The Same River Twice Part Dos

Offutt begins this section of reading discussing his uncertainty of his wife's pregnancy. He really wants the child to be healthy and have a good upbringing, and he's worried how he potentially will have to take care of the child at home. This contrasts greatly with his thoughts and actions in his youth, where he would move with seemingly not a care in the world. I think as people age and face more responsibility, uncertainty and worry happens more naturally, it just comes down to how you deal with every situation.

After talking about his wife for a few pages, I love how Offutt opens up the stories of his youth again. He says, "The guts of America unfolded in every direction as I traveled down the interstate bloodstream, dodging the white corpuscles of perverts, cops, and outlaws" (page 59). This goes along with Offutt's many other great descriptions that I've already noticed in the book. He makes comparisons to two things that you normally would not associate with, giving the writing a much more original feel.

Another quote I liked was when he described his father's greatest fear as "duplicating Caesar's deathbed epiphany, and each of us was a potential Brutus, Judas, or Delilah" (p. 60). I liked this quote because Offutt could have simply just said his father was dreadfully suspicious of his family, but instead he used both secular historical as well as Biblical examples to really put true feeling into what his father was dealing with.

This whole reading really focused on Offutt gaining new experiences that he had never experienced before. There was some good insightful thoughts, and some very humorous situations. I thought it was very funny when he was about to jump out of the plane and he writes that "ten million years of genetic conditioning screamed in outrage and protest" (page 64). Just the next page, though, his friend Bill has killed himself by drinking and torching himself with kerosene, showing the fragility of the human condition.

Even in his life with his wife, Offutt experiences new things. For instance, him changing a diaper was worse for him than seeing heroin addicts or even "the chilling aftermath of a gunshot wound" (page 75). Really, we're always experiencing new things, no matter how old we get. The younger you are, the more new things you're generally going to experience, but that doesn't mean that this experiencing of new things will stop when you get old. There's always more to learn.

I thought it was interesting when Offutt describes Al talking of judgement and damnation then having Winner talk of death and destruction as well. He writes that, "maybe he and Winner were both correct-the world was doomed to extinction" (page 84). I think this part showed that when people are faced with uncertainties, such as the future, they become desperate and search in vain for answers or at least try to try to prepare themselves for the uncertainties that are to come.