Messy, isn’t it?

I’m not good at naming favorites, except when it comes to books. That’s because my favorite book by a pretty wide margin is a psychedelic surrealist novella called Trout Fishing in America. It won my heart the moment I saw its cover, and it hasn’t let go since. I love it so much that I refuse to read anything else by Richard Brautigan because I want to believe that everything he writes is golden.

I am overhyping the book. It’s not that great. It’s not a masterpiece of writing or anything close to it. Chances are, if you picked it up, your reaction would be a big WTF. That’s understandable. To unromanticize it, the book is pretty much a drug-induced play on language by a California hippie.

But the play on language is so delicious. A couch likened to baby food? My heart just thumped.

Brautigan wrote one little line that has made me think more than any other, and it wasn’t from Trout Fishing in America. It was from his suicide note. The note simply said:

“Messy, isn’t it?”

I don’t know if there is such a thing as a great suicide note, but I can hardly imagine a better one than that.

At risk of over-analyzing, if it had instead been “Death is messy, isn’t it?”, that would have royally sucked. It would have been a sadistic finale to his shitty life. But I think Brautigan’s omission of a subject was intentional, and not just to save space.

I don’t like to use the word “life” because it includes everything from swimming around your mother’s uterus to being ejected with a filth of shit and fluids to spittle on adults’ shoulders as bacteria ride a mucus trail to your gut to pubic hair and parasites and cupcakes and first loves and ejaculate and karaoke and alcohol and puppies and cancer.

To sum that all up in one word, though, “messy” is pure genius.