There are those in the world who live to work. They love their jobs and it's a joy to get up in the morning and strive and ache and accomplish. These are the people we're meant to admire. To emulate, to get close to or aspire towards. I
can tell you that I've never admired them. I can tell you that the closest I've ever gotten to them is when they step over me and my puddle which I've claimed for a bed. For there are those. There are them that. There is me that only. Works to live. Because life is for me what happens in the moments, and the glimpses, and the tarnished coppers. Money that changes hands is only worth it's journey. It's stories, like the inscriptions on books.
To Jennifer, on her 11th Birthday, love DadA book.
Tails with a Twist: Animal Nonsense Verse by an animal with a twist. By an author with a story of ill-spent youth that's given to a little girl on her 11th Birthday by a father, one can only assume, who doesn't know which end is up or how his own tail twitches.
I wish you the very best, Jennifer, on your 11th birthday, but you're probably in your eighties now if you're alive at all. Perhaps this book ended up in a shop that sells spent dreams because your children's children didn't give a damn about you, Jennifer. Or the work that you did. That you lived for or that you earned your living with.
It cost me three dollars.
Which is more than I spent on my dinner. A tin of
soup. Prime rib, first rib, initial rib, cut into pieces and served with carrots. And it makes me think about -- existence. And what we do to feed ourselves from tins. From books. From our relationships with others. A meal condensed in a can and sold for two dollars, or a child's 11th birthday, reduced to the mildew and dust of a bookstore that wouldn't hire me. But it's just as well. I'm already present in volumes on the shelves, it would be too much to have me as forgotten and overlooked and mishandled behind the cash register as well.
But hello -- you -- you. I know you're reading this. No one else is but you are. And you're your own tin of soup too, aren't you. Flavours and bittersweet memories all chopped into bits. The prime, the water, the diluted soggy vegetables, it's all there. Appealing, pleasant when warmed up. Consumed by those who don't have a second thought about soup. Or dinner. Or two dollars.