The Invisible Library

I just got back from my quest to find Father’s Day cards (Oh, how I hate the Halmark Company and their fake holidays!!! But that’s another story). I prefer to get the blank cards so I can write my own messages because, frankly the mass produced sentiments are either stupid, schmaltzy or both. But the only blank cards I could find today (and I went to three places) all had American flags on the cover. Which just proves what I’ve suspected for some time: patriotic flag waving is just a mask for vapid sentiment.

This message braught to you by your local chapter of the Snarky Pessamist’s Society. Support your local SPS. Or don’t. They won’t like you either way.

The First Rule is, Buy Your Own Flowers…

I was talking about Mrs. Dalloway with my wife the other night, how, even though I love Virginia Wolff’s prose, the way she builds sentences and uses words, I didn’t like the book. I had thought about it for some time and came to the conclusion that it was because Mrs. Dalloway is a book written explicitly for women. Now normally I don’t buy into the gender warfare crap. I love the Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington and have read a few Agatha Christy stories that were really good. But I just didn’t get Mrs. Dalloway. I wanted something to happen. Anything. But it never did.

Elvira (El-vee-ta) said how she understood it because every other character in the book, no matter how trivial was centered around Clarisa Dalloway in such an intricate manner, that you didn’t need for anything to happen, that it was all about repression and how one women finds ways to act out through the lives of others and escape her own restrictions, even the ones that were self imposed.

This got me thinking. I realized that there was a men’s book that was a direct corollary to Mrs. Dalloway: Fight Club. Everyone in Chuck Palahniuk’s book is obsessed with Tyler Durden from Marla to the Narator. It’s only at the end that the Narrator realizes he is Tyler Durden and that he’s been trying to find a way out of his own repressed situations, some of which, like the ones with Marla, are self imposed. Of course in Fight Club, he reaizes this through acts of terrorism.

But that’s the difference between Mrs. Wolff and Mr. Palahniuk, between women and men: when men are frustrated and feel trapped by society, we beat the crap out of other frustrated men; women go buy flowers for a dinner party.

Soul of an Old Poet

I met an Old Poet at the cemetery gates one day when I was just a boy. We walked and talked and I asked him if he was here to visit someone and he says to me, he says, “Son, I’m here to lay my old bones next to my wife who died here thirty years ago today.” And he goes on and tells me, “My soul’s heavy and I’m tired a caryin” it ’round this here old world. Good soul though, served me well and kept me out of some things and gotten me into others and it’s a shame to just give it up so…”

I say to him, “I’ll buy that old soul from you, so you’ll know it’ll be in a good place.” And I offered him a bottle of wine I’d brought with me to feed to my grandpa’s ghost. The Old Poet, he drank the whole thing down in one gulp and then corked the bottle and handed it to me and then lay down right there on his old woman’s grave and died.

I’ve still got the bottle. It’s at home on my windowsill, still corked. One day I’ll take that bottle down and pop the cork and listen to the Old Poet’s soul, swinging from the trees and laughing at the Moon.