CHAPTER THIRTEEN

"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you'll start missing everybody."
-Holden Caulfield.

It's so quiet I can hear how loud the clock is. Time has a voice. It's late, I should be in bed, I don't even feel like writing. Force of habit. My computer is buzzing too much. It worries me. It could explode or something. . .

Someone was blowing something up, fireworks or something, but I went outside and couldn't see anything. Just whistles and pops and explosions. No light at all. The woods were screaming alive. Loons screeching on the lake.

There are weird insects outside that are trying to attack me. They are clanging up against the door and when I open it they buzz in and try to suck the blood out my neck. I've squashed a dozen of them so far and switched off the light and I refuse to open that door again.

I finished the Catcher in the Rye. It was very good, very deep but finishing it depressed me a lot. I've never been so upset about ending a novel and it's not because I wanted it to go on and on forever. I don't know what it is. I almost wish I had never read it.

Anyway, this is some cult book, some book I was supposed to be born knowing every word. People think you're stupid when you get to be my age and you get excited about something that they've loved since grade school. It was this way with Fight Club, with the Mars Volta. "Dude, I love this new band." "Yeah, I know, I heard about them years ago. They're OK."

It's this way with religion too. "Jesus? Sure, I know about him."

What was the point of reading this novel anyway? Chuck Palahniuk has sheepishly stated that Fight Club is just a remake of Catcher in the Rye. Less than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis obviously was. The same message, the same characters, the same people, who like me, like this book. I think Fight Club was more fleshed out. The anti-consumerism ideas were better expressed. There was also a twist ending and some actual sex.

Truth be told, I've just been trying to rewrite these books myself.

It bothers me that Mark David Chapman liked this book and saw himself as the Catcher in the Rye. Because I really see myself as standing beneath that cliff and catching kids, poor depressed kids who don't have direction in life. I mean, that's what I want to do. I'm not doing it yet. I fear maybe I'll end up shooting someone instead. Or kill my grandma. Ha.

It's a weird name for a character though. A 'caul' is a mucus membrane that some people are born in. So it's more like he's holdin' a field of these things.

I met an old lady today that my grandparents visited cause she is having surgery. Her name is Mim. She's so old and so sick that she's nothing but a skeleton. You could see how big her skull was supposed to be because her eyes keep popping out. Think shrunken head. Think puppet.

Her dogs were huge German shepherds and I have a fear of big dogs. I was doing my best to control myself, but they would just sit and watch me. They'd lick their lips and maybe it meant nothing, maybe it didn't. My grandparents kept talking but I couldn't focus in on the conversation. I stared at the TV to keep my mind off the dogs, but I have no idea what I watched. We were there ten minutes, but it should have been an hour.

I asked Mim if I could take a picture of her. She said, but I'm a wreck, but OK. I told her, it's because I didn't want to forget her. I don't know if I was lying or not, just to get another weird picture of a dying old lady. I'm sick in the head, really. But I won't forget her now. I can't.

I went trekking in the woods today. I've been meaning to for awhile. Get lost. Find something else. I didn't go far but I didn't have to, not to be completely surrounded by trees and a shag carpet of dead leaves and you can't smell or hear anything but the woods. I looked up and I could see nothing but blue and green and I told myself, "God is here."

But I ran out of the woods, swatting at my neck and my arms, because of mosquitoes and dirty little bloodsuckers that wanted my life. I said to myself, "Satan is here, too."