First, I apologize for NOT KNOWING the title of a book I recommended a while back on the Great Books thread. The Catcher-in-the-Rye-type book is called: The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky. It’s short and sweet, and I highly recommend it.
JJuggle, who dropped out of college to pursue a lucrative carreer as the Motorcycle Maintenance Man for the “Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club–Philosophy Branch,” was discussing Zen and Motorcycles as follows:
First, will somebody break the news to JJuggle that philosophical concepts DO NOT apply to “actual living.”
I took JJuggle’s course in “Actual Living” along with my classmates Franny and Zooey, but I’m still doing Virtual Living. It was a GAFF (Get an A For Free) class, so it didn’t matter.
JJuggle doesn’t mind me revealing that, when he applied to college, they didn’t have Google for detecting plagiarism, so he used the Guidebook to write all his college essays about Zen and Motorcycles. Of course, he didn’t get into Harvard, because they don’t want any more Holden Caulfield-type suicidal freshman who’s favorite book is about a mental patient wandering around the country looking for his memory.
In a [movie] Adaptations moment, we find Pirsig riding the country on his motorcycle, reading the Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, then discovering he’s not riding around the country at all, but actually only riding around in his own mind, then he goes through a door that takes him into the experience of Being JJuggle, and John Malkovitch is next in line behind him.
Next he finds himself cruising down a shute on a motorcycle and ends up on a highway…
In an “AHA” moment, he realizes with enormous gratitude that Being JJuggle is a variable interval reward system, and he’ll never give it up.
