Today has been an unusual day thus far.
I’ve been reading Slapstick, a novel written by Kurt Vonnegut. He’s dead now.
Hi ho.
And I’m having one of those experiences where I’ve become so immersed in a book that I’m not even jolted into the outside world, but instead seeing it through the narrative lens of the book I’ve just been reading. Everything I see, I seem to imagine it through the dry, understated, deadpan humour of Vonnegut.
So it goes.
When I got off the train at Melbourne Central this morning, there was a woman at the top of the escalator. She was handing out pamphlets.
Pretty much everyone went past her, because they were probably in a hurry – they were right lane escalator people – no time to stand still. I took one of her brochures, and looked at it. It said on the front, which was yellow, with a big blue number ‘1’:
“What is the one thing you need to know before you become pregnant?
Take folic acid!”
On the inside it explained that folic acid prevents birth defects such as spina bifida by up to 70 percent. Spina bifida is a neural tube defect and the most common one is when the spinal cord is poorly formed.
I turned around and nearly gave her back the pamphlet, because I’m not going to become pregnant anytime soon. Then I realised that she probably had spina bifida. She was in a wheelchair, you see.
So it goes.
Then I kept the pamphlet and read it cover to cover, because I figure that way at least her time wasn’t wasted. I already knew that folic acid was important, but now I feel like writing about it.
You can get folic acid through green leafy vegetables such as spinach and broccoli, lentils, chickpeas, oranges, and cereals.
The brochure was sponsored by Bayer HealthCare, who I guess want to sell folate supplements. The brochure says that “even if you eat food which has folic acid added to it, such as bread, you will almost certainly need more to obtain the required amount. Taking a supplement will help you to meet your daily needs.”
Hi ho.
And I’m sitting here at university, still in the bookish daze that follows immersion in a novel or written world.
I think I like Vonnegut’s writing because he doesn’t labour. He doesn’t force. He just writes what he sees. Sometimes that’s something bizarre, impossibly far fetched, and grotesque, but somehow it all feels true as well, because the world is crazy like that. People do die in freak accidents, or survive, or find themselves unable to love.
One of my favourite parts in Slaughter-House Five is the description of a book by fictional author Kilgore Trout:
“It was about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings.
It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground.
Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.”
He also presents a picture of the world that I don’t find completely depressing, even if his conclusions seem to be that humans will always kill each other, use intelligence for evil, and have wars, etc.
And so on.
P.S. There is something to be enjoyed about late night train trips.
Standing at Flinders Street, hoping I’ll see a rat scurrying about the dark, wet tracks,
When a cat at a station pads past in perfect time with my music.
