Here at Uproxx, we’ve taken a solemn vow (spoken into a clown’s mouth at a drive-thru so you know we’re serious) that we will photoshop Keanu Reeves. I’m talking about a lot of photoshopping here. And the fact that Reeves has become aware of the “Sad Keanu” meme isn’t going to deter us from pursuing more photoshops with even more hovercats. Never enough hovercats.
Now Keanu Reeves may be cashing in on all the sadness with a book called Ode To Happiness. Reeves says it had nothing to do with “the internet deal”; they made the book in August 2009. It includes 16 drawings by Alexandra Grant and will be available in a limited edition of 4000 copies costing around $50 apiece. Fifty bucks for sixteen pages? Now I’m sad.
So what’s in the book? Guardian explains:
“I draw a hot sorrow bath,” reads the first page. “In my despair room,” reads the second. Each page wallows in increasingly absurd levels of self-pity, while the accompanying blotchy, black-ink drawings, by Los Angeles artist Alexandra Grant, look as if they’ve been blurred by tears. It culminates with an image of a bleeding black spot and the line: “It can always be worse.”
Well, that’s pleasant. But it’s not as bad as it sounds; Reeves tells Guardian he started writing it while “self-pitying, nostalgic music” was playing on the radio when he was with his friend Janey Bergam (also the book’s editor), and the lines he was writing were making her laugh. Then Bergam’s friend, Alexandra Grant, put pictures to the words and gifted it back to Reeves as an in-joke. And now for the low, low price of $3 per page you can buy someone else’s inside joke you had no hand in creating or witnessing. Yay?
Reeves says he’d like to write another book:
“I’m considering another idea I call Haikus of Hope. Basically like, ‘I want to kill myself’, and go from there. Going into such a dark place that you can somehow surprisingly find the light at the end of the tunnel – but a nice end of the tunnel. Not the end of the tunnel.”
I should have taken the blue pill.