics #teenageDramas
    Arkham Horror 2nd ed, 2 players

    Things lined up about as perfectly as they could have in this Arkham game, sometimes things just go right. All our characters got crazy strong fight weapons and spells and the GOO I had pulled was +1 toughness for a GOO whose name I don't care to say. So we were consistently blasting every monster off the board with confidence and ended at maybe 8 doom with a seal win. Having zero sense of risk is not an especially common thing for a game that can be as harsh as Arkham 2nd edition. It almost always feels touch and go at some point in the game.

    #arkhamhorror #fantasyflightgames #richardlaunius #kevinwilson #boardgames #tabletopgames #bgg #boardgamegeek
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