"This caring too much-I remember that it only developed with me about the time I first fell in love. And even then I didn't care enough. If I had really cared I wouldn't be here now writing about it; I'd have died of a broken heart, or I'd have swung for it. It was a bad experience because it taught me how to live a lie. It taught me to smile when I didn't want to smile, to work when I didn't believe in work, to live when I had no reason to go on living. Even when I had forgotten her I still retained the trick of doing what I didn't believe in.

It was all chaos from the beginning, as I have said. But sometimes I got so close to the center, to the very heart of the confusion, that it's a wonder things didn't explode around me."
-Henry Miller, pages 15-16 of Tropic of Capricorn

I was at Bradford's a bit back for a firepit and beer when I met this guy. Giant snakebites, not the usual man I'd think of as intellectually engaging. However, I quickly learned in discourse that he had Tropic of Cancer on his phone. The entirety of the novel. ON his phone. Amazing, no? Well, without necessity, I tell you that I do not have this; cut to this evening when I decide to turn off Christmas on Mars (I was incredibly disappointed, possibly because I was incredibly sober) and make myself a cup of tea, a cup only because my parents happen to be immensely different from me culturally and do not own either a tea kettle or a teapot. So I nuke some water in the largest, most conical mug they own and scour my bookcase of things I've left here in Euless to see if I can't pick out something good. I crouch down, all my bodyweight resting on the balls of my feet and notice immediately that my books have been rearranged, probably in the process of the remodeling my family's doing to their house, when seeing that my Henry Miller collection is not only out of order both chronologically and alphabetically, but these little nuggets of perverse beauty are separated and spread all across the shelves. I still have not adjusted this. But I think back to this kid, his name was Levi, and his marvelous phone. Now, I feel it should be noted that I haven't read the Tropics since I was 16, when I felt it slightly more interesting to masturbate to the sexual situations and overt, yet appetizing infidelity. I have loved this author's word choice and overall life philosophy since the first time I picked up Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, my first of his works to truly encounter. My younger self wasn't fully unfamiliar with the author, and the day I actually obtained that book (in a rather shifty way, though I think it to be unfitting to describe that manner in this situation), after expressing my desire to experience a breadth of his publications, my mother bought for me both Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. Like nearly each time when I acquire more than one literary work, I went for the smallest of the three, which of course was Stand Still. By the time I reached that worthless blank page at the back that I so often used in order to practice my signature, the author had enveloped me in a beautiful, yet revolting sense of internal separation. From the day I opened the text, I was an avowed Henry Miller fanatic. The choice of the word "fanatic" here is intentional, as I became not only a fan of the works themselves, but of the man and the way he approached la vie quotidienne.

I wrote earlier about how I feel myself extremely different from either of my parents (I do remind myself strongly of more distant family members, however), but my father acts in some ways much like me. By this, I mean to say that when this man discovers something that he enjoys, he is dreadfully devoted to it until the possibility of intense obsession disappears or in a manner more plausible, he discovers a new interest. In much the same way, upon the discovery of a novelist, or for that manner a visual artist, I tend to submerge myself in their writings until I either become burned out or I simply run out of works to engage myself with. During my mid-teens, I found myself in this situation with Salinger, Bukowski, Kerouac, Quinn, and William S. Burroughs. Of course, Henry Miller created throughout the majority of the 20th century an immense amount of novels, and so with this author, the former was the case.

Anyways, Tropic of Capricorn and Tropic of Cancer blew me out of the water as it truly connected me to the novel more so than any other writing I had ever encountered. This shit is real, every thought between the covers was a personal revelation of my feelings, and it fully made clear to me that I was not alone in my perverse thoughts and flighty nature.