After much consideration, I’ve decided that there is no good order in which I could tell this story. Most stories explain things chronologically, but everything is still unfolding in a decidedly unchronological order, so I think that would likely make things more complicated than they already are.

So I’ll start by telling you about my favorite book, given that I’m bound to mention it frequently.

In my favorite book, a book that I was fated to read, Vonnegut wrote (regarding religion), “Live by the foma (harmless untruths) that make you brave and kind and happy and healthy”. 

I have done no such thing. I am a coward, an often irritable husk of a person, overflowing with black bile. But nonetheless, I persist. 

I found the book many years ago on a cart outside my local public library. The cart was full of leftovers free for the taking, secondhand books that had been donated to the library but were in such a condition that they were unworthy of being shelved. I take at least one book every time I pass by the Reject Cart, partially because I see myself reflected in their unwantedness, and partially because they’re free, so why not?

A Non-Exhaustive List of Things I Have Rescued from the Reject Cart:

-3 books of operatic sheet music. By nature, they are entirely written in Italian, which is a language I cannot read nor speak, and feature a great deal of musical notation, which I technically can read but am so poor at that I’d probably have a similar rate of accuracy if I were to assume the next note based on vibes alone.

-Volumes 1 and 5 of Lilla Uppslagsboken, a Swedish encyclopedia of sorts. While I cannot read their contents either, the spines are quite pretty, and I have removed two of the plates to use as wall decoration (the human circulatory system and a bathymetric map of the Arctic Ocean).

-Several travel booklets: A Colourphoto Guide to Trier, Imperial Tombs of the Ming Dynasty, Slovensko, and my personal favorite, Panorama: der Großglockner Hochalpenstraßen, which is a cardboard fold-out panoramic photo of the highest paved mountain road in Austria. At the bottom corner of the mountain, the pamphlet designer photoshopped in an Alpine Marmot holding a bouquet of flowers.

-A 1947 printing of The History of Herodotus, which appears to have been owned by an individual in Massachusetts before being donated to the library (which is decidedly not in Massachusetts) sometime around 1960. Based on the checkout card, it was borrowed 9 times over a span of 34 years. I have no idea what Herodotus was up to in the 20-odd years between the last card stamp and my acquisition of it. It’s possible the book was entered into an automated circulation system and continued to be periodically borrowed, but I think it just as easily may have been lost in a back room somewhere, given that the first time I opened it I was met with a visible cloud of dust.

-Seven works of Shakespeare. Two of them are Hamlet.

The book that I was fated to read was not a particularly exciting find. I didn’t know anything about Vonnegut at the time. The summary on the back was vague, inaccurate, and overall unappealing. The cover of this edition was devoid of art and whatever information was on the cover was presented in a color combination so heinous that it made me queasy just to look at it.

If it weren’t for the fact that it was the sole remaining book on the Reject Cart that day, I likely wouldn’t have picked it up. But there it was, Cat’s Cradle, treading water in a sea of outdated economics manuals and early-2000’s dieting magazines.

I begrudgingly brought the thing home with me and put it on my desk, where it was promptly tossed adrift once more, this time in an ocean of loose papers. Partially completed schoolwork, diagrams for inventions that would never bear a prototype, illegible and water-stained poems I’d written while wine-drunk in the bathtub; Cat’s Cradle readily joined all of the other things I’d abandoned. 

It floated there for several months. During one of many ill-fated attempts to get my shit together, I decided to clean off my desk. The book was transferred to a steadily growing pile on the floor next to my bookshelf (which I had outgrown several years earlier) and I forgot about it once more.

By the time I finally got around to opening the damn thing, it had been in my possession for nearly half a year. 

Here’s what happened: my psychiatrist had lightly suggested that I check myself into a psychiatric hospital. I asked him if I would be allowed to bring in a book and a journal. He said I would, but the book had to be paperback and the journal should be free of any “questionable content”. 

The journal I was using at the time was almost exclusively composed of questionable content, so I packed a blank sketchbook. Most of the novels in my “to-be-read” pile were either hardbacks or on subject matter that would likely get them confiscated, so Cat’s Cradle it was. 

My visit to the psychiatric unit is, ultimately, a story for another day. But after discovering that I would not be allowed to write in the sketchbook with anything except for unsharpened crayons (everything else was too dangerous, including non-toxic marker), I finally caved and read Cat’s Cradle. 

I will do my best to avoid spoiling its events in case you, whoever you are, feel compelled to read it. (And since you have stumbled across this page, I do recommend that you read it, because you are Like Me).

Cat’s Cradle is a book about many things; science, religion, and the apocalypse, to name a few. Such themes have been recurrent in my life, which is probably why it has made such a profound impact on me.

There is a fictional religion central to the story called Bokononism. Bokonon, its creator, has many teachings, but there is one primary tenet to the religion as a whole: Bokononism is a religion composed entirely of lies, and Bokonon encourages his followers to remain aware of this. That’s not to say that all of the ideas in Bokononism are overtly false. But a relentless search for the truth rarely leads to happiness. 

A relentless search for the truth rarely leads to happiness.

This, of course, depends on the questions you’re asking; but in most cases, capital-A Answers will not make you kinder or softer or gentler or better.

There’s something you must know about me in order to understand all of this.

I am, as previously stated, a coward. Long ago I built myself a little campsite in the deepest valleys of the Dunning-Krueger effect with the intent to live out the rest of my days there, quiet and cozy in a world of deliberate unknowing. 

For several years I have been aware that there is much I do not know and even more that I do not understand. At some point, I decided that I was okay with this, that I was tired of trying to Figure Things Out, that I should do my best to put myself on autopilot and only think about things that would apply to a content, productive, average life. 

I told myself it was best to just stay put in my familiar clearing. If I wanted to be functional, productive, and happy, my world must end and begin where the trees stop growing. What lies in the darkness beyond the trees is none of my concern.

But there is something that lurks in that same darkness.

It is something that I have sensed for years but have only recently begun to accept the presence of. 

I have spent the better part of my adult life lying on the forest floor, exposed to the elements,

ignoring a rustling in the leaves and telling myself it’s just the wind. 

But now I have risen from my dissonance and the something is so close that I can hear it breathing.