My favorite book, hands down, is not The Wanting Seed as I may claim some times. It’s by far the most entertaining book I’ve read and certainly the one I enjoy the most, but it’s not the one that’s touched me the most. That one would be The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread by Don Robertson. It’s one of those books I so love that has numerous characters that seem removed from each other until the climax. The main protagonist Morris Bird III is a 9-year-old boy on, to him, a big journey across the city of Cleveland. Set in 1944, it’s a seemingly innocent tale of a child discovering himself and some secrets of the world around him.

Now the reason it’s special to me is because of the particular when of my first reading of it. I found it when I was a preteen in my mother’s collection of books and began reading it as a bathroom read. Shortly after beginning it, I was admitted into the hospital with one of my bouts of ketoacidosis. When I was asked if I wanted anything brought to my room, I requested that book. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered it was the first of a trilogy. Unfortunately, they were all out of print. Abie surprised me with the second and third books (The Sum and Total of Now and The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened respectively) on my 23rd birthday. I’ll admit that, upon reading the melancholic end of the third book, I cried like a bitch.

Four years later and I’m looking through the channel guide of my digital box and what’s this on 17-2? The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened? It couldn’t be based on the story I read, right? Wrong. The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened was apparently released in 1977 as a made-for-TV movie starring James Earl Jones as Morris Bird Jr. and, as Morris Bird III, Jimmie Walker.

Let me make this perfectly clear:

The motherfucker known for shouting “Dyn-o-mite!” is playing the character from a book that may be one of the few pieces of evidence of me having a heart.

It’s on in an hour, and I shall at least try the first couple minutes of it before completely denouncing it as an atrocity. My expectations, however, are not very high, especially since they can’t even show the greatest thing that almost happened.

She and me’s a history of violence but I long and burn to touch her just the same

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. —Antoine de Saint-Exupery

http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp03282009.shtml
“We gather here tonight, beholden to no god, no fate, but only our memories, our love, and ourselves.

Tonight we take back that which has always been ours but which we forgot, and we make a promise to ourselves and each other to never forget again.

We each invest this bar with a part of ourselves and make it the embodiment of long nights past.

For our friendship
For the first one to arrive
And the last one to show up
For the one who came out of nowhere
And the one planted in tradition and hoping to pass it on
For the solitary
And those happily stuck with each other
For the ones who are gone and never coming back
And those who refuse to forget them

The building is empty, and so’s the booze. Everything that matters we take with us, either in our hearts, hands or hollow legs. Fuck anyone who doesn’t like it. Fuck anyone who doesn’t understand.

And the last one out always turns off the light.”

Maturity is the generic term for what remains after our evolution has halted and our dreams have died.