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// Choking on Air 
// Story: Those Lost at Golden Oak 
// by Nihil Savant 
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	Rainbow Dash stayed the night at my old home once, and we spent the night discussing the Daring Do books. Impressed with my knowledge of those, she started picking out random books and asking me to tell her about them. And I did. This went on for a while, until she reached the conclusion that I loved books so much that I knew every book in the library. And I do. She asked if there was any book I’d ever completely hated.
I replied that, when you read as much as I do, you start to see both the good and bad in everything you read- a great book can still have a moment or a character that doesn’t work well, and a bad book can have flashes of brilliance, or at least competence. And avid reader can get something, whatever it is, out of anything they read.
But there was an exception- the book I couldn’t say anything nice about. I showed Rainbow Choking on Air.
Choking on Air is a collection of poems rather than a story, though not even twenty years ago scholars would have scoffed at the idea of calling them poems. They don’t rhyme, there’s no meter, there’s no structure. Many don’t even use punctuation or basic syntax. The sheer act of reading the thing is an assault on the eyes.
And then there’s the contents. Nothing but a constant barrage of swearing and grotesque imagery. I read one to Rainbow Dash, even she was disgusted to hear it and I was embarrassed to say it out loud. It honestly infuriated me that something this effortless and this disgusting could be published, while so many good poems and great stories never make it out of pony’s heads. These horrid ideas could have only been written by somepony completely sick.
But after Rainbow left, I couldn’t get Choking on Air out of my head. I’d held it up as the ultimate example of “bad,” the exception to the rule. I had make sure that was accurate.
A secondary reading did little to change my opinion, but it became a bit more coherent. I identified a character through all of the nonsense, a half-protagonist, half-icon called “a Scream.” Even recognizing that, the thing was just too revolting and incoherent to enjoy. But I decided to look into it’s history anyway.
The author is a stallion named Thunderush. He was diagnosed with a muscle-degenerative illness about a year before writing Choking on Air. I regret my complaints about the collection’s publication- it turns out the library’s copy was the original manuscript, given by Thunderush to a friend, who after unsuccessfully attempting to publish it, had it bound and donated to the library. His disease would leave him nearly completely paralyzed before the donation was made. Fortunately, Thunderush is still alive and recent medical advancements are helping his recovery. I’ve heard he recently regained mobility in his head and neck.
I’ve always said that good books exist outside of context, but knowing the story of it’s origin helped me change my perspective on Choking on Air. I gave the collection another look, a more studious one. The only completely grammatically correct sentence in the thing is “Are you reading this?” Found in the last poem. The anger the poems evoke in the reader is actually supposed to be there. The bile the book spews out exists to hide the underlying sadness, both by disguising it’s intent and by making the reader too overwhelmed to continue. It’s a bunch of poems about negative emotions, expressed through negative emotions, and eliciting negative emotions. Frankly, it’s genius.
That said, Choking on Air was not an enjoyable read, even when approaching it from the right perspective. Also, while I’d never want to limit pony’s freedom of expression, the expression of purely negative emotions seems destructive, and I’d rather live a constructive society. It was good, but I still don’t really like it, if that makes any sense. I’d love it if we were in a position where you could formulate your own opinion on it.