Koko's Sentimental Education

As I successfully abstain from rereading Flaubert's not so minor masterpiece, I pass the early morning hours considering what I've learned since July, when Nadal won Wimbledon, Batman embarrassed us all, and my poor body collapsed, one more detritus among the discarded Fluticasone canisters in my bathroom and the unstrung tennis rackets on my living room floor (thank you, uncorrectable, late backswing). So:

Lesson 1: An animal can degenerate into its own rabid, ancestral shadow, harness the evil energy of a thousand suns, attempt to depodify (?), uh--remove the foot from, is there a word for that--another creature harmlessly tending to its creaturely business, fail to do so, get flung across the room by a rational animal twenty times its size (me), take a second chance at the foot, go haywire on some steel bars, and then, not five minutes later, look absolutely adorable:

Well rampaged, my little Achilles; may all your scandals be satisfying.

Lesson 2: A raw onion eaten as a snack tastes better than it should. Raw garlic, on the other hand, hurts like hell and causes severe involuntary fits of swearing--an edible Tourette Syndrome.

Lesson 3: When Yeats wrote that "a terrible beauty is born," he was referring to unseasonal strawberries, not revolutionary martyrdom. I discovered this fact while weighing the relative strengths and weaknesses of fleeting fruity pleasure and immortal Irish verse.

Lesson 4a: Although I know a few things about poetry and practically nothing about prose, I enjoy good essays more than I do good poems. Interestingly, I rarely enjoy good fiction: "I think, you read something someone just invented it? Waste of time."

Lesson 4b: And therefore Charles Lamb and George Santayana are, for completely opposed reasons, my new mythmakers.

Lesson 5: Thanks to Generation Kill for turning "ninja" into an adjective, as in "that is so fucking ninja."

Lesson 6: Despite my terrifically shy ambition to get well, make sense, and be beautiful, I continue to look like the kleptomaniac Géricault painted during his tenure among the crazy-brave and plain crazy:

Mr. Sticky Hands and I are more crazy than crazy-brave. We aren't even phony-tough.

Lesson 7: Vegetables pureed and mixed with delicious fruits are still vegetables, so don't drink anything green, even if it does promise to complement barley grass with cool shit like kiwi pits and hedonism berries. Just eat the broccoli as nature intended--spitefully--and don't ruin perfectly good sugar by forcing it to fraternize with older evolutionary organisms. Plants that don't flower, be damned.

Lesson 8: In tennis there is no such thing as improvement; there is only you not understanding how you hit that shot again.

Lesson 9: Middlemarch is ninja. (See above re: ninja as an adjective.)

Lesson 10: Robert Browning wrote exactly one readable line of poetry, but it's stuck in the middle of a poem about statues or something, so don't bother.

Lesson 11: I don't like going to sleep, but I also don't like waking up. About what else can one assert both x and not x? Somewhere, seventy years ago, Karl Popper's head just exploded.

Lesson 12: It is entirely possible, and perhaps inevitable, to cherish the memory of a rabbit peeing on your lap, but only if he does so deliberately:

Happy third birthday, my darling, in three short weeks.

(Do not mistake his imminent birthday for Birthday, the dysfunctional foot-monster. As the anonymous Anglo-Saxon bard sang, næs þæt na se Godric þe ða guðe forbeah: "that was not the same Godric who earlier fled from the battle." Of course, we have no idea what happens to this new, heroic Godric, because the poem's only extant manuscript burned in a fire, leaving us with a few confused stabbings, the fleeing Godric, this new valiant Godric, his horse, and the final line distinguishing the Godrics, a line that is both tremendously stupid and also way, way too self-conscious to fit comfortably within the proto-Germanic culture of collecting wives, extorting lords, and generally not believing in Jesus. It does make the poem giddy, though, so well burned, fire, and please, be generous with the Brownings.)