Moments  June 24th

Listen to this blog? Don’t feel like reading? Click on the image to the left to listen to me read it to you.

Yesterday I finished reading Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. It was something great. By “something great,” I don’t mean it was the best book I have ever laid my hands on – that would be his Slaughterhouse Five – but I found it rather enjoyable. A lot of the books I rate so highly I like for the smallest of details. I think I read books for their moments, rather than for their overall story.

That would explain a lot about me. It would explain all those unfinished written works in my Documents folder. I have all these unconnected blurbs and scenes that will never be connected. That’s why I’m not a novelist. I am a poet. I will never have to unite these moments with words that I don’t really mean.

But I digress. I want to tell you what struck me in Breakfast of Champions. It was the notion of “bad chemicals.” I could tell you about my bad chemicals – or I could create some literal bad chemicals if I had the means – but I won’t. First of all, I am alluding to a novel I don’t think many of you have read, and secondly, it wouldn’t make a good blog. It would make a good novel or a memoir, and I don’t really write those.

I think that’s why I like Kurt Vonnegut’s work. I’d probably like him, too, but he’s dead now. So it goes. He died the day before a presentation I had to make for my English class. I think I tried to put it in an order no one else would have. An unconventional chronology. Kind of like in Slaughterhouse Five. Except it was much less well-executed.

Anyway, I keep alluding to these books, which probably makes no sense if you haven’t read them. So, I’ll stop. Here’s something for you: Why do you like the books you like? Have you ever really thought about it? Because I did just now, and this is what happened.