It's September.

The Man who Said Nothing

He was belligerent, irrational, idiotic.

"Orwell is dead and no one cares about him!"

Everyone stopped to stare at him, not one of them said a word, not out of shock toward this statement, but out of the hope that if no one responded, this obnoxious man would, quite simply, shut the fuck up. He had been saying things like this all night and everyone was tired of it. They just wanted to have a nice peaceful, semi-intoxicated evening, perhaps play some video games. The last thing on anyone's agenda was to have a drawn out discussion on the merits of literature because really, who cares about that shit? Who!? Apparently this man did, and far too much it seemed. Sure they appreciated the discussion of literature now and then but people -- fraudulent people -- often brought up literature out of some misguided desire for acceptance or self-validation rather than the desire to discuss one of the world's finest, most honest forms of art, and this, this self serving, intellectual masturbation, this desire to discuss purely for the advancement of one's own image was painfully evident in the way this man spoke. Yeah, Saul Bellow wrote some great books and you read them, but what difference does it make to anyone other than yourself?

No one knew who he belonged to or who brought him to this party. He just seemed to have shown up on his own accord, or rather stumbled upon, considering how drunk he was. One of the women nodded slightly though she did not know why. A reflex perhaps? The woman was beautiful but she spent a lot of time worrying about her looks, perhaps a desire to be prettier? Granted her nose was a tad large but most people easily overlooked this as it was simply a character flaw, a deviation from beauty, rather than a deal breaking disfigurement.

Aside from this woman's simple gesture the group stayed quiet, hoping, praying, that this unwanted, unshaven, balding, unattractive, bad minded, generally distasteful man would walk away and bring his inane ideas with him. When he spoke he blasted you with the scent of a rotting corpse in a late summer afternoon. The scent matched his ideas in quality.

The unwanted man continued once more, "No one reads books anymore! Doesn't anyone care!?"

"Prove it!" said one young man, quite a bit better dressed than everyone else. You might even have said he was god damned gorgeous. He had no girlfriend to speak of but would likely have one before the night was through. You could tell, just by glancing at him, that he was confident, self assured, mentally stable -- at least superficially. He licked his lips because they had remnants of chocolate pudding on them. People often said he had a heart of gold, so kind he was, like a knight. The words of kindness flowed forth out of him and everyone loved him for it. In any situation, if there was a right thing to say you can be sure he said it. Perhaps, at this moment, his best feature was that he had no qualms challenging a drunken moron.

The man was slow to answer but when he finally did, he said, "Prove it? I...what? Prove it!? Well, I...I can't prove it. I just know these things. I know many things! I read them in a book!"