Mark Twain and a Kitten: An Ode

When this image was first brought to my attention, it seemed me that metaphorical stars were metaphorically aligning, and my documentative instincts immediately led to a trance of reflection. It's a horrible way to live, but we make due, don't we?

Anyway, I couldn't help but feel as though Twain was reaching out to me from beyond the grave via the medium of another literature enthusiast's blog. “Some people scorn a cat and think it not essential; but the Clemens tribe are not of these.” We, Enfields, are with you, Sam--undoubtedly, we are with you.

I was in Junior High when a teacher first introduced me to Mr. Clemens, the same year a balding football coach, through a class dubbed "Health Class," introduced me to intricacies of my then-changing body. In fifth period, we read Huck Finn aloud, several timid white children tip-toeing around the word "nigger" as though it were poison ivy or a land mine or something of that sort whilst looking in my direction to make sure the ethnic half of me hadn't taken offense, and in sixth, we watched a fifteen minute illustrating both the birds and the bees in unwanted detail, which was I how I saw the first vagina I'd ever see, crowning head and all. I had already developed a self-consciousness about my weight and my plump, perpetually-dry lips and my clammy, perpetually-moist palms. I tried to hold hands with the girl who had asked for my help on the Huck Finn paper, but she was not a fan of the nervous sweat dripping from our shared grasp.

A Doodle of the Devil Blowing Bubbles

Every picture needed horns, and he wanted to be the hand that distributed them. He realized his realm of influence in that regard had its limitations, but his elementary school made a habit of telling children that they can accomplish anything they put their minds to--no matter how improbable. As a result, he earnestly believed he could sketch horns onto every political figure in every textbook, onto every portrait of every composer reprinted in every program for every concert band performance, onto every smiling child on every box of girl scouts cookies, onto every author's photograph on every book jacket wrapped around every book in every library or bookstore, onto every poorly sketched stick figure in every bathroom stall in every truck stop across the country. For now, he would have to settle with this particular program, content with defacing this idle giant as that gentle beast gazed over a landscape somehow meant to signify the accompanying piece, but eventually he would need to expand, would need not to regulate his art as a means of contending with boredom but as a militant expression of disdain for a horn-less society.