I am the avenging sword of taste and decency.
A couple of years ago I read an article on Cracked called Five Classic Novels That Bring The Funny. I hadn’t heard of two of the books on the list so I picked them up. Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole was one of those two books.
It’s about an unemployed (or occasionally employed) modern day Don Quixote named Ignatius J. Reilly. Even though he is 30 years-old, he lives with his widowed mother. He lets her foot the bills until she finally makes him get a job to help out. Everyone family seems to have one, right?
Speaking of that, my brother’s 30th birthday is coming up very soon. I’ll have to stop by my parents’ house (where he lives). I guess I could have grabbed him a copy of Confederacy of Dunces, but I figured he’d get more use out of the breathalyzer I bought him.
Anyways, back to good old Ignatius… Ignatius is completely delusional and the rest of the world just doesn’t seem to live up to standards. He’s not the type to keep that a secret either, which causes all sorts of entertaining mayhem. He is the guy that you laughed at in school. He is the guy that your office mates snicker about by the water cooler. Well, that is until one of his grand ideas comes to a head.
In an attempt to not ruin the story for anyone else, I’ll stop there and instead tell you a little about the Ignatius I used to work with. He was socially awkward to the extreme. Think Milton off of Office Space.
He was the type that couldn’t be bothered with grocery shopping because that involved going out in public. He eventually started ordering MREs off the Internet because he could have a month’s worth of food delivered to work. Yes, delivered to work. You wouldn’t want the delivery people knowing where you lived would you… He’d have me help load them into his car when they showed up.
If he didn’t eat food that comes in a little pouch, he was ordering carry out from local restaurants under a fake name (apparently so the FBI wouldn’t know he liked wet burritos or black olives on his pizza). He eventually got himself fired on account of behavior that is highly frowned upon at most places.
