Litany, Vonnegut Style

Tomorrow will be the one month anniversary of my last exam. It will also be the day when I start work again. I didn't plan a month break, although perhaps I needed it. Perhaps I didn't. Over the last month I have hung mostly around the house, this 400 sq ft cottage, cleaning, cooking, and going out to shop and buy things to improve our lives: photo albums, a camera, an address book, a grater, etc. My latest acquisition was a hanging basket for food in the kitchen. A lot of spending for someone who has no income.

Not to mention food. I have cooked most nights, and am convinced that cooking is almost as expensive as eating out. I go to the grocery store every day to buy some bok choy, shiitake mushrooms, tofu or potatoes. I've become a much better cook, though.

This break, also, has not been good for me. A month's collective guilt (over spending money) and boredom. I've read 5 novels, most of a book of literary criticism, and many poems. I read a Latin grammar as if it were a novel. I've resisted the urge to become one of those crazy scrapbooking ladies. It's been tempting. I have written very little. Only a handful of journal entries and one poem.

I guess this boredom and guilt complex came to a head within the past few days. The day before yesterday I began to feel very bad, but didn't know why. I had read an entire novel and went on a long walk with Thom, his friend, and his friend's two big dogs. I also watched to short films by the independent filmmaker Kenneth Anger, so that way I have a name to drop when talking to people who like independent film. I don't drop a lot of names, though, unless I know I'm in the company of people who won't be impressed by them, either because they've never heard the name, or because they are too familiar with the name to be impressed. On a normal scale, this would be a pretty good, productive day. But it wasn't good enough, apparently. I didn't tell Thom.

Yesterday Thom was in a good mood, but you know, it just comes out that you're unhappy when you're around someone who loves you. The day before, my manager had also left a message on our machine, asking if I could work. Perhaps this is what crushed me, or maybe it was that I couldn't figure out why I was so crushed by being asked to work. I realized then that a month of being exposed to no one else but Thom and my own thoughts and the landlord's cat and clerks at places like Harris Teeter and Bed Bath and Beyond had pretty much crippled my ability to deal with reality. I cried before Thom left, and he gave me what I wanted, which was essentially permission to ignore the message, even though he had deleted it from the machine the night before. After he left I went back to reading my novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, and finished it in a couple of hours. Two novels in two days.

I felt kind of OK when Thom was at work, but I was not very motivated and I barely did any cooking and no cleaning. I had to walk up to main street, a walk of a mile, I'd say, to pick up Thom's Jeep, which was in the shop. I then drove to the library to see Cassius (by the way, the two dogs we walked with are named Cassius and Brutus), who I have not seen in over a month. One of my biggest problems with Cassius, man not dog, was that he would take up so much of my time. We became friends in January, and by April he was inviting himself over to my house once or twice a week and spending time with me in 6 or 8 hour chunks. Then Cassius and I got in an argument, and I wrote him a long email, telling him what he had done and why he made me so mad, and we didn't speak much after that, agreeing that I would contact him when I felt ready. I guess I felt as ready as I was ever going to, so we met. We just sat around and talked, about poetry and movies and stuff, and our visit was a record 2 hours, record because of its shortness. I had planned to go to the store after I left Cassius, and buy some food and cook dinner, but I just didn't feel like it. I listened to my new CD that Thom bought me two days before, by the band Camera Obscura. I listened to a little David Bowie, too. I love David Bowie on a couple of different levels. His music is good, yes, but that's not why I mainly love him. I love him because he set himself up as an icon, and when the going gets rough, you can just look at pictures of David Bowie all dressed up. You don't feel bad, as if he were a model and you feel that you should look like that. No, he's just pretty and weird and had a bunch of photos taken of himself. You can just look at him without feeling shallow or depressed, or that you're wasting your time. This is a gift that few people have been able to give.

Back to Camera Obscura. The new CD only came out 4 days ago. The chorus of the first song goes like this:

Hey, Lloyd, I'm ready to be heartbroken

Because I can't see farther than own nose at this moment.

This song helped a little. It's a good song with a good tune and I began to think about my own nose, which is the cottage and the Kurt Vonnegut novels and the grocery store and the habit of feeling grateful for everything that I have so that I don't have to feel bad for having things that other people don't. So I might as well go back to work, to serve coffee and help people find books and be servile, so that way I can see other people's noses, too.

When Thom got home, I'd barely done anything, though. I'd put the laundry away. I guess I told him about my day, and at some point I began to cry. It wasn't that I needed an audience to cry. I think Martial has a poem about that. No, at any point during the day, I could have sat down on the bed with a box of tissues and bawled my eyes out. But it was my thoughts that made me cry. Alone, you can push your thoughts away. With Thom there, it was hard, because he was what I was crying about. I wasn't crying about sad things. I cried because Thom loved me so much. I also cried over a bird.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel about the fire-bombing of Dresden, during World War II, which killed many, many people, most of whom were civilians, refugees, or prisoners of war. Dresden was not a city that housed any military bases or munitions factories or anything like that. No one has been able to determine if bombing Dresden was a war crime, but the US government tried to cover it up until the 60's or so, so it probably was, since the government admitted that it was shameful, at the very least. Billy Pilgrim, the hero, was in Dresden when it was bombed, survived, and was made to burn corpses and clear rubble. At the end of the novel, the war is over, and there is a bird in a tree and it asks Billy Pilgrim “Poo-tee-weet?” I had seen a beautiful bird in the gardens earlier that day with Cassius. It was gray and black, very slim, very graceful, with dove eyes. But it didn't ask me anything.

When I cried with Thom, first I cried on his shirt, and then he took me to the bed and laid with me while I cried on the pillow. I thought about how much Thom loved me, and how a bird, after World War II, was able to sit in a tree and ask, “Poo-tee-weet?” and how anyone was supposed to answer that. I hope Kurt Vonnegut cried when he wrote it, or did the equivalent. Some people can't cry.

After I stopped crying, I lifted myself from the pillow and looked at it. There were four wet spots, for each of my eyes, my nose and my mouth, where they all had leaked. Looking at the tear, snot, and saliva face on the pillow, I noticed that it was smiling. I thought it was funny, but didn't laugh, and blew my nose, trying to get out as much snot as possible. Perhaps now that my nose has less snot, I'll be able to see past it.