The Last Part, 6

Eliza and the smartest-man-that-ever-lived walked in silence for a few minutes. Now only two blocks from the library, Eliza spoke up, “If you were that good at reading when you were that little, then how come you haven’t read since then?”
Whether it was the headache or the weather or a really quick and kind of early mid-life crisis, we will never know, but for some reason he told Eliza everything. Every single thing.

They were standing on the steps of the library when he finished. He told her everything right up to the present, even what they had said to each other minutes ago in the simplest way he could. She listened listlessly, but attentively. He cried a little. She tightened her mouth in apparent cogitation and finally asked, “Why’d you want to be all alone?”

“I didn’t want to be alone, I wanted people to respect me, love me, hate me, ignore me, amaze me, amuse me, argue with me, bewilder me, correct me, mug me…” He stopped, looked at his feet, then continued, “I wanted them to at least try to believe that I wasn’t an alien. I just wanted to be normal.” He blew his nose.

Eliza punched him in the nose. She didn’t even wait for him to finish wiping his upper lip. She just socked him. She didn’t knock him over, but he sat down anyway. “Why did you do that?” he sniffled. Blood was running out of his nose.

“Because you lied to me. I can’t believe I was stupid enough to believe you, I mean, you started out pretty well, you were funny, in a ridiculous sorta way. Come on, a genius baby? But I thought, ‘Eh he’s cute, maybe I’ll let him take me out for a drink.’ But noooo, you’ve got to try the whole sob story thing about not being accepted by your parents and your peers. And then, and then, you start crying? Give me a break.” She went on, and angrily at that. “Well guess what? If any of what you said is true then you’ve got to be the dumbest-man-that-ever-lived. And…” She was getting ahead of herself. “…you know, the most abnormal thing you did was get hit by a bus, I wouldn’t have even noticed you otherwise. Even dogs know that the normal are lonely.” And she stomped off into the library, cracking her knuckles.

The so-called genius walked home with a little bloody piece of tissue hanging out of his left nostril.

Part 5

“No” he replied.

“Ya sure?” she questioned again.

“No” He did die, or at least some think that part of him did, but that is not where the story ends.
Eliza helped him up and asked him why he was lying in the street. He said that he thought he was hit by a bus. She said he probably was and asked him where he was going.

“To the library” he said.

“What for?” she said.

“Books” he said.

“Me too” She said.

His head hurt a lot, and he worried about amnesia. He thought being hit by a bus and losing his memory or his above average intelligence just as he was on his way to regain it and do something for once would be just perfect for a dime novel or a soap opera. But he was just as smart as he ever was, but his head hurt a lot too. So he didn’t try to do math or cure cancer or anything like that on the rest of the walk to the library. Instead he asked Eliza what she liked to read. She told him she liked to read anything over a thousand pages. He told her that he hadn’t read anything for fun since he was seventeen months old,

“and that wasn’t really for fun, that was to create a religion”

“Did it work?” She asked.

“Yes”

“What’s it like?”

“Oh, it’s a little of this and a little of that and a lot of Tolstoy.”

“I just finished War and Peace” she lied.

“What’d you think of it?”

“It’s good.”

Part 4

The next morning he walked to the public library. It was rather dark and cold for nine in the morning. Clouds and fog and drizzle will do that. He could afford to miss work, well, he wasn’t really missing anything. The computers in the corner of his kitchen/living room didn’t know the difference between Thursday and Saturday. He had only a vague idea of what he meant to check out of the library. He knew it was three books, big books, but that was about all he could sum up as far as books went. What he was summing up was the square roots of every crack in the sidewalk, that on an average day there was over ten thousand dollars in the parking meters downtown alone, and a simple cure for color-blindness. His mind began to mesh, not race. As his fear and laziness melted away, every part of his mind turned and twisted and molded as pieces of a puzzle and slid together into a solid shiny block without a center or circumference. It all came back with the weight of a bus and the sound of pressurized air releasing. A young woman’s voice, he would later know as the voice of Eliza, came questioning from above, through mist or sewer steam a few feet away, “You dead?”

Just a thought

You may ask how it is that I can remember these monologues, given so many, many years ago, so extensively. It is not that I have a remarkable memory for such things; on the contrary, I am making them up. What? What's this? I have just broken a, rather, the rule of writing! I have revealed myself as a fraud! I have reminded you that I am not real! It's all farce! No, I am not real. Yes, it is all farce. "Call me Ishmael." I am made up by a man named Herman Melville. He is made up by many people all over the world all the time, but right now, Luke is making up him who makes me up. Luke is made up by God. I do not know who makes up God, maybe God's God. I can only hope that somewhere in my book there is a minor character that makes up people too, and one of them, Joseph Herrington, say, makes up John Pumperhower, who makes up, Carol Stennington, who makes up Charles Kilbody, who makes up Sara Nantle, who makes up Rover, who makes up puppies, who make up cuteness, which makes up kittens, who make up meows, which make up God, who makes up Luke, who makes up Herman, who makes up me, or something like that. That is how I can live. That is my only hope.

My 11th Vonnegut novel in 90 days:

I make no apologies for having been zapped during my darkest days in high school. Winston Churchill was bombed out of his skull on brandy and Cuban cigars during the darkest days of World War II. --p.40

Jennifer Louise, you don't know me but we're cousins.

I once wrote that there is a fine line between writing and verbal diarrhea. I now know that I have no power over that line.

something i heard when i might have been awake:
"Tuesdays are apple pie days."
"But what about my mother's birthday?"

My sister doesn't change, neither do my brothers. I insist on making life a life-changing experience.

Yesterday I fell down a flight of stairs. I broke nine ribs and fractured my skull.

Just kidding.

Seriously--comma--space--I didn't fall down at all yesterday I just wanted to see if you were still listening.

I saw a really fat squirrel yesterday. It moved slowly.

I'm often reminded of a man that went down Niagara falls in a six foot rubber ball and received only minor bruises. He was ridiculed as a coward, and people started using barrels again. We need more of that these days.

a story in n parts, part 3

The encounter with the psychologist was so close or, rather, the psychologist’s encounter with the Great White Flame was so powerful that the psychologist, being completely unprepared and far too normal to even experience the Great White Flame became immediately and permanently blind. The light also bleached all of the melanin in his facial skin and hair. The child was deeply upset by this, and by the crap in his pants, and consequently decided to stop exercising his abnormal intelligence forever.

Instead of quitting cold turkey as before, he decided to slowly phase out his abnormality. His first goal was to match the intelligence of his parents’ by the time he went to school. The most productive method, he quickly learned, was to stop caring about any one thing for more than a few minutes at a time. Some things, though, he allowed his attention to hold for up to several hours. One of these things was the ceiling fan above his playpen in the living room. He would lie on his back, silently, and stare at the blades slowly rotating for hours, usually not thinking of anything more than matching his breath to their rotations.

Over the next few years he became merely fodder for tabloids, his apathy grew inversely proportional to the decline of his apparent intelligence, and he drifted from the ceiling fan to the pattern of the bathroom wallpaper to his meandering model trains. By age five he scored a very respectable yet disappointing to his parents and their doctors, 151 on a standardized IQ test, the doctors left entirely and dismissed the child’s apathy and apparent self-absorption on his above average intelligence and the over stimulation he received as an infant. He was awarded a clean bill of health, and his parents were advised to enroll him in a good school.

They did. Through most of grammar school the child seemed to follow his parents’ footsteps. Like his mother he entered middle school at the age of eight, had few friends, and received perfect scores on all of his work, but unlike his mother, who cried for sixteen hours the first time she got a B, he was not at all upset with his first less than perfect grade. Like his father he always did the assigned work that influenced his grade and not a drop of any other work, he always swang on the swings silently for the whole of his recess, and read nothing for pleasure. “I don’t like books, why’d you re-wallpaper the bathroom?” he once said.

By middle school his grades and IQ began to drop. He still had never given an incorrect answer. He merely stopped completing assignments. His parents tried passively to influence him, to encourage him to complete his assignments, to make him understand that they would like him more if they had a reason to be proud of him. But he didn’t care about them, and honestly his parents never got over the disappointment of his normalness. He didn’t really care about anything anymore. He didn’t care if he was alone, he didn’t care to be alone.

On the IQ test administered for acceptance at the prestigious private high school his parents went to he scored a 138 and left the last third of it blank. The school admitted him gleefully and he convinced his parents to let him live in the dorms.

Both High school and his four years at college, William and Mary, went by rather uneventfully. His IQ dropped another 10 points on paper, he had sex a total of 19 times with four different girls, none of whom he loved, he smoked marijuana six times, tried cocaine twice, smiled 17,632 times, only once was accidentally, he got drunk a lot, especially in college, and he began smoking cigarettes on his eighteenth birthday when a friend suggested he buy a pack. He chain smokes to this day.

On his thirtieth birthday he found himself living alone in a three-room apartment with eleven dead houseplants all given to him from his mother. He designed web pages for a living for the last eight years, and drank half a pint of Jack Daniel’s to wash down his last four cigarettes every night for the last three and a half years. But on the seventh of June, thirty years after he was born he wasn’t drinking or smoking, he was thinking for the first time, how unsuccessful his plan was. So, he began to devise another.

20 months

For those of you who don't know. It's been a long time since I got my hair cut. I've been sporting a goatee and curly hair to my shoulders. If it were entirely up to me, I'd never cut, shave, or pluck any of my hair, but it's not up to me. I have to look respectable for my job. Any and all suggestions for hairstyles are welcome. Remember, I must be clean-shaven and look "respectable."

a story in n parts, part 2

His plan was simple. It would be difficult, require unbelievable amounts of self-control, self-analysis, and humility, but still amazingly simple. This was his plan: act normal. He already knew how the average human his height, weight, age, and social status acted. He was constantly surrounded by professionals: physicians, psychologists, biologists, sociologists, and even a few crazy clergymen, who were all always comparing him to “a normal child,” “the average eight-month-old” and so on. He decided to begin immediately. He stopped talking, stopped anal-retentively making his crib, stopped composing poetry, and he even gave up his favorite pastime, making fun of people in his head. In fact, in a matter of a few days he was able to control almost all of his above average brain activity to the point that he even began to forget how smart he really was. This upset him a little bit, so he allowed himself to exercise his full cranial computing capacity on the seventh of every month, his mensiversary.

By his first birthday, his plan was quite successful. Most of the professionals had left, or were working on his parents. Sixteen books were written about his superhuman infancy, one of which was titled, 242 Days of Divinity. Twelve of the books went to great lengths to discount the tests and puzzles and to discredit the doctors that observed him, even the sound recording of his first nine words, (and his last nine until he said, “Momma” nine months later) was “proven” a hoax. One of these twelve books was entitled, Nothing but a Normal Nerd’s Neonate.

On the seventh of October, his 16th mensiversary, he taught himself to read when his parents luckily let him watch closed captioning on C-span with his near deaf grandfather. On the seventh of September he read War and Peace, The Bible, and Moby Dick. On the seventh of November he contemplated these three works and composed a personal philosophy and religion. Twice during the month of November, much to his dismay, he lapsed. He found himself overcome with the desire to practice his religion. The second time he put his situation in grave danger by attempting to become one with the Great White Flame when the last of the psychologists walked in. In a beautiful moment of quick wit, he shat himself and started bawling.

My Cousin's 3-month-old is named Dylan.

I've never done any "creative writing" for a class before. That's why I'm so bad at it. Mark Helprin is teaching a two week class thingy next semester. There are 14 kids that want to take it. There's only room for 12. Therefore, we all must write a ten to twelve page short story by Dec. 3rd. I'm working on it, but it's kinda hard. I hate deadlines. Maybe I'll just buy off/beat up two of the kids I like the least. Oh, I'm going here tonight.

SILLY RABBITS

They all cared about the same things. They all wanted to eat good food, drink good drinks, see people feel better, feel better about themselves, sleep a lot, work enough to feel productive, and screw like bunny rabbits.

No one could ever do all these things all the time, but the bunny rabbits still wanted to. A few of the bunny rabbits wore respectable thimbles on their ears. No one knew if they were respectable because they wore the thimbles or if they wore the thimbles because they were respectable, but that didn’t matter either because about 98.9% of the bunny rabbits knew that thimbles equaled respectability, and respectability meant leadership and leadership meant telling everyone else where to get good food, drink good drinks, etc.

The problem was that half of the thimbles disagreed with the other half of the thimbles. The half that promised personal fulfillment to everyone’s basic desires, and consequently universal salvation, would come from nibbling on the left side of one’s lower lip wore blue thimbles, the half that promised fulfillment to everyone’s basic desires, and consequently universal salvation, would come from nibbling on the right side of one’s lower lip wore red thimbles.

The red thimble wearers and the blue thimble wearers had many complex and convincing arguments for their respective lip sides and many simple arguments too. All the bunny rabbits that liked the red thimbles’ arguments knew that the blue thimbles were screwing it all up, they had it all totally backward, they were on the completely wrong side of the lower lip; it even made them look funny. And all the bunny rabbits that liked the blue thimbles’ arguments knew that the red thimbles were screwing it all up, they had it all totally backward, they were on the completely wrong side of the lower lip; it even made them look funny. So all the bunny rabbits that couldn’t agree about lip sides (98.9%) were forced to depend on the crazy bunny rabbits that didn’tbelieve nibbling their lower lips would help at all (1%).

These crazies were easily recognized by the lack of blood on their chin from lip nibbling. Some had scar tissue on one side of their lower lip or the other, and some had scars on both sides. These few “crazy” rabbits(1%) pretty much nibbled their right toes or their left toes in order to save everyone and the world. The left toers’ leaders wore green thimbles, and the right toers’ leaders wore brown thimbles. These rabbits were obviously crazy because they couldn’t walk and nibble at the same time, (but these immobile nibblers did get very flexible in their motionless states.)

But anyway, the normal people (98.9%) were condemned by their disagreement with each other to keep a very close eye on the crazies’ bloody spots because the tie was so close that one little lower lip nibble just left or right of the middle (usually in desperation at a useless bloody toe) could give the reds or the blues 49.46%, a majority. Then most of the rabbits could stop nibbling on themselves for four more years unless someone rudely mentioned nibbling at the dinner table or in the break room or something like that.

Oh, all unscarred bloodless rabbits (about .1%, (there were two of them, they didn’t want to save the world, they just wanted to save some of it, and they started by saving their body parts from their incisors)) were condemned as selfish and apathetic. They didn’t count.

tomorrow will be a sad day in american history

So there goes the Junior Prom...
vonnegut once again being wonderfully riduculously
right to be wrong
when it all doesn't matter anymore
...but that's not the half of it