Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Saturday, December 06, 2003 It's like Outbreak meets The Banana Splits! Hola, Amigo! It's Saturday night, around 7:00 p.m. and it's dark and wet outside. Not as much so as at 5:00 p.m., where the sky was so dark and drained of light, I expected the Rapture to kick in. Now it's just plain ol' dark and wet.I finished Nano--finished a bit early, in fact. Wrote over ten thousand words in two days, called it quits at 51,000 plus (I did 20% of that in two days? That kinda creeps me out, for some reason....) and managed to get kookily feverishly ill. Called in sick to work for a few days, finally felt better, then went and sold off 17 boxes of books. All these numbers, I hope, are doing something to convey how, um, extreme my life still feels. Getting rid of seventeen boxes of books (somewhere between half and two-thirds of my entire library) was alternately horrifying and ecstatic. I had to do it, though, because I'm moving in with Edi at the end of the month and I just got too much CRAP. Can books be crap? Oh hell, yes--particularly if you don't read 'em. Right before I got sick, I had managed to go through the first fifteen boxes and cull out about five. Then, while I was feverishly sweating all over myself and my bed, I stared at those boxes like, "Do I really need those Ionesco books? I collected them eight years ago and I haven't read them yet. Am I ever really going to, or am I just deluding myself?" It's the most sensible fever I've ever had. I went back through the ten boxes and cut another five, and then I just kept going. I could go on and on about that long Thursday--spending the six or so hours just pulling it all, then packing the seventeen boxes in my car and driving (during a rainstorm) down to Fremont because it had the only bookstore I knew that would take almost everything (and let me donate the rest), the long cautious drive surrounded by hundreds of pounds of my own possessions, knowing that they could crush me quite easily in any kind of collision--but what really stays with me is, at the end of it, how similar it was to getting my tattoos way back when. I was exhilarated and shattered, hyper and exhausted, cranked full of adrenaline and pain. I had lost something of myself, willingly. Tattooing had made me feel, for once, in control of my body, rather than vice-versa. Something similar happened with those seventeen boxes of books: if I started thinking about how much money I had spent on those books, how many hours, how much space, how much potential, I would begin getting depressed. But when I didn't dwell on that (just like you try not to dwell on the ink that is now on your skin, no fooling, forever), I felt so much more light. All those damn books! The people who bought the books went from surly underpaid bookstore employees at the beginning to enthusiastic book browsers in the forty-five minutes it took the three of them to unload, sort and stack everything. Two of the people didn't say anything to me directly, but I came back a few minutes early and I got to hear one of them say, "Wow, look at this!" And another person reply, "Yeah, I know. Doesn't that look great?" And after, one of the guys, the one who looked a little older, with the glasses and the gut and the dark hair, looked at me and said, "This is a really great selection of stuff. You really must have spent a lot of time getting some of those books. If you don't mind me saying, you appear to have really great taste." That man will never know how much I wanted to leap over the counter and embrace him. "Yeah, well," I said. "Well, thanks. Honestly. It makes it easier letting all this go knowing that it'll be appreciated. I mean--not that you're the one who's going home with it, but you know what I mean." "Well," he said. "Actually, there's a bunch of stuff in there I'll probably be buying. But yeah, I know what you mean." "Well, Cool," I said. "Cool." My books were going to go to someone who appreciated them--who hopefully wouldn't keep them in boxes in his bedroom for the next twelve months. My books had been freed, too. posted by Jeff Lester | 7:26 PM | |
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