Creative Cardinal #1

To insolate something down to a moment a word a thought that changed my life… it’s asking too much of me. It’s like demanding I remember when I first tasted rain. I was raised on literature. My mother sat me on her knee and read to me soft stories form the Bible or from 101 Dalmations. Or the “Very Hungry Caterpillar”… That used to be my favorite. And there was a squished book that I liked to chew on, something about a sleeping turtle? Mommy read the story to me so many times that I memorized it and pretended to read the story out loud to her. There are pictures of me proudly “reading”, the book upside-down.

Actually, you probably think it’s kind of silly but my morality and identity was sculpted, in a large part, by Dr. Seuss. Come to think about it, everything I am can be collected into some thoroughly ludicrous rhyme. For example, I have spent my entire life searching for the magical, whimsical place of Katroo, which is my own personal Xanadu (From “Happy Birthday to You”). It’s a wonderful world where children have parades in their honor, breakfast in bed, and everybody is loving and kind for you. No one pushes you down at recess and makes you eat mud. Okay, the part of me that is a critical adult responds to “For Birthday luncheons as a rule/We serve hot dogs, rolled on a spool,” with enraged protests over animal cruelty, heart attacks, and the glorification of consumer culture as the ultimate good. YOU CAPITALIST BASTARDS! But inside my non-pretentious heart, there is a part of me that snickers, wanting nothing more than to pulp all the endangered bird species’ eggs together for my selfish delight. Mmm… nothing sounds better to me this moment than some Scrambled Eggs Super! (ala Peter T. Hooper). It’s akin to the part of me that wants to be the first person taken into space for the purposes of tourism. A rational part of me says that sightseeing on Jupiter has got to be really bad for the environment of good ol’ Mother Earth (all the fuel expended and poisons released into the environment and all), but if someone offered me a ticket I’d be there in a heartbeat. And to have sex in zero-g? Damn!

Anyway, lucky for a world that has enough ruthless dictators already, the hedonistic side of me is tempered with other values I have inherited from the Good Doctor. For example, I have a rather annoying twinge of conscience that was imparted to me directly by dicta on justice from such works as The Five Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. The greatest unfairness of the world is that some people suffer for something that’s not their fault. Bartholomew was going to be killed just because the universe decided that he was going to wear a hat. It wasn’t his fault that he was wearing a hat, in fact, he fought the hat. Nevertheless, he was going to be punished, and that was anything but moral. My lack of love for authority figures can be drawn from the people in Seuss’ books that impose such silly laws. Why should anyone obey a king who would kill somebody just because they wore a nice hats? (speaking of which, I wonder if that’s where I got my love of shopping and accessories…some of those be-gemmed, be-feathered hats were pretty rad.) Who would obey a leader that called down the Oobleck? You could say that Bartholomew was the first inspiration for all my later, civil disobedience (we both have a kind of tame, mousy style, looking at the world with big, wide eyes, confused that it is quite so ridiculous as it has turned out to be). Oooh, I almost forgot to mention the ruler from Yertle the Turtle… now there was a tyrannical regime if ever I saw one!

And wouldn’t it just be the awesomest thing ever if there was a LGBTQ parade where everybody wore stars on their bellies? Sneetches & Other Stories taught me about equality. We’re not that different, after all, and even before I sensed the queer tendencies skimming through my own blood I recognized that there were rights that everyone should enjoy, regardless of the minutia of sexual orientation. (Speaking of those “Other Stories” was anyone else totally freaked out by the wandering pants? That scared the shit out of me when I was little.)

Of course it’s ironic that my very-Republican grandparents gave me my first doses of liberalism in The Lorax and the The Butter Battle Book, but to go into the political ramifications of those stories are obvious to the point of tedium. Let’s face it, Doctor Seuss has got to be one of the greatest pamphleteers on the planet. His propaganda indoctrination skill is unparalleled, so subtle that there are no calls by Republicans to cut his funding or schools trying to ban his works. That’s what I want to be as a writer—I want to impart and justify my values in logical, reasonable fashion, so quietly it becomes a definition of you from the inside-out and not from some methodic preaching.

I wish I lived in Katroo. I wish things were that easy. I wish that people didn’t forget my birthday, that I had a chocolate cake ten-stories high with peppermint frosting, and that everyone would see each other as cuddly, furry little creatures worthy of acclaim of themselves. I still love reading Dr. Seuss and all those childhood stories, call it nostalgia or sentimental or whatever. I have a dream, and it comes straight from the pages of the books read to me at bedtime.

Soft, soft… turtle creeps.
Hush, hush… turtle sleeps.