What's that old saw? Sometimes you write the song, sometimes the song writes you?
Well, sometimes a hitchhiker gets shot on the side of the road while researching a memoir called "The Kindness of America" in violent and ironic embodiment of inchaote social dissolution that troubles the premise of self-based optimism first glimpsed in Leaves of Grass and later mythologized in On The Road, and, well...sometimes that hitchhicker shoots himself.
PoliticOlogy reported a few days ago that Raymond Dolin, the aforementioned hitchhiker/memorist, was shot in an apparently random drive-by while trying to hitch a ride in Montana. Dolin claimed that after pick-up had pulled alongside him, the driver rolled down the window, shot him, and sped off. A suspect was arrested following an hours-long manhunt, and Dolin was said to be recovering well.
That story broke down Thursday night, when Dolin confessed to shooting himself in what Montana authorities are calling "a desperate act of self-promotion." Dolin, a freelance photographer, had recently taken a bus from West Virginia to Montana to begin his "research," and was barely into said research when he shot himself and concocted the story of the drive-by.
Lloyd Christopher Danielson III, the man arrested for shooting Dolin, was released on Thursday after Dolin's confession, though Danielson had been driving drunk at the time of being arrested (no word on whether he just claimed to be driving drunk to promote his book). No charges have been filed yet against Dolin, who remains in the hospital, and no other details have been released, as Montana authorities are, if anecdotal evidence is any indication, standing around water coolers, shaking their heads in disbelief, and saying variations of, "I tell ya, truth really is stranger than fiction."
Anyway, it turns out that this was not a random, violent event, but actually a completely explicable example of our culture of overexposure, celebrity and self-promotion. I don't know if that's better or worse. But for the record, PoliticOlogy did flag the fact you can't, by definition, research a memoir as evidence that something about Dolin's story didn't quite smell right.
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