it's funny how one thing can lead to another. i was watching penny dreadful and one of the main characters was named dorian gray which touched something inside my brain and the oscar wilde obsession took hold. it's also funny how person's outlook can change with age. i remember being forced to read oscar wilde in high school and not liking it at all. the problem with reading this stuff in school is you can't just read it and enjoy it, you have to write little essays to a humorless teacher and try to find some inner meaning in the story etc. and of course reading books written by gay authors was not the sort of thing that a young man gravitated towards in those days. we were down right homophobic.
it only took me a page or two to fall in love with oscar wilde this time around. it seems that every page, if not every paragraph, contains some excellent play on words or pithy observation. at first i thought to myself, how the hell can this guy come up with so many great and funny observations on life, then it hit me. old oscar spent a lot of time socializing with educated, upper class brits and being the smart rascal that he was, he must have soaked up their words of wisdom like a sponge and made use of them in his writing. or course, i might be totally wrong but that's how i imagine things when reading his pearls of wisdom.
if anyone had told me 40 years ago that i would become a teetotaling, scooter riding oscar wilde devotee in my old age i would have thought they were nuts but as they say, life, or truth is stranger than fiction. but all is not lost, jeffery, the dude, lebowski is still my hero and i do spend a lot of time abiding.
this isn't from oscar but it's my new favorite adage:
THE STONE AGE DIDN'T END BECAUSE THEY RAN OUT OF ROCKS.
shit, the rip has even taken an interest in oscar wilde!
billy says he still loves you sons of bitches.
