Seven and One

I haven’t read nearly enough books.

Since the summer I’ve amassed this whole pile of “shit i should have read by now” but all I’ve managed to scrape off the top so far are Brave New World, 1984, and A Clockwork Orange, and I finished each of those by the end of september. I’m right now trying to read Cat’s Cradle by Vonnegut, but it’s been relegated to that humbled position of “bathroom reading” that must be making Kurt spin in his grave. Instead I’ve spent most of my time with graphic novels, catching up on essentials of the Batman canon, or rereading Watchmen for the third time. I love them, don’t get me wrong; i completely wave the flag for the graphic novel as a legitimate literary art form. I just… feel like I should be reading Vonnegut instead. Or Kerouac. Or Rushdie. Or Joyce. Anything but another Palahniuk novel.

It’s probably because all these books i should be reading were my dad’s. I found them in a trunk full of his stuff and made it my mission to read them. Maybe I thought that if i read what he read i could get into his mind and maybe be able to more accurately simulate what he would say, a concept whose flimsiness is matched only by how inarticulately i conveyed it. But i’d probably try much stupider things at this point. He would have been 52 this month. I don’t know, I don’t want to write out something as obvious as “i miss him,” but…

Obligations have forced me to make another severely important anniversary something other than my number one priority, and the guilt i feel for that is substantial. But it’s not just guilt, and it’s not my inability to work around the obstacles and scheduling conflicts and bad-timings that arise in my life, it’s frustration at the frequency with which i have to work around obstacles and scheduling conflicts and bad-timings. It really is all the confirming proof I need of the existence a higher universal authority. But look, i’m making it all about me.

Maybe april is just a hard month for me. Of course, historically, May hasn’t exactly been a carnival, either.

Thanks to Lani, whose blog inspired this frank extrospection tonight.