Boredom and Borders

Since Jacqui has been in adventures on the west coast all week, I've been wondering what the hell to do with myself.

So far it has mainly involved eating pizzas, drinking beers, and playing video games. However, today I decided to continue reading Lorrie Moore's collection of short stories: Self-Help. . I walked around town, occasionally looking up, but mostly with head down, reading this book. It's really nice, the way a cold shower is when you're sweating.

So I kept walking and reading right up main street, until I walked by Borders.

They are closing all the Borders. Remember in the '90s when people were upset that these big corporate book stores put all of the little guys out of business? The little bookstores all died, except for maybe the few that hide out in college towns. Every college town I've ever been to had a book store. The owners will tell you that they sure as hell don't do it for the money or the women.

Now the Internet has closed all the Borders. The large windows facing the main street read, in big red, yellow, and black letters: UP TO 40% OFF ORIGINAL RETAIL PRICE! and GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE! and ACT NOW! DON'T HESITATE!

Tom Waits, of course, starts playing in my head.

I walked in with my book in hand and went straight to the counter. "Hey I just walked in, I have this book, do you mind if I buy some more?" The guy looked at me like I was lying, like I had been shopping for an hour just to find Lorrie Moore on the shelf, just so I could walk out with it, unpaid. His manager, a tall, thin woman, with curly brown hair, told him, and me, that it was fine. She believed me.

After grabbing books, putting them back, grabbing more, and shuffling around, I chose six books and didn't steal the seventh, despite what the family in line thought.

Borders was out of bags.

So I walked home, the entire time trying to remember how to hold books. I haven't held more than one or two books for any extended period of time since 2000. I tried holding them all under my left arm, but they kept shifting and slipping as I walked home. I tried holding them the way the nerds did in middle school: right in front of you with two hands. But I felt lame. The books were small and my hands were touching underneath them. I tried holding them the way middle school girls do: the way you hold a baby, but my fingers weren't long enough, and the books kept slipping away.

I eventually settled on the way Rocky holds bricks as he runs around construction sites getting ready for Apollo. As I walked, a group of teen aged boys with empty book-bags were following me.

It's July, they don't need book-bags unless they are trying to rob me of my bricks. They followed me right to my apartment building, followed me into my building, they must live there.

I half expected their moms to pop out and offer me tutoring jobs since I looked so smart with all the books I had.

But no, I made it home with all my books and no third job. I finished another twenty pages in Self-Help and now will crack open a corked bottle of beer and read some of the Bukowski collection I bought.

A friend of mine once said that if you've read one Bukowski poem, you've read them all. Although I totally see exactly where he's coming from, I think he'd agree with me that he was wrong.

Here is me flipping through this book and landing on a random poem:

white dog

I went for a walk on Hollywood Boulevard.
I looked down and there was a large white dog
walking beside me.
his pace was exactly the same as mine.
we stopped at traffic signals together.
we crossed the side streets together.
a woman smiled at us.
he must have walked 8 blocks with me.
then I went into a grocery store and
when I came out he was gone.
or she was gone.
the wonderful white dog
with a trace of yellow in its fur.
the large blue eyes were gone.
the grinning mouth was gone.
the lolling tongue was gone.

things are so easily lost.
things just can't be kept forever.

I got the blues.
I got the blues.
that dog loved
and trusted me and
I let it walk away.

Shit like this makes me want to write, again.

The books I bought today:

Charles Bukowski's The pleasures of the Damned (Poems 1951-1993)
Charles Bukowski's Hollywood (Novel)
James Joyce's Ulysses (Novel)
James Joyce's Dubliners (Novel)
Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness (Nonfiction)
Joe Dunthorne's Submarine (Novel)