Kafka

I remember my eleventh grade teacher announcing that the next thing we'd be reading in class was "The Metamorphosis," and my first thought was, "Cool, I've been meaning to read Ovid." That was how big of a nerd I was at age 16.

Well. I was in for a surprise. But it didn't take more than the first sentence of Kafka's story--

“When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach....”

--for me to forget about Ovid. I had never 

read anything like Kafka before. And when we finished that story, I had to have more of him.

And I quickly devoured everything I could find. Of course, there wasn't all that much. 8 other "long" stories. 60 some "short" stories. (If memory serves, some of them were a paragraph long.) And the three novels: The Trial, The Castle, Amerika. 

Come to think of it, he was the first writer whose complete oeuvre I possessed. 

Because he let me know that there was someone else who felt like they didn't belong in this world. Because he was able to express how absolutely alien everyday life often seemed. How inexplicable were the actions of the other beings who inhabited this world. How violent and terrifying they could be.

And that was just civilian life. When I joined the U. S. Army in 1976, I found an even more alien, inexplicable, violent, and terrifying world. And Kafka came with me.

Once I was at my permanent duty station (the 101st Military Intelligence Company, Operations Security Platoon, Ft. Campbell, Kentucky), I had a desk of my own, as in addition to my Signal Security duties, I also served as the platoon's administrative clerk. So I hung up a poster of Loni Anderson in a swimsuit, thinking that surely someone would tell me that that was inappropriate for the workplace...

...but I was not thinking clearly. This was the ARMy. They loved it. The only reaction I got was, "Nice tits!" 

So I hung up the cover of a Penthouse magazine with a girl draped in an American flag, thinking that surely that would imply a lack of respect for said flag which would prove anathematic to the Military Mind...

...but no, all that led to was the comment, "I'd fuck her for Old Glory!" Not yet willing to admit defeat, I bought a package of Preparation H, taped it to the wall with a sign beneath it which read, "In Case of Emergency, Break Tape."

Nope.

And that's when I got the idea to write out a Kafka quote from The Trial which I thought summed the U. S. Army up quite neatly:

"One must lie low, no matter how much it went against the grain, and try to understand that this great organization remained, so to speak, in a state of delicate balance, and that if someone took it upon himself to alter the disposition of things around him, he ran the risk of losing his footing and falling to destruction, while the organization would simply right itself by some compensating reaction in another part of its machinery--since everything interlocked--and remain unchanged, unless, indeed, which was very probable, it became still more rigid, more vigilant, severer, and more ruthless."

Some of my workmates...most of whom were at least ten years older than I was...stopped to read it. One of them told me that I was really weird.

That was it.

Lately I've been having a lot of heart pain, which made me think, once again, that I probably don't have a whole lot of time left on this planet. That, in turn, reminded me that I am a terrible housekeeper, and that if I die before I clean up, someone (my #1 son or my youngest sister, most likely) is going to have to hire a big dumpster for the driveway and spend a week shoveling all of my shit into it.

And some of it is really good shit, so that hurts to think about. 

But more than that, I don't want to put anyone I love to that trouble. So today I started going through my bedroom closet. It was a painful process. I found notes from five different women, all of whom declared that I was the Best Man They Had Ever Known and that they would love me forever. I found rejection slips for poems, short stories, novels, a screenplay, and a comic book mini-series. I found thousands of pages of things I'd written. (Literally thousands of pages.) I stopped to read some of those pages, and I had no memory of them at all. (I did occasionally think, "Hey, that's pretty good!" though. Which only makes it worse, really.) 

And then I found that piece of paper with the Kafka quote written on it. From 1977. 

Forty-four fucking years ago. 

And all I could think was...where the hell did it all go? 

Which was quickly followed by..."Could I have another go, then?"

I'm sure I could do a much better job of it.