Well, as I promised you yesterday, here is my letter to A’nonniemouse dated June 1997. To read the previous post introducing this letter, click on COCKROACHES GET A MILLION DOLLAR GRANT!!!! These Cochran Cornell the Cantankerous Cockroach writings are posted in the category Cochran’s Writings on this blog.
Dear A’nonniemouse, I received your letter of May 30 a couple of weeks ago and must truly thank you for your two letters, especially the second, a real bonus, since I didn’t answer your first one. You mentioned mitigating circumstances as to why I haven’t written to you. A’nonnie, you just don’t know! You said you didn’t know what to say to me because you don’t know me. Well, I must confess---therein lies the problem! I’m struggling with the current fad problem of having to “find myself,” that is, to come to know who I am, in order that I can respond to others in a somewhat healthy matter. After all, if I don’t know who I am, if I don’t know myself, how can you know who I am? I avoid looking in a mirror because I’m so disgusted and disappointed with the image I see. When I find myself skittering across a reflective surface, and get an unexpected glimpse of myself, I ask myself who I am, what I am going to be when I “grow up,” what is my destiny? These questions I ask myself constantly, but seem not to be able to find any answer. When I have more that a glancing glimpse in the mirror I pause (and you know how hard that is for us roach characters) and almost wish to be trompled on by a human shoe when the thought hits me, that what I see, that downcast, useless being I am, may be who I ultimately really am---that maybe I’m no better than that! That my mother raised a no-good do-badder. I’m in a quandary. I cannot become adventurous right now. I get totally depressed. I just don’t know who I am yet. I don’t have a persona, a proper cockroach aura. I seem to be spending much of my life trying to discover who I am. I’m doing what humans say is searching for myself. I just don’t know who I am, who I am to become, what’s to become of me. Adventures, you ask of me. Oh, if only there were some worth telling. But mine are all misadventures that prove how incompetent, indecisive, scatterbrained and unsettled I am. In fact, when Russ and his friend A’nonniemouse didn’t see me while they were visiting my creator, Carolyn, it wasn’t because I wasn’t there, because I was. But I didn’t want them to see me in the state I’m in, a state that seems perpetual. I’m sure they were looking, but I used my roach skills and stayed mighty out of the way. My life isn’t blazing or exciting. I am just barely surviving. Carolyn, I’m sure, has shared some of your adventures with me, and they are the rare dark moments among the light spots in my life (remember, dark spots are preferable to me, since light spots do me so much damage!). I’m so envious of you, but wonder how you could go about terrorizing the homo sapien pastors of Jamestown, Pennsylvania. Carolyn told me the following story her blind friend Russ wrote to her about one terroristic event---which occurred in a church, no less. Have you no couth? Click back Monday night for Part 3 of this series, Cochran’s Letters About Finding His Identity. The series will continue on successive Monday nights until the letter is fully posted. The parts are filed in the category Cochran’s Writings on this blog. |
