Though approximately eight years older than me, I am pretty sure Chuck Klosterman and I were separated at birth. The Fargo Rock City author’s second book, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, is like reading a journal of pop-culture opinions I could be capable of eloquently writing myself if given an entire eight years to reverse the effects of living the fringe lifestyle of a college journalist.

My brother Chuck and I both moved from the Midwest to New York to write. We have identical video collections (Memento, Being John Malkovich, Donnie Darko, Waking Life). Neither of us care much for beds (he sleeps in a “sort of self-styled nest in the corner” while I’m partial to the floor of my closet). And we both love sports (Chuck digs the Celtics; I used to own a ping-pong table).

So it is with a mixture of kinship and intense jealousy that I ecstatically crowd-surfed through his veritable mosh pit of collected essays. Tribute bands, Internet porn (no relation to his essay on the cultural significance of Pamela Anderson), the “cool” quotient of Billy Joel, the “Experience Music Project, home for the first annual Pop Music Studies Conference (a summit boldly titled ‘Crafting Sounds, Creating Meaning: Making Popular Music in the U.S.’),” serial killers and killer cereal all serve as conversation points on the idea of entertainment as a reflection of reality and sense of self.

Winkingly transitioning from one seemingly random thought to the next with “but ANYWAY,” Klosterman unleashes a barrage of cultural references that explain other references ("The X-Files" and "My So-Called Life" serve as guideposts to explore the social responsibilities of "Saved by the Bell"). Every entity is interconnected, which is why an essay on the Dixie Chicks as the new Van Halen can name-check ‘NSYNC, Henry Rollins, “George fucking Jones,” Jay Farrar, Nine Inch Nails, John Lee Hooker, Sarah Jessica Parker, David Schwimmer, the Beatles, Eminem, Oscar Wilde, Moby, ALF, Liz Phair and Bob Dylan successfully. “In and of itself, nothing really matters,” Klosterman writes. “What matters is that nothing is ever ‘in and of itself.’” In his mind, the only true reality is that Adam Sandler is not funny.

But as much as we love our siblings, we’re still prone to smugly pointing out their flaws. Anyone whose job is not associated with some form of journalistic media will not fully appreciate his essay on the nature of news, and his sweeping proclamations that “The most wretched people in the world are those who tell you they like every kind of music ‘except country,’” and “Do you know people who insist they like ‘all kinds of music’? That actually means they like no kinds of music,” will come as surprise to no one who has waded through some of his more murky essays in SPIN magazine. Lines such as “I simply had no interest in shit like cultivating (or in cultivating shit, for that matter),” aren’t so much clever as they are base, which seems odd since his is an unabashedly niche publication. He’s a snob, he’s a geek, he’s proud his shallowness, and he’s stolen all of my best ideas. I’m telling mom.

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