The Inaugural Meeting Of The Chuck Klosterman Fan Club

Order! Order! I call to order this, the inaugural meeting of the Chuck Klosterman Fan Club! Can I have your attention, please? Or not. I mean, I’m not going to go all John Cusack in High Fidelity trying to get you to notice me here. And I’m just not the “Stephen from Real World: Seattle” type or anything, so the worst I’m really going to do is maybe imply that you guys are being super coldplay right now. (See what I did there? I’ve cleverly reclassified Coldplay from a noun that sucks to an adjective meaning “sucky,” an idea I got from Prince’s own reclassified visual representation, or, I guess, also Puff Daddy/P-Diddy/Diddy who, when you think about it, was a far superior lyricist to both 2Pac and Biggie, but who for some reason never gets the credit he deserves.)

Anyway, I realize I’m getting to my point at a Chinese Democracy pace, so let’s just do the Star Wars thing where we forget all the earlier stuff exists and pretend the story of our club starts here instead.

I believe this club has the potential to be In the Aeroplane Over the Sea-good, which is to say really fundamentally solid, but then it wouldn’t be so bad (in fact might be better, even, all things considered) if we turned out more Hanson’s “MMMBop” and really attained that level of cultural penetration and accessibility, in the way the 1989 Lakers were considered the “Showtime” franchise despite the Boston Celtics playing technically magnificent basketball.

Do you guys get what I’m saying? Because in my head it’s coming out brilliant but you never know when maybe it’s coming out Dylanesque, which is to say totally genius but superficially ambiguous, and part of me thinks maybe I should just stop a moment, pause, and start back over later to stunning results a la The Police at Bonnaroo, but then maybe I’ve already blown my opportunity, like I did with my #3 most influential ex-girlfriend, Katie, who went basically Tonya Harding when I kept insisting the FOX show Prison Break was, at it’s core, just the same or better than The Shawshank Redemption in terms of culturally relevancy.

Sorry. Random tangent. Didn’t mean to go Urkel on you. From now on it’s straight Stefan. Zach Morris, even. Cooler than a cucumber that wrote for SPIN. Which is a pretty cool magazine, really — on the Magazine Scale of Coolness [ranging from Boyz II Men to KISS], it probably comes in at a solid Radiohead. But yeah, back on track. No harm done. I mean, there are going to be little hiccups like these at a first meeting, and wouldn’t you rather have these hiccups than a third arm? Something to think about, right? Like I get this isn’t maybe the most Fonzie of speeches right now but it’s definitely less inconvenient than having an arm growing out of your chest. You know? Then again, maybe that’d be super-convenient, having the extra arm, because then you could sort through your cassettes, write a journal entry about your ex’s bangs, and dribble a basketball at the same time.

What were we talking about?

Oh yeah. The fan club. Do you guys still want to do this even though we’re all for sure going to die and be forgotten one day? Knowing that one day the name Chuck Klosterman might very well perish from the earth? Hard to imagine, I know, but remember the apparent permanence of hair metal? The glitz and grandeur of Ratt and Poison and Mötley Crüe? And then Ozymandias out of nowhere like some estranged Maury husband who reminds us that nothing will ever rock hard enough to be forever. Just a Foo Fighters Denying AIDS-level bummer. I mean, in a world where Arrested Development can be cancelled after three seasons, why build anything?

No, no, you’re right, we’ll press on. It’s what Chuck would want. We’ll be the Notre Dame fighting against the odds, the Sammy Hagar defying everybody’s expectations. We will be the U2 of fan clubs, which is to say a group quite possibly better than Led Zeppelin when you really think about it. Yes, we will do this. We will do this, and we will make Chuck proud.

North Dakota.