The reason I didn’t post a Friday Non-Dissertational last night: I actually had one of those rare occasions that people refer to as an instance of “having a social life”. It’s been a banner week for that kind of stuff; earlier in the week a friend and I went and saw Susan Tedeschi play.
In any case, I’ve been feeling pretty uninspired as far as writing “creative” stuff goes (not that a dissertation isn’t creative, but you know what I mean), or perhaps not so much uninspired — I got plenty of ideas –as undirected. I don’t know where to go with these ideas about a Lovecraft-inspired pulp-horror office comedy about secretarial temp work or a surreal drama about a person who does volunteer work comforting animals at kill shelters.
So, instead, some delectable Richard Brautigan. (There’s a dissertation connection here, perhaps, in the way the first poem of the collection I quote from echoes the instrumental fantasies about machines of loving grace that I’m so invested in critiquing — but I won’t quote that poem.) If you’ve never encountered Richard Brautigan, I think you would be quite happy if you stopped reading this right now and ran out of the house and scoured your town until you found a copy of In Watermelon Sugar and brought it home and enjoyed it before reading this small poem of his. But I’m sure you know what’s best.
It’s Raining in Love
I don’t know what it is,
but I distrust myself
when I start to like a girl
a lot.
It makes me nervous.
I don’t say the right things
or perhaps I start
to examine,
evaluate,
compute
what I am saying.
If I say, “Do you think it’s going to rain?”
and she says, “I don’t know,”
I start thinking: Does she really like me?
In other words
I get a little creepy.
A friend of mine once said,
“It’s twenty times better to be friends
with someone
than it is to be in love with them.”
I think he’s right and besides,
it’s raining somewhere, programming flowers
and keeping snails happy.
That’s all taken care of.
BUT
if a girl likes me a lot
and starts getting real nervous
and suddenly begins asking funny questions
and looks sad if I give the wrong answers
and she says things like,
“Do you think it’s going to rain?”
and I say, “It beats me,”
and she says, “Oh,”
and looks a little sad
at the clear blue California sky,
I think: Thank God, it’s you, baby, this time
instead of me.
(The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.)
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