books and birthdays
my birthday's coming up. i'm the most ineffective party planner ever. i come up with the ghost of an idea of what i'd like to do and assume that everybody i'd like involved telepathically knows and will show up at the secret meeting spot the designated secret five and a half minutes late. bearing chocolate and prosecco.
i've been in bookstores a bunch the past coupla days. i half-started reading chuck klosterman's killing yourself to live... but then allure came in the mail and the lame-brained petty side of me prevailed (during the lunch hour, anyway.) it is not just a little embarassing i have paid money to subscribe to that garbage. and then on the other hand adbusters pisses me off in an equally spirited and polarly opposite sensibilitied way, so i guess maybe i should just shut up and make my own periodical. maybe that's what this is.
it's been fun visiting my childhood memories for longer than usual lately. been thinking about everybody in the fam who's not around anymore and i drifted back to thinking about the little ritual my grandfather and i had every year my birthday rolled around. he and i would take a drive to oyster bay and there would be free reign in the bookstore in the strip with the blockbuster on one end and the dunkin donuts and the music store on the other. the bookstore itself isn't there anymore - which seems to be the way of things, i guess - but grandpa let me browse and smell the bindings for as long as i wanted. i don't ever remember him telling me to hurry up. and generally i amassed a stack of things that piled close to my knee, and when it got too heavy for me to push around anymore, or else when i was exhausted from looking at new things, we'd check out and that would be my birthday present, this wondrous-smelling cube of pages and possibility, of new adventures and glossy covers, prettily-tasseled page markers, all splayed in the bottom of a big brown paper bag. i held it between my feet on the ride home, and, i hope, always remembered to tell him thank you.
i've been in bookstores a bunch the past coupla days. i half-started reading chuck klosterman's killing yourself to live... but then allure came in the mail and the lame-brained petty side of me prevailed (during the lunch hour, anyway.) it is not just a little embarassing i have paid money to subscribe to that garbage. and then on the other hand adbusters pisses me off in an equally spirited and polarly opposite sensibilitied way, so i guess maybe i should just shut up and make my own periodical. maybe that's what this is.
it's been fun visiting my childhood memories for longer than usual lately. been thinking about everybody in the fam who's not around anymore and i drifted back to thinking about the little ritual my grandfather and i had every year my birthday rolled around. he and i would take a drive to oyster bay and there would be free reign in the bookstore in the strip with the blockbuster on one end and the dunkin donuts and the music store on the other. the bookstore itself isn't there anymore - which seems to be the way of things, i guess - but grandpa let me browse and smell the bindings for as long as i wanted. i don't ever remember him telling me to hurry up. and generally i amassed a stack of things that piled close to my knee, and when it got too heavy for me to push around anymore, or else when i was exhausted from looking at new things, we'd check out and that would be my birthday present, this wondrous-smelling cube of pages and possibility, of new adventures and glossy covers, prettily-tasseled page markers, all splayed in the bottom of a big brown paper bag. i held it between my feet on the ride home, and, i hope, always remembered to tell him thank you.