The Bottom of My Ladder

I’ll think about something for an average of half a second, make some strange connection, blink, and then moment’s gone. Usually, I don’t even notice it happened. Reading The Mezzanine, though, I started noticing how much of life is made up of exactly those kinds of thoughts. Baker takes one thought, follows it somewhere completely unexpected, and then follows that thought somewhere else. I wrote in my notebook, who would ever think to write all of this down? At one point in the novel, Howie purchases a book and wonders something like, “Who bought this kind of book?” and I was sitting there thinking the exact same thing. Like genuinely, why the hell did I buy this book? If it wasn’t for my high school English class, would I ever pick up a book with this plot?

I was trying to explain this to my coworker one night while I was on a ladder facing shelves at work, and I swear I sounded crazy. He asks me how my day at school was and tell him that we're reading The Mezzanine.

"what's it about"

"well, it's kinda like...I don't know...well...there's this escalator...and this guy and...oh! There's the integral sign and..."

Before we know it, there’s shoelaces and milk cartons and the ethical and practical nuances of paper vs plastic straws. I imagine all of these words in Baker’s novel, falling from the page and down to the bottom of my ladder in a scramble, like it does in Winnie the Pooh. (Peak cinema, would recommend. The 2011 version to be specific.) Anyways, I was trying to explain how The Mezzanine is somehow worth reading when the entire thing is basically just this guy going on and on about his lunch break. And the more I tried to explain what was so interesting about it, the more I realized I was struck by his digressive messaging. I just kept going. I went on for what felt like the length of a novel.

That’s probably the funniest thing about this book to me. Baker managed to stretch a lunch break into an entire novel, and then I somehow managed to take these letters at the bottom of my ladder and scramble them into my own long string of nonsense. It’s kind of ridiculous when you think about it. The book is full of these thoughts that would normally just come and go, and somehow, he made them worth noting. As I was reading, my initial instinct was to think the book was boring because basically nothing happens, and then I spent half my night talking about why nothing happening was actually the interesting part.

And as I’m sitting here, in an attempt to summarize my thoughts on this un-summarizable book, preparing to put it on my shelf, (where it will undoubtedly be forgotten) I can’t help but think about the same cycle of confusion, word scrambling, and realization that I’ll probably go through when I find it again. Maybe I’ll pick it up years from now and wonder, once again, why the hell I ever bought a book about a guy’s lunch break.