Jitterbug Perfume

This was in another lifetime, but for the sake of actuality, this was a couple months ago.

At a concert, I met a man. By accident, maybe...

Probably on purpose. Ask God, not me. 

He was an English teacher, and he was very handsome (they usually are).

There I was, on a concert balcony, talking it up with this entrancing guy. I wanted to know all about him and more importantly: what he liked to read. There is nothing I will judge a person on more. Literature is my compass on which morality is based and if you find that shallow, you must not read much of anything that I like. 

I shared with him the fact that I would be up and moving in a matter of weeks to a new city. I was at the tail-end of my California-coloured diary entries, towards stranger crowds and shades of blues that have not yet kissed my supple palms. The man told me to read a Tom Robbins novel to pilot me through this new phase of life I'm reaching out for. I did as I was suggested to do. I bought Jitterbug Perfume. I started a new life for myself, fingering through that sacred three-hundred-and-forty-page spiritual guidebook every day or so. I think I lost myself. I'm glad to rid the parts of myself that wanted me to stay the same. The flower bud was getting too cramped. Blossoming seemed the natural course of action.

In honor of the boundlessness of this novel and all that it has provided my morphing spirit; I will share some of my favorite lines that I underlined over and over and over until I went inkless. 

Enjoy. 

"Magic things are fond of deceptions." pg. 18

"But I am seized with desire to be something more. Something whose echo can drown out the rattle of death." pg.24 

"I may be mad, he thought, but I prefer the shit of this world to whatever sweet ambrosias the next might offer." pg. 29 

"They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning." pg. 34

"The eclipse made me do it. Wasn't it derealizing? Didn't it give you shivers? Didn't it transport you to another plane? Didn't it make your brown eyes blue?" pg. 69

"Bones are patient. Bones never tire nor do they run away. When you come upon a man who has been dead many years, his bones will still be lying there, in place, content, patiently waiting, but his flesh will have gotten up and left him. Water is like flesh. Water will not stand still. It is always off to somewhere else; restless, talkative, and curious. Even water in a covered jar will disappear in time. Flesh is water. Stones are like bones. Satisfied. Patient. Dependable. Tell me, then, Alobar, in order to achieve immortality, should you emulate water or stone? Should you trust your flesh or your bones?" pg. 79

"The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought." pg. 85

"My own foolishness could use some company." pg. 90

"The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being." pg.131

"Gods have ears for irony." pg. 132

"Physical immortality is not an end result, a condition to be arrived at in the future, but an ongoing discipline, an attitude, a way of life to be practiced in the present, day by day." pg. 136

"Kudra gave him a look that you could spread on a bun. Her words, however, pricked him like the knife that does the spreading." pg. 159

"A couple's first quarrel is Cupid's laxative." 162

"Ricki the bartender has defined the Four Elements as cocaine, champagne, pussy, and chocolate." pg. 176

"Death hath more than one way to defeat a man, it seems. Death bests thee even while thou liveth." pg. 193

"And he vowed that in the future he would strive to keep that sense of play more in mind, for he'd grown convinced that play-more than piety, more than charity or vigilance-was what allowed human beings to transcend evil."

"The spirit of one individual can supersede and dismiss the entire clockworks of history."

"Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who batter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route." (all pg. 197...HELL OF A PAGE)

"Perhaps it is noteworthy, she thought, that the performance of a young man in bed is roughly the same length as a rock song on AM radio." pg. 242

"The universe does not have flaws. It has habits. And habits can be broken." 251

"Wiggs contended that longing for the future was as antilife as dwelling in the past. Nostalgia and hope stand equally in the way of authentic experience." pg. 299

"All in all, it wasn't enough to get a young woman in love through a lingering funk such as February." pg. 304

"He moved through the world as if he was intimate with it, as if he belonged in it, as if there was not the remotest chance that he would fall down in it and break a hip." pg. 306

"And I cannot help you understand. In the realm of the ultimate, each person must figure out things for themselves. Remember that, when you return to Your Side. Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received." pg. 338

My heart is full. What a proper recommendation this book turned out to be. Very fitting for all the questions, I seem to be nagging the sky with these days. 

And to you, English teacher from the concert, (since you were wondering) I think I do know which stretch of highway I morphed from caterpillar to butterfly on. You'll have to meet me in another strange place again to hear that answer.