April 16, 2008...5:28 am
For my birthday I received a Tree of Smoke
I love Denis Johnson. As in I love his words, his phrases, his characters, his plots, his honesty, his irony, his description, his voice, and every little shred that molds together to form his work. If I can simply be half the writer he is I will be pleased.
So I just turned twenty roughly ten minutes ago. I welcome this year with arms uncomfortably open for a handful of reasons. I’m supposing that this year will be a good one, though this is mostly because two is my lucky number. Twenty also happens to terrify me. Why you may ask? Well a lot of it has to do with my fear of growing old and despite the fact that being twenty still gives me youngster cred I’m a third way through my predicted sixty year existence. PAUSE.
(Sidenote: for those of you that know me well, you know that I don’t want to live past sixty. For those unaware of this fact, it all stems back to my grandmother. One day we made blackberry pie and her frail blue-veined hands began to quiver as she took hold of mine and made me promise to never grow old. This scared the shit out of me seeing as I was only six and that memory stuck with me ever since. I asked her how old old was and she answered sixty. Hence the reason I don’t want to live past sixty.)
RETURN. So here I am, on my aqua futon making my silly little predictions for the upcoming year and listening to forever young, another tradition of mine. Here’s to another year of adventure and seafaring.
Final thought: “The god I want to believe in has a voice and a sense of humor like Denis Johnson” -Johnathan Franzen. Yes, he really is that good.
Leave a Reply