Preterition

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.)