It’s been a helluva day, dear reader, and I am exhausted.  Far too tired to commit any great literature, that is certain.  I’m probably pretty incoherent at this point.  But I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the significance of this date on the calendar of badass American letters.  July 16, 1951 was the date J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was published.  It’s impact on the culture in the ’50s was massive, but the book’s impact on me was just as great.  I was 13 when I first met Holden Caulfield, and felt, as many of us did, like we were looking into a sort of mirror.

At 13, the books themes – alienation, identity, and societal hypocrisy –  were right up my alley, and Holden was instantly my boy.  There was nothing precious or polite about Holden Caulfield’s voice.  He mumbled, cursed, and eye-rolled his way through alienation and lightweight identity crises like a champion, pissed off by the state of the human race from the jump.

The book was banned in some schools when it was first unleashed, but kids tore into it like contraband candy.  What made Catcher shine – what still makes it shine as brightly as anything can in our social-media speckled ADD dystopia – is how flagrantly it said a big fat “Nope!” to sanctimony.  It spit in the fact of what was “decent.”  It said it was okay to push back against rules nobody remembers consenting to.  Salinger’s magic was in creating a protagonist so disaffected, so sick of the bullshit, that every kid on the fringe (including yrs. truly) saw themselves in him.

God…I need to sleep.  But real quick: my two favorite part of the book are 1) when his teacher throws his essay…but I may be misremembering that.  Someone throws something “like a turd,”…that always stuck with me, and 2) Holden hires a prostitute named Sunny, but when she arrives, he feels uncomfortable and decides not to go through with it.  He still pays her the agreed amount, but later her pimp, Maurice, shows up to demand more money, and when Holden doesn’t pay, Maurice beats him up.  Not sure why, but that scene always stuck with me too.

It’s funny what we remember.

Anyway, if, in the unlikely but shameful event that you have not read Catcher, I shall include you in my nightly prayers and encourage you to check it out.

Okay, goodnight.

N.P.: “Under My Thumb” – Ministry & Co-Conspirators