Photo by Leland Francisco[/add_caption_link]


reader, reader, reader. slow down. i’m not saying it’s your fault. i’m saying i just had sort of a bad day and night wasn’t nice, either, i had the kind of night where you figure out by the end of it, when you reach it and you’re still awake, that if there’s anything to be learned from the whole experience, it’s this: “you’re not the only one who didn’t sleep last night.” i’m saying i got into a small argument about whether or not people still think in absolutes about good and evil and i wound up arguing from ignorance and you know how much i hate doing ugly, cynical things like arguing from ignorance. even for the right reasons, it still turns my stomach. that was a lie, i’m sorry. it’s just that i’m afraid that kind of thinking will eventually turn me ugly and cynical, and i don’t want to be like that. i want to be a pretty and unique snowflake, like you, sophisticated, charming reader.

i have a professor who has complimentary habits of swearing and saying “te tum te tum” in place of “et cetera.” he reminds me of a thing a kid in my fourth grade class said when we all went on a field trip to the nursing home. (the trip was supposed to do something to make us learn something about old people or something.) she said, “i like them, they’re so cute.” i have since then never had a violent impulse. hadn’t had one before, coincidentally, i just neglect to mention things out of convenience sometimes.

this is what happens, all day every day, when the worry of your life, the real one, most-reminded one, is what you will say when people ask you what you think of chekhov or james joyce or william faulkner when you haven’t read any of them. not “haven’t read enough of them.” fuck that. when you have read enough of them to get into an embarrassing conversation with a person who has read more books than you (PWHRMBTY) about the subject, but not enough to get out of it unembarrassed.

pwhirrmbutty. that’s my semester. when talking to strangers, “how’s your semester?” is a fancy and stable middle-ground to climb back upon when the bottom falls out. i think that’s what i’m going to say, now. my semester is pwhirrmbuty, up and down, through and through, nothing but it, and i love it and love it.

and love it. the self-abnegation, i mean. it’s good for you. taken in equal doses with actual reading, it’s probably like boiled kale served with boiled chicken: tasteless; useful.

one more thing: i had a dream my mother was making my bed while i was in it, folding me with the sheets. i now realize my whole preoccupation with vomiting and cleaning in my fiction- where it came from- i puked on her twice in one year. when i was in kindergarten. it was traumatic for both of us and realizing this, now, i just hope, no, i know, deep down, that we are capable finally of getting over such a calamity- the vomiting-on, the being-vomited-on- i look at this less as a chance for healing as for growth.

that doesn’t mean anything. it literally lacks a meaning. and i am fine with it, reconciled to it, i will look in the mirror after my shower and put on my wrinkly shirt without drying off and think pathetically about The Graduate- the swimming pool scene, etc. i will tie my only tie around my neck, which, also, is my only one. and i will preen as hard as that sentence- into the mirror, into the morning on my way to the bus, into the bus, and so on, te tum te tum te tum, till i finish.

finally, i’d like to take this chance to talk about your shoes, and how they’re really yours. i mean, you’ve really done something special to them. you’ve put your mark on them, and it’s a good mark- it’s an “i own these shoes” kind of mark. it has certainly improved their aesthetic value. they are as pretty as you. this isn’t to say you’re as pretty as your shoes: don’t make me mince words. what i’m saying, really, is that you have done something very special to those worldly objects with your feet, just by existing inside them, with your feet, and it’s something absolutely nobody else in the history of mankind could’ve pulled off in the same way. your shoes are masterpieces, reader. every pair, as long as you’ve lived and will live. i’ve always thought that about you. i’m glad i’ve finally got the chance to say it.