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PRAISE FOR EVERYTHING WE DON’T KNOW
“[These essays] explore isolation, weaving together the intangible and material touchstones of life periods with remarkable ease . . . Beneath an eternal-boy persona, a surprising tenderness reveals the struggle for human connection . . . Everything We Don’t Know demonstrates the pain of sometimes misguided perceptions, and the many routes an insatiable mind can take.”
—Foreword Reviews
“What a great read! Aaron Gilbreath has put together as fine a book of essays as you’re likely to find these days. At times I felt as if I could be reading a John Jeremiah Sullivan collection. Aaron Gilbreath’s strong, candid yet insightful first-person narrative is compelling, clearly honest, and frankly, it reminded me of many things I’d prefer to forget, yet did so powerfully enough to keep me coming back for more.”
—James Williamson, guitarist of Iggy and the Stooges
“I’ve been jonesing for the next great collection of personal essays, and Aaron Gilbreath’s Everything We Don’t Know cures my pangs. Booze, drugs, failed relationships, poverty, knee-jerk travel, desperation, joy, music, and recovery—it’s like a primer on late twentieth/early twenty-first century American living, written with honesty, astuteness, and self-deprecation. I loved this collection.”
—George Singleton, author of Calloustown
“Aaron Gilbreath’s first collection of essays, Everything We Don’t Know, is a rowdy, exuberant, obsessive, and often hilarious examination of the ennui and energy of a youth spent rambling through the wild west and other meaningful landscapes. Combining a novelist’s understanding of narrative structure and pacing with the essayist’s digressive talents, Gilbreath creates a voice that embodies the best journalistic qualities of Hunter S. Thompson, Mary Karr, and Joan Didion. Gilbreath’s essays combine humorous, unsentimental, unflinching prose with rigorous research, harrowing drama, and confessional moments of deep reflection. Everything We Don’t Know is a testament to the adage that the greatest gift any writer possesses is a curious mind; and the abundant fruits of Gilbreath’s curiosity end up being the greatest gift of this book.”
—Steven Church, founding editor of The Normal School and author of One with the Tiger
“Everything We Don’t Know is an electric, funny, and far-reaching collection about Gilbreath’s early loves and misadventures growing up out west. Sometimes ecstatic, sometimes angst-filled, he follows where curiosity leads, anchoring himself in resiliency and feeling, intelligence and humility. The essay “It’s Really Something You Should Have Examined,” about his girlfriend Abby and his ferret Wiggy, highlights Gilbreath at his quirky and tender best.”
—Marcia Aldrich, author of Girl Rearing and Companion to an Untold Story
“Aaron Gilbreath writes the kind of essays I’m always crossing my fingers for when I open a new collection. He grabs the threads of history, nature, pop culture, geography, and travel, and weaves a kind of wild web around the personal essay. Honest, open, deft, and able to turn a phrase like a bad ass—Gilbreath is now on my shortlist of go-to essayists.”
—Amber Sparks, author of The Unfinished World and May We Shed These Human Bodies
“Gilbreath is among that rare breed of writer with both a journalist’s keen eye for observation and discovery, and a memoirist’s skill for shining a light on our human foibles, mistakes, and thwarted ambitions. His brilliant examinations expand and contract seamlessly between the outer world and his own inner life—from Googie architecture to the Redwood Forest to his harrowing efforts to kick heroin. Gripping, honest, and endlessly intelligent, Everything We Don’t Know marks the debut of a major literary talent.”
—Justin Hocking, author of The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld
“Aaron Gilbreath’s new collection of essays shatters the tenets of memoir, and leaves the shards out in the sun to stew, before putting them back together in ways more frazzled, distressed, hilarious, scarred, and thereby more human, and true. Along the way, Gilbreath’s exhilaratingly cockeyed meditations on the seemingly mundane detritus of our world—when leashed to engagements of friends, jobs, lovers, family, strange music, and stranger architecture—are allowed to dovetail with (in his words), “these mythic notions [that] colonize your head.” I, for one, am grateful to have had my head colonized by these wonderful essays.”
—Matthew Gavin Frank, author of The Mad Feast and Preparing the Ghost
CURBSIDE SPLENDOR
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of short passages quoted in reviews.
Published by Curbside Splendor Publishing, Inc., Chicago, Illinois in 2016.
First Edition
Copyright © 2016 by Aaron Gilbreath
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016949234
ISBN 978-1-940430-92-8
Edited by Alison True and Naomi Huffman
Book design by Alban Fischer
CONTENTS
Dreams of the Atomic Era
A Secondary Landscape
The Stoned Age
Land Speculation
Ancient History
The Burden of Home
Leaving Tatooine
Tillage
Tragedy of the Commons
It’s Really Something You Should Have Examined
My Manhattan Minute
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Between Disappearances
Hey Cowboy
Every Supper the Last
Everything We Don’t Know
A Reckless Autonomy
(Be)Coming Clean
Works Cited
Acknowledgments
Credits
By the time I recognized their gaudy beauty in 1995, the 1950s and ’60s motels along Van Buren Street had largely turned into rent-by-the-hour sex dens and the haunts of junkies and crack smokers. Those buildings that had ceased operation sat fenced and boarded up, colonized by squatters and pigeons, pending future demolition. In the thirty years since its heyday, Phoenix, Arizona’s “Motel Row” had degenerated from class to kitsch, and finally into one of my hometown’s most crime-ridden corridors, a parched vacation-land graveyard desiccating in the same desert sunlight that once drew its customers. I wanted to photograph the vernacular architecture before the ’dozers arrived: the funky fonts, Polynesian huts, upswept flying-to-the-moon