Sock, Penn Jillette / Lando Calrissian is my bus driver

i have a happy note and a bad note to discuss today.

Lando Calrissian is my Bus Driver. that is the good portion.

I finished reading Penn Jillette’s book “Sock”.. not the good part.

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Lando. I noticed him a few days ago. Coming to work, he would pick me up at the bus stop and i would show him my bus pass. Mr Billy Dee Willams would wave me aboard and i would either stand or find a place to park my ass. Obviously this depended on the morning.

Every day i would see him and think “who is this guy and why is he so familiar to me?” The answer was always “he is one of your bus drivers and you see him nearly daily.”

Today he spoke to me when i got on the bus. It was at this moment that i realized (at least on a personal level of self delusion) that my bus driver was Billy Dee.

Lando said to me, “did you know your bus pass is out of date?” This is not what i heard though.. The exchange went more like this:

Lando: “(did you know your bus pass is out of date?) That was never a condition of our agreement, nor was giving Han to this bounty hunter!”

Me: “(yeah, i forgot to pick it up but i have a new one) Perhaps you think you’re being treated unfairly?”

Lando: “(that is okay, just make sure to get it soon or someone will get on your case) …No.”

Me: “(no problem, thanks for the ride…) Good. It would be unfortunate if I had to leave a garrison here.”

Billy Dee Lando.. Lando Dee Williams…Billy Lando Williams… What a cool guy you are.

Tomorrow i think i will bring a magic marker with me so you can put your John Hancock on my manboob (moob). Sure you may look a little bit older, you have seen the weather of the world, not just this one, but many others. you have smelled the air high above the planet Bespin. You left behind the repulsorlifts and fought in combat to defeat the empire. you knew the truth about universal health care at the cost of a dominating clone based stifling of basic universal rights.. personally i like health care.. but there must be a happy medium out there that we can all agree on.. Until then, your old ass is one of my heroes and i am glad that you are part of my daily life even if you have a job that is definitely beneath you.

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Penn Jillette.. The louder half of Penn and Teller.

Penn wrote a book back in 2004. When i saw it in the book store, i said to myself, that looks awesome! The story is narrated by the sock monkey of a NYC Police Diver. Said diver runs across the body of an ex-girlfriend and spends the rest of the book determined to locate the killer and take him down. Did i mention it was narrated by a sock monkey?

The book (aptly named “Sock”) was one of the lousiest reads i have ever mucked through. The story was interesting. the characters kept me interested as the story progressed, i was surprised by the ending. the problem was the damn sock monkey. as far as narrators go, he was the most annoying, hard to follow story teller i have ever run across. i slogged through the book determined to find out who the killer was, but everytime someone asked me about the book i would tell them i hated it. it was annoying and painful to read.

I was not lying.

The monkey is overly descriptive, worse than Anne Rice, and we all know that she can describe a room for 50 pages with no difficulty. The monkey was full of itself and held itself up as if it were the worst thing ever created. it would tell stories and jokes. It would say dirty things and then put itself down for being dirty… and we are really talking 7th grade humor here.. so far from being truly dirty that it was once again annoying.

The monkey spent a fair amount of time in the past listening to the radio by itself. The damn monkey was written so that it would end nearly every paragraph with the lyrics of a song. You may think i am exaggerating, and i am, but not much. You would find odd paragraphs with no song reference, but most paragraphs… LYRICS. Just when you think you can get past the asinine phrases and buggy bits of the narrator character, he tosses out lyrics to a song. You compulsively stop what you are reading, make a mental check mark as to if you know where the lyrics come from , then continue. The continuation is painful. You FEEL the interruption.

The lyrics were occasionally witty in their placement, but more often than not they appear to have been part of a list Penn was trying to get through. A prefabricated list that if he didnt find a way to use completely, he would have felt as if his “Magic Trick” had failed. In this case, the magic trick being that Penn actually got people to finish this poorly written novel of junk phrases and decent ideas.

To be honest, though i finished it and enjoyed the core story, it took until page 112 out of 228 for it to begin to become passable. HALF the book… It became passable when the monkey got cut out a bit and we started reading text written by the killer. THOSE were fantastic passages. Kill the monkey narration by the killer. This would have been incredible.

Up until page 112, there was only one memorable paragraph.. I marked it in my book.

My honest opinion, post rant… DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. If you do, ask me for the good paragraph and then pick up on page 112. If the text gets sloppy, skip it. The pain is not worth it. I rarely hate books, but the damn sock monkey ruined this one for me. I finished it for story alone and hated the experience.