Listening to ‘Bookworm,’ a weekly radio program hosted by Michael Silverblatt, I discovered the French poet   Pierre Reverdy. He is known as a Surrealist, but his poems seem very straightforward to my untrained ears. They are morbid, dismal, creepy, and cut to the heart of things with unusual eloquence. Keep in mind that I hate poetry, though.

Ron Padgett read his new translation of a prose poem by Reverdy that ended with “….alas, my hate endures” bla bla bla. I experienced that shock of recognition: Mine, too! I thought happily.

I’ve been thinking of getting a tattoo, probably a terrible idea, but I haven’t been able to come up with a good idea until now. So I’ve been trying to find out how to translate this phrase back into French, without success.

Can anyone help? “My hatred endures” is the single best description of my worldview that I’ve ever stumbled upon. I know it’s pretentious to get a tattoo in a foreign language, but at least it’s not Latin. I just read about some actress/moron who has a tattoo in Sanskrit, which seems like some sort of milestone in stupidity. My other tattoo idea, for the last few years, was a gang-banger name that I think I made up: Lil’ Spiteful. I’m not ruling that one out, but I’m wondering how it will go over in the nursing home where I’ll end up, with nothing left in my memory bank except the Complete Lyrics of Bob Dylan.

Meanwhile, my hatred endures, and tonight it is flowing in several directions. I tried Lunesta last night for the first time, and instead of that cute little butterfly I got nothing but grinding insomnia. I’m so disgusted by this failed experiment in pharmaceuticals that I don’t want to try my sample of Rozerem. If I can’t achieve the butterfly, it’s hard to believe I’ll get Abe Lincoln and that hedgehog. I don’t even know if that thing is a hedgehog, a gopher, or a beaver.

Alas.

Recently, I discovered a whole new category of mental disorders, known collectively as Delusional Misidentification.

With Capgras Syndrome, the person’s primary delusion is that a relative or loved one has been replaced by an imposter who is an exact double. In married   people, it is always the spouse. Well, duh!

Cotard’s Delusion makes a person doubt his own existence; he often believes he is dead.

There’s a bunch of other variations. I like autoscopic phenomena, in which a person believes he is an imposter of himself. That one sounds like a really sticky situation, doesn’t it? It seems like a paradox, or at least a conundrum. Larry King would call it a ‘Catch 22,‘ as I heard him refer to some mundane conflict last night. Then there’s intermetamorphosis, reverse intermetamorphosis, temporal reduplication, and mirrored-self misidentification.

I once knew a woman who was hideous in every way, including aesthetically. But she would describe her impact at a party or somewhere, by saying “I looked like a million dollars!” She was absolutely sincere, even though her enormous snout moved up and down as she spoke. There should be a category for that sort of delusion! Or what about those creepy guys who are always talking about their screenplays in a really loud voice. I heard a guy last week in Ross For Less, explaining into his cellphone that if a producer said she “got” his script, then it wasn’t “smart” enough. That’s probably Joe Eszterhas Syndrome.

I found Joe Eszterhas by googling ‘worst screenwriter.’ I wonder if he’s proud of coming up first. I’m not sure what his particular disorder is, but I like that he’s given us a yardstick for awful screenwriting.

My own delusion is that I can still wear really tight jeans at my advanced age. But wait, maybe that’s because I don’t have a full-length mirror! Ignorance is bliss. Or a Catch 22.