"Messy, isn't it?"

Richard Brautigan! That was him. The poet I was writing about last night that I had done a project on in Art School. Richard Brautigan. After a while of googling various phrases including mayonnaise with poetry, I finally found him. It's all coming back to me now. By the looks of things he had a bit of a tough life and as a result was slightly disturbed in the head (a nutter). He was an alcoholic, paranoid schizophrenic brought up by abusive, alcoholic parents and then put through a number of years of electroconvulsive treatment in his twenties. His biggest seller was called 'Trout Fishing in America' and that's where all my ideas of mayonnaise jars in libraries stemmed from. It's a book about American society and Brautigan's personal take on it at the time of writing in the sixties. My final project involved setting up a small library in his name and using old style library cards, the kind printed on easily worn out brown card that used to slot into each other. Brautigan commited suicide in 1984 at the age of 49 by shooting himself in the head with a .44 Magnum and it was a good few months till anyone found his body. His suicide note simply said "Messy, isn't it?".