Technically, the title of this post should be “Just Finished Reading,” but that doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. So please forgive my little white lie.
I picked up this book at the Denver airport on my way back to Taiwan, after spending a month with my family in Colorado. I’ll be honest, money is a little tight right now (in case any of you are inclined to buy a painting, now is a great time) so I had to force myself to narrow down my book choices to just one. If you know me, you know what a near-impossible task this is. I love shopping for books almost as much as I love reading them, and English books are few and far between in Taiwan…. So those airport bookstores are a treasure trove.
How, you ask, did I land on this one? For one simple reason: the author. A couple of years ago I read a book by Kevin Wilson called Nothing to See Here and oh my God, I don’t think I’ve ever laughed that hard at a book ever in my adult life. It’s wild and absurd and absolutely the most fun ever.
So when I saw his name in that airport bookstore, I didn’t even need to know what this next book was about. I was sold. And despite the handful of other books I’d already meticulously chosen and carried around for twenty minutes, I had a winner… without even reading the description on the back.
Having gone in blind, Now is Not the Time to Panic was about as pleasant a surprise as any book I’ve ever read. It was not, as I expected after Nothing to See Here, a side-busting comedy. But it felt like it was written specifically for me, and that feeling is somehow even better than wiping away tears of wild laughter.
The story follows a couple of oddball teenagers in a small town in the 90s with nothing much to do (hello, my childhood) but to be oddballs together. He’s an artist, she’s a writer, and at sixteen they both feel like the summer is dragging on. That is, until they discover some fun to be had with a giant broken copy machine in her garage.
Together they fix it up and create hundreds of copies of a weird poster they‘d designed together—a combination of his strange drawings and her strange words—which they then distribute in random places around town.
Okay, let’s pause.
At this point, I’m hooked. If you knew me as a teenager, you might remember that I used to make these weird little colorful magnetic cards that said things like “Happy Wednesday!” on them. I would come to school early and put them on random lockers every couple of weeks, and they became an amusing kind of mystery throughout my high school.
A few people knew that it was me, but I think most people didn’t. I really don’t know. I do know of at least a couple of lockers that were full of them, as people started to try and collect more than their friends. I know the custodian collected them, too.
Eventually I started distributing them around town, on whatever magnetic surfaces I could find—stop signs, grocery store shelves, car doors, park benches—nothing was off limits. It was thrilling in the sort of way that being a weird teenager is always thrilling, and I never had a good explanation for it when people asked me why I did it.
Truthfully, I thought I had no other reason than that I had the materials available to me and it didn’t seem like an idea I could not act on, once the idea occurred to me. Of course, now as an adult I can think back on it, and reflect that a big part of it was probably that longing that I think most teenagers have: to do something meaningful and different and rebellious, but not too rebellious. To be seen but invisible, praised but mysterious, understood and misunderstood all at once.
Alright, back to the book. You can see how it reeled me right in, how I was thrilled to find that feeling again, of putting something weird all around town for everyone to see and wonder about. It’s exciting, to be a weird teenager acting on your weirdness. And that’s exactly what these characters do.
In my world, the worst that happened was that maybe a few people were annoyed, or threw them in the trash, or called me a litterbug. In Now is Not the Time to Panic, however, things really escalate for the characters.
The posters cause a town-wide panic when someone accuses them of having originated from Satan-worshippers. Things spiral quickly out of control, leaving the actual teenage creators wondering whether it was a good idea after all. They go back and forth, debating whether what they’ve done was irresponsible or dangerous, or whether it was everyone else who made it so.
The panic spreads beyond their little town and throughout the rest of the country, and all the while these overwhelmed teens refuse to say a word about where the posters came from.
I don’t want to get into any spoilers, so my synopsis will stop there. But after finishing it, I was left with more than just a feeling of nostalgia about my own weird youthful shenanigans—it left me considering a lot more about art and the power of the things we create.
How much of our art is our own responsibility? Do we have an obligation to consider the effect it might have on the world around us? Or is it naive to think we even have an ounce of control over that?
Once the things we create are out in the world, I’m not sure that they really belong to us anymore. In some ways, I think that’s what stops a lot of people from sharing their art at all—or even from making it in the first place. We want to cling to what we were seeing and thinking and feeling while we were making the art, and we’re afraid that other people will just ruin it. We’re afraid that we’ll be misunderstood. Just like we were when we were kids.
Anyway. I’m no book critic, and I’m not even sure that this counts as a review. But I finished this book and I couldn’t help but let it whirl around in my brain until I wrote about what it made me feel. And that, I think, is the mark of a really powerful work of art.
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