I finished reading Salinger's Nine Stories today. I laughed. I haven't laughed at a book in a long time. I realized that when I was bent over and couldn't read the words on the page because I was crying I was laughing so hard. When something strikes like that, unexpectedly, in a book, it's nice. It reminded me of what it was that made me want to write in the first place. Making people laugh.
Back when I was around 9 or 10, the new kid in school, feeling awkward and unable to fit in, the only thing I knew to be was weird. So I was. I wrote bizarre stories. I remember I wrote this crazy story about a kid who gets a Barney tape for his birthday and somehow he get's so pissed off and throws a wild tantrum and burns his house down. Then he comes back from the dead, or some madness, and tries to reconcile his behavior. I told it in a funny way. I just remember standing up in front of the class, reading it; in front of teachers, classmates, parents (other people's, not mine) and I remember them laughing, really laughing and I remember thinking, this is good; this is a good feeling, I want to keep doing this.
I was talking to a friend the other day about how I was flipping through a book of e.e. cummings poems and came across one that my college writing professor used to repeat to us whenever we weren't being interesting enough, urging us to write more impassioned and less with our ability to put our commas and semi-colons in the right place. It goes like this: "since feeling is first / who pays attention / to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you;" I'd forgotten it was by cummings. I'm not even sure I ever knew. It was so random to have found it. It was random to have remembered that it came from somewhere. I was reminded of the line in the Phish song "Things are true that I forget. No one taught that to me yet."
So what have I realized in a day or so. I should strive to be funny and write with a purpose. Vonnegut says to find something I care about and that I think other people ought to care about too and to write about it. Salinger definitely is guilty of that. It was actually funny how the last story "Teddy" was so interconnected with Maugham's The Razor's Edge, which I just finished at the start of this month. I've always noticed bizarre links. I think that's God showing up in everything.
I haven't written anything new in a bit. Not since 2012 began. I'm recharging my batteries I think. I haven't traveled anywhere in a few months. That will change soon. Change happens rapidly, all at once, like a firework. One fast move and I'm gone. I think Kerouac said that. He's gone now. So is Salinger and Vonnegut and Hemingway. It sucks when all your heroes are ghosts.
