All fall down (shit! they're on to me!)

A canonical author has passed, and one of the very first thoughts to flash across my little brain when I heard of his death was, “Wow, I’ve never gotten around to reading any of his books.”
This was swiftly followed by a crushing sense of guilt, made all the more weird because my first thought had been, “I didn’t even know he was still alive.”

Apparently, in my world, it is alright to ignore basic foundation blocks of Western literature if the author has been dead for awhile (at least since the 1980’s), because I’ll get around to reading him or her at some point; but it’s just downright rude to ignore living authors! I should have gotten right on that, apparently. Thanks, psyche, for making that clear.

I’m tempted to put together a list of important living authors, ordered chronologically by birth. Maybe then I can cross-reference it by known diseases/psychoses/crippling enamorations with drugs and or alcohol, get myself a little reading list and try to beat the clock. Most likely, not only would that plan never be borne out, but it also just wouldn’t work. There are too many. That’s the root of it, really: that I feel like a fraud. That every day I get through without someone catching me, asking me how on earth I ever managed to graduate with an English major, how I could have ignored so many great works, how I can manage to drag myself around upright each day, well, every day like that is a miracle. The logical jump is to assume that, some day, the cards will fall.

The chances are pretty good that I’ll knock them over while drunk, let’s be honest, and get them all sticky and covered with gatorade and step on them for a couple of weeks before I bother to pick them up.

This all makes me angry. Illogically angry, that type of anger I especially hate because I know it comes from some deep-seeded neuroses and not from any basis in reality. That type of anger that forces me to acknowledge that, seriously, I can not hide the crazy, no matter how much I’d like to think I can.
I’m angry because I read what I was told to, and so much more.
I’m angry because I trusted that by doing the work I would, in the end, cover the gamut of what’s important.
I can’t even begin to imagine where I got that idea. Whoever said that you’d have learned everything you needed to know by the time you graduated college? Apparently, it was the same person who promised that rose garden; which is to say no one. I made it up, and I’ve been fighting to catch up with that idea for as long as I can remember. Uphill both ways, barefoot, and possibly pregnant in the kitchen, who knows, but hell, as a fraud I reserve the right to mix my metaphors, thank you very much.

So then, I wonder if this is what drives most people, this desire not to fail? This feeling that you’ve managed to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes thus far, so you’d better get your ass in gear and make all of your illusions true? I wonder if it’s this fear that really goads us along, and allows us to turn potential into viable possibilities? And would that mean then when my time comes if I’ve been a success at life, it was really all because I was running away from some metaphorical bees and that scary clown from It?

Can’t I just attribute any success I have to a love of puppies and ice cream? That would be so much tastier.

Endnote: Today I was saddened to read that Kurt Vonnegut had passed away at the age of 84. I didn’t name him earlier in the essay because I didn’t want it to seem as if I was writing about Kurt Vonnegut, and then segue into disturbing facts about me, and then get lost writing about me. This whole piece has been about me, I’ve been bringing the crazy this entire time. Just so we’re clear on that. This is not the worst memorial in the world. It really is just a good ’ole tangential rambling.