I’ve mentioned this before on this blog and podcast (number six is in the works by the way … I’m recording it this weekend), but in case you’ve missed it, I’m dyslexic. I actually have a pretty bad case of it, and during college (and high school), I had a really hard time keeping up with all the reading I had to do. I came up with a ton of tricks to fake my way through it, and eventually I got so good at it, I wasn’t even reading any of my assigned reading. Mostly I would listen to lectures about the reading material, and retain most of that information. My grandmother always used to say “the deaf could see for miles.” I guess this is why I retained so much information. I love stories though, so I really felt like I missed out on college to a certain extent, and I also wasn’t as well read as my degree would imply. This came out from time to time during conversations I would have about books and literature with my friends.
A couple years ago my buddy and I started carrying around a book with us all the time so that anytime we got a chance during the course of a day we would pull it out of our back-pockets and read it. So, anytime I hit the Starbucks in the middle of the day, or found myself with nothing to do waiting on someone I would pull out this book. It was mostly a book I had read before, so that I wouldn’t have to think too much. The first book was Franny and Zoey, by J.D. Salinger. I had read it after I read Catcher in the Rye years ago, but had never understood it’s meaning before. It’s weird how words change as you get older and the story of Franny (This particular book is actually two books in one) which I thought was so lame when I was young, ended up meaning a great deal to me at my age. Her quest for understanding the world around her really resonated with me, because I too ended up taking extraordinary steps to comprehend my existence, and I still do.
Reading Franny was lost on me when I was younger, but now … time made all the difference. I hear all the time that people never change, but I challenge you to go back and read a book from when you were younger, and you’ll understand that a million people in a million moments occupy your being, and the only remnants of those people you were are etched on the various flawed memories of flawed individuals … thus almost don’t matter.
Recently, and I mean within the last year, I was going through all the crap I had in my garage, and moving stuff from cardboard boxes to plastic bins, when I came across a bunch of books from college I had purchased but never read, and realized that perhaps I should do something about what I had regretted for all these years. I decided I was going to read all the shit I said I read in college but never did.
It’s actually been a pretty cool experience to read old history texts, and remember stuff from lectures and tests that I had long since forgotten. I was amazed to realize how much of the bullshit I put on essay questions was so obvious, and how I still got credit for those fucked up answers. Anyways, food for thought … I think you’d be surprised how different the words look to you today.
