DAVID KIRBY

ALMOST WORTH IT

“That was almost worth it,” she says as we exit
the movie theater, at which point it occurs to me
that, if we see, say, ten movies, one will be
Not Worth It, three will be Really Worth It,
and the other six will fall into the Almost Worth It
category, which makes me wonder if pretty much
everything else in life can be categorized according
to the same scheme, which, if you think about it,
isn’t all that bad: having only ten percent
of one’s experiences fall into the Not Worth It category
is a good average, although, as far as movies go,
our more or less satisfactory experience
in that department is due in large part to the fact
that we read a lot of movie reviews and almost never
see a movie unless we’re pretty sure that it will
succeed at least at the Almost Worth It level,
although that goes against my personal conviction
that whatever I decide to do ultimately will surely
rank up there with everyone else’s Top Ten Things
to Do and that therefore I’ve got to get out early
and beat the crowd if I want to stand a chance
of enjoying my show or concert—why, it’s all I can do
the night before to not take my sleeping bag
and camp out in front of the ticket booth, and even then
I’ll want to go two hours early. How do you know
the venue didn’t do what airlines do and double-book?
What do you do if you get there and there’s a guy
in your seat, sit in his lap? What if the guy’s
a Hell’s Angel? You’re not going to sit in
a Hell’s Angel’s lap! Why, he’d hurl you to the floor
of the theater or concert hall and stomp you
to pieces and rush outside and tip your Harley over
and stomp the crap out of it or, in my case, tip
my fat-tire Schwinn Roadmaster over and knock me down
and stomp me to pieces and my bicycle as well.
But I go to my show anyway, either early or late,
and guess what, it’s Almost Worth It. There’s a character
in Sartre’s Nausea who says an adventure is an event
out of the ordinary without necessarily being extraordinary,
like getting on the wrong train or losing your briefcase,
though that would depend on what’s in your briefcase—
certainly you losing your briefcase would be less
troublesome to me than me losing mine unless there were
something in yours that belonged to me. Not everything
is Really Worth It. Not everything is a sockdolager, that is,
“something exceptional or outstanding.” Did you know
that “sockdolager” or at least its variant “sockdologising”
was one of the last words heard by President Abraham Lincoln?
He was watching An American Cousin in Ford’s Theater
when John Wilkes Booth, himself and actor and one familiar
with the play’s dialog, knew the line that would elicit
the loudest burst of laughter from the audience was
“Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out,
you sockdologising old man-trap.” Not everythng in life
is Beethoven’s Ninth: when a friend’s 11-year-old
effused over some pop song, his grandpa said, “It’s no
Beethoven’s Ninth,” a phrase my friend and her husband
have used ever since to describe disappointments
of every kind. How was dinner tonight? Not bad,
but no Beethoven’s Ninth. Very likely An American Cousin
was a theatrical experience of the Not Worth It type,
seeing as how it is seldom produced these days, possibly
because of the macabre association but also maybe
it’s just not a very good play, though if my local little
production of An American Cousin turned out to be
Really Worth It, I wouldn’t know, would I, since
probably wouldn’t go to see it in the first place, having
assumed it is Not. Where does all the Really Worth It
stuff come from anyway? The people who make it
don’t know themselves, or maybe they just aren’t telling.
Bob Dylan’s sure not telling. Maybe Sunnyland Slim
was onto something when he described bluesman
Robert Johnson as “just a guy. An exceptional music
man but just an ordinary guy.” Another musician,
Walter Horton, said of Johnson, “I traveled up and down
the line with him, but I never got to know him.”
Maybe Robert Johnson wanted it that way.
Maybe Johnson’s contemporary Roosevelt Sykes was right
when he said, “he didn’t want you to know him.”

David Kirby teaches at Florida State University. His latest books are a poetry collection, The Winter Dance Party, Poems 1983-2023, and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them. Kirby is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” He is currently on the editorial board of Alice James Books.