Notes From Underground was something else entirely because the book’s narrator spoke to me like no other had before. I had already been checking out Camus and Kafka from the school library. (That same summer I had the store order Kerouac’s On The Road for me, one of the few times as a teenager when I thought I was cool.) The inspiration came from a mentor of mine, a philosophy student at the local college who had turned me on to existentialism. I would not have been able to purchase such an obscure text at the bookstore or find it in the library in my rural hometown. I had picked the book up that summer while at a scholar’s camp at the University of Nebraska. I would say that was the high point of my pretentiousness, but then again, I would grow up to become a grad student. I hold the thinker’s pose, and in my hand is a Bantam paperback copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. I am sitting on a stool, before a backdrop of painted bookshelves. In that self-designed photo I am wearing (because it is 1993) light washed baggy jeans and a black denim shirt. I did so on the condition that I got to do one of my own choosing. Being antisocial and contrarian, I did not want to go through the ritual of senior photos. There are many, many embarrassing photos of me during my teen years, but one of the biggest was ironically the one I loved the most at the time.
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