Twenty Lines (Synopsis of the Latest Theodore Dreiser Novel)

He had clambake hair, a pooty-pooty mouth, and six fingers on his right hand.  He was a Libra baiter.  There was no room in his vocabulary for words.  When he met his fate, his fate, disgusted, kept on walking.  There is no perfect way to sum him up, except to say that he was an express train running from too little to too late.

He walked to the lake.  He didn't like the lake, it was too hairy.  A little train ran around the lake, to give little women with parasols a chance to air their cheekbones.  He hopped on board the train, sat down next to a little lady, and said how de do.

The year was 1892.  The World's Fair was coming to Chicago.   He intended to be there, to hawk his new elk-skin umbrella.  Rain started to fall, and the lake hair got wet.  He got off the train, walked to the nearest hashery, and ordered a plate of organ meats. 

He intended to go places, and he would happily drown cats to get there.  There was an ambition in him, an ambition as American as the exploding U.S.S. Maine.  He had tried cutting hair, peddling restorative potions containing laudanum, stocktrading, and selling subscriptions to ladies magazines.  But there was a sadness in him too.  He stood at night at the foot of a streetlight, wishing his life was being lived on the other side of one of the lit windows of the family houses running up and down the street.  He wanted a wife, it didn't matter whether she could further his career or not, to take out to the theater or strangle.  

Comments

[Martijn]

Do thís!

[karoline]

I don't know Martijn, drowning cats is illegal.

[Jan Martin Löhndorf]

And the cats wouldn't appreciate it.

On another note: Mike, have you changed something about your medication lately? Your texts are getting better by the minute!
Standing ovations from Hamburg!

[Bryon]

Standing ovation from Chicago, too!

[UF MIKE]

I am firmly opposed to drowning cats. I think it should be a federal hate crime. That said, thank you everybody for your kind words. It must be the medications. Everything else in my life stays horribly the same.