Yes, Pnin Is Really My Favorite Book

Sunday afternoon, Al Green playing.
Cold at the ends of my fingers, stomach full of huevos, receiving messages from a Finnish man I could swear I never gave my number to.

Did I mention it’s chilly? It’s gray, it’s cloudy, it’s a day best spent under multiple soft blankets.

Pre-gym, post-brunch, mid-deciphering people and texts and men.

So there’s this guy who I think is pretty interesting. He’s got brains, and he’s got eyez. And he’s slightly retarded, clearly, since he flings himself off the nearest cliff whenever possible. And this is a theme I keep discussing with Mza. Menz, and womenz, who can’t stay in a moment, who would rather crumble than possibly hurt, maybe later, maybe never.

Like Nabokov, I believe in rereading. Nothing upon re-inspection can be less interesting.

But have we all (and by “we all” I mean my dopus friends, not you, surely) broken down into a re-inspection without the first read? Are we pre-empting through pre-inspection? Post-empting for the final read?

Do we reach for the next experience without fully living the last one and then turn it around with our critical theory educations on the tips of our fingertips like a shiny glass globe that will at some point drop and shatter into a hundred shards of possibilities, possibilities we will sweep up and discard as easily as the way we fall asleep each night at the end of a full day?

I, for better or worse, suffer from insomnia.