At this point, I realize that a) this whole process has been really weird, b) he’s just admitted that he’d make assumptions about Chuck Klosterman if he wasn’t Chuck Klosterman, and c) interviewing an interviewer about interviews makes this a really meta-meta-meta moment. I can’t help but blurt out this last point.
“That’s all my life is now!” he says, throwing his hands in the air. “That’s all it is!”

I have yet to mention that all day long, Klosterman’s been wearing a T-shirt that says FICTIONAL CHARACTER. So here’s an assumption: despite painting himself like a lucky bastard with a solid work ethic and a populist sensibility, this public Chuck Klosterman is both an invention and a calculation, consisting of both his own premeditated design and other peoples’ projections. And he knows it. By wearing those two words on his chest all day, he’s telling everybody that he is whatever you think he is. Genius, bullshit artist, entertainer, asshead. If you view him as an accessible author who feels like a drinking buddy, that’s who he is. If you have no clue who this weird guy with the shaggy reddish-blond hair is, then he’s a nobody. If you think he’s an opinionated dick who’s growing a brain in public, it’s your prerogative. Making judgments based on other peoples’ personas is how he has constructed his own persona.

“I’m incredibly self-aware, but I don’t have a great sense of self,” he says. “Your sense of me is so much more accurate than mine. Totally is. Anybody who’s not me, I think, has a better sense of me than I do.”

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Camille Dodero: cdodero@thephoenix.com