Catcher in the Rye

A Blatant Parody of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

by Franny H.

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap"— I have to tell you, I know, but I really don't want to go into it to tell you the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents were two hydrogen atoms deep within the core of the sun. See, this whole nuclear fusion thing happened while they were under extreme temperatures and pressures, like 16 million degrees Celsius or something. It kills me—they "fused". Their nuclei. The nuclei came together to make a helium nucleus and that brought me into this world. That Einstein guy came up with an equation for it, something like "E=mc²" but it's kind of a rough explanation. When my parents fused (freaky, ain't it) the mass of the helium nucleus they formed was less than the total mass of their hydrogen masses. The extra mass is converted to a huge amount of energy— about 89,875,517,873.681 times the amount of mass there was. It's so phony. I asked where babies come from and I get Einstein, I'm telling you, I would really need a cigarette if I weren't a tiny packet of energy (a photon) with no way of smoking it.

I bounced around a while–years–inside the radiative zone where I was born. It's the phoniest place there is, just a bunch of photons literally bouncing off of each other and all the other atoms in there, "randomly walking" around for millions of years. Same cycle, over and over again, hydrogen nuclei fusing to make helium and sending off all these other photons. The same old lousy photons just getting bounced around with other lousy photons off of lousy nuclei. After ten million years, I couldn't take it anymore. I was close to the edge—closer than I'd ever been before. So I just took off, not on my own accord mind you because I had to bounce to get there, but I got out into the convective zone, and it was very…big. I hit an atom, a gas atom, named Jane, and excited her enough to take me all the way up to the photosphere. She cooled down before we got there and let me go, but I really ought to call her. I radiated up to the photosphere and charged an atom in the plasma up there named Sunny. It was kind of hard to get excited about her but I'm a photon and all so it worked out.

I had a crummy close call with a "sunspot" in the photosphere. Spot, hah. I'd call it a freaking hurricane of about 5500 degrees in the shade. All this magnetically charged plasma was swirling around, between the poles of the stupid thing, and I nearly got the quarks beat out of me. Or whatever I'm made of. Anyway, I don't wanna talk about that anymore. Needless to say, I ditched Sunny and vibrated my way on up to the chromosphere. It was red, and it was very hot (10,000 degrees) and that's all I have to say about that. The corona was better—I've always liked coronas, they're pretty and stuff, not nearly as phony as all those other layers of the sun. The hotter the better, I say, and the corona is about a million degrees which is great for me. They always say to me, "Catcher," (that's my name) "why do you like it hot?" and then I ask them where the ducks go in the winter when they leave Central Park. That usually stumps them.

I got ejected from the corona though, in a coronal mass ejection. That really killed me—I'm not even mass, I'm energy, and I get kicked off of the sun just the same. Oh, I tried to stay but the atom I had excited just dragged me along for the ride. It happened pretty high in the corona, and it was sort of funny in an awful way. How often do million-ton chunks of plasma get chucked off out of the sun just for having crazy magnetic fields running through them? Well, not that infrequently, but still, it's the principle of the thing.

It only took a few minutes to get to Earth—I tell you, it was one dubious ride. I hate photons. But I came to, we all came to this big blue-green blob and went crashing into its magnetosphere. That's the magnetic field of charged particles (protons and electrons) keeping solar flares, solar wind, and CME's from wreaking havoc on the earth and its phony inhabitants. Well, my CME hit that layer and sent a huge flood of electrons raining down on Quebec. Look at them all, yelling in French about their power plant malfunctions. That kills me.

Anyway, after that I kind of ended up here—I don't really remember how, I got transferred from atom to atom, they got excited, they got unexcited and I left. I mean, you have to obey the laws of conservation of mass and energy and everything. So I'm here, in a field of rye. Who eats rye, anyway? Other than that bread, seriously, could it be any more pointless? What am I supposed to do, catch little kids from falling off the edge of that cliff over there? Damn kids shouldn't be playing baseball near a cliff anyway. I'm a photon, I can't be Catcher and be in the rye…or can I? Catcher in the rye…interesting…I think I'll call Jane. Except she's a photon. I miss my brother Allie. He's a photon. We're all photons…you know, I’m sorry I told so many people about all this junk. I miss all these places I told people about. Even the photosphere and that old convective zone, for instance. I think I even miss that goddamn radiative zone. It's funny. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

Note: the first two sentences and the last three sentences are almost exactly the same as the first two sentences and last three sentences of The Catcher in the Rye. However, in writing a parody one is legally allowed to include as much of the original as is needed to make the parody recognizable, and I think I need that many sentences to make it recognizable that I am spoofing Holden Caulfield and the fact that he uses the words "phony" and "killed" way too much. I copied no astronomical information from the aforementioned novel.