I have been feeling blah lately.  Things haven’t felt right.  My days have been feeling stale.  So I thought I’d look at some great works of literature to see what famous characters have done who felt the same way.

But that plan only lasted until I looked at Ishmael from Moby Dick:

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet . .  then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

I quickly realized that following the example of literary characters is a really dumb idea.  Here’s a guy who stalks corpses and apparently has some serious canker sores, and then he decides to jump aboard a boat that chases a large, white allegory?  I decided that I’d be better off not taking a page from Ishmael, Interrupted.

Same with Dick Diver from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night.  Bad things happened to him, such as--well, actually, who cares what happened to him?  His name is Dick Diver.  I’m not saying my own name is all that great, but I don’t need to be a walking ad for prescription pharmaceuticals, either.

And then there’s Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray.  He came up with a great cure for wrinkles that totally beats Oil of Olay and botox treatments. But he had to hang a really tacky painting in his living room.

Hamlet had the hots for his mother and he killed himself and never bothered to give his girlfriend swimming lessons.  Yeah, I really need to see what he has to say about life, the universe, and everything.

Literary characters are useless.  So I’m taking matters in my own hands.  I’m off to New Zealand.  See you in a few weeks.*

*If you’d like to understand the meaning behind the title of this post, you need to know that my mother always wrote ‘Backson’ on the notes she left on the kitchen counter to tell us that she had gone into town and would return later.  And if you want to know why she did such an eccentric thing, you can read this.**

**Okay, bye.