How I Accidentally Started the Sixties by Howard Bloom

Author:Howard Bloom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2017-09-06T22:41:40+00:00

So by the time another year or two of bizarre episodes had passed, all I wanted to do was settle down.

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Now, if you eat all your broccoli, in just another three chapters Howard Bloom will finally meet the girl of his dreams. But first, my departure from the kingdom of animals to the realm whose citizens stay in one place and kidnap photons with a felonious chemical called chlorophyll. The kingdom of plants.

WAS SISYPHUS A SISSY?

In September, 1962, I arrived in the city of my birth only to discover that my father and mother, who had nearly lost their minds over my year of absence, had a new reason to nearly lose their sanity: my presence. Yes, they were somewhat unhinged by the fact that I ran around the house naked and that I marched into other people’s expensively carpeted homes clothed but barefoot (don’t worry, I still took a shower every morning). Then I was hit by that peculiar infantilization that disables even the mighty when they return to their nursemaids after conquering a continent or two. In short, I became nearly catatonic. Like Carol Maynard, I turned into a vegetable…an overcooked turnip.

You may know the state. You wake up in the morning with no goal in sight, only a murky fog where your sense of purpose should be. You remind yourself that you are back home, where your folks would prefer a modicum of clothing. But picking up your underwear seems an impossible chore. Much less putting it on. You have to muster more willpower than it took Odysseus to put out the eye of the Cyclops, to avoid the charms of Circe, to survive the Sirens, and to outwit Scylla and Charybdis. But in this case, what you are straining to achieve is to sit up, stretch your arm to the floor, and winch your thumb and forefinger around the elastic band of your Fruit of the Looms. Fortunately in my case, salvation was in the wings. Salvation…and one bright speck of wisdom.

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Seeing my vegetative condition, my former French teacher, Madame P. F. Hennin (whose name I haven’t changed because, unlike most of the guilty—or simply hapless—parties in this book, she’s innocent), took me into her home for a few weeks and let me sleep there. Despite the fact that there is no room for turnips in French cuisine. Instead of schooling me in the art of sautéing and making sauces, Madame Hennin taught me her version of the secret of life (which we will reveal to you upon request; just send a self-addressed, stamped envelope crammed with all the money you can get your hands on). OK, you wormed it out of me. The pedagogue was vivacious, slender, and brilliant. I explained what I’d been after. We circle, I said, some source of ultimate satisfaction like a planet going around the sun. But orbiting at arm’s length never gets us any closer to what we want. The solution: dive straight for it—that ultimate and ever-satisfying whatever-it-is.

Madame Hennin sat me down and told me Albert Camus’ version of the myth of Sisyphus.

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