Dear readers: this will be my final book review. I’m dying, bitches. No joke. My legs crapped out, and I went to the vet last week and she laid down the cold, hard truth: I have wobbly hedgehog syndrome, the #1 killer of domesticated hedgehogs. Call it poetic justice for all the jokes I made about WHS in the past, but, hey, life’s a bitch. Any literary ‘hog could’ve told you that. This will be my last review on Tumblr, but I still have one last surprise for you assholes, so stay tuned. But why spend my last days on earth sulking when I could be reading? So I picked a book that covers my two favorite topics: drinking and death.

I’m not going to lie. I choked up a couple of times while reading Drinking With Men because of my particular situation. Community, conversation, confession: these are all foreign concepts to a hedgehog, but you can bet they start to flow once I have a little Jameson in me. There’s a lot of reflection on death and aging in this book, which seems inevitable when you’re drinking. Schaap writes that at a bar, “There’s safety in superficiality, in not letting things get too deep or too personal.” I may be a humble hedgehog with excellent typing skills, but goddamn, did that shit strike me in the quills. Let me put away my sarcasm for a nanosecond. I started this review series because I was bored in my cage, and I wanted to talk shit about the books I was reading. Little did I know it would mean so much to me, and I would hear so many nice things from you floating Internet heads. I think I’m allowed to be mushy now that I’m sick; I’m so grateful that the Internet welcomes bitchy, literate hedgehogs. Otherwise, I would’ve died of boredom. (Err, too soon?) Anyway, I couldn’t think of a more fitting book to end this series. So tonight, when you go to your regular bar, have a shot for me. Or two. I don’t know what lies ahead for me, but I know I’m going to need books and booze to get through it.

Clementine, out.

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