I’ve just been standing over there, next to the little silver bin in the kitchen, biting my nails down one by one. Fingers, not toes, don’t worry. It’s time to try and make this blog make sense with my new litter of naked mole rats at the end of my palms.
Flecked green paint skirts off the door when it opens.The bitter smell of old paper and coffee.
“You’re going to be a while, aren’t you,” she said, smiling up through oval eyes.
“Five minutes,” I said, because sometimes I lie. She went to sit in the pockmarked red chair. Books stacked up around her like dolomites.
And off I went into the depths of Crooked Book wandering, wondering why anyone would sell these books!?
This is a place, really, of magic. Where the true and honest letters of Hemmingway, honest and true, crack their elbows against the Big Sur floor bristling of Kerouac’s conscious streaming. I feel like I’m in a dimension of true reality. Maybe it’s the coffee.
Is there anywhere you get to see the true nature of someone’s ideas though, apart from a place where lots of books live? Lot’s of curated ideas thought through and binded. It’s a world we don’t get to see much anymore. Certainly not in the greased up quick world of social media. It took Tolstoy 10 years to write War and Peace, lovingly, painfully, a masterpiece of deftness, life and death. Even Jack Kerouac settled down for three weeks, he says, to spit out On the Road.
What’s weird is that people write more than ever now. More than when old Leo or Jack had their stylos out. What’s weirder is that words represent us far less than they used to. Maybe it’s because we don’t have to take so much care. I don’t have to grab my bird feather quill out anymore, scratching each word into Vellum made from baby cow.
Nope, now all an offense hoarder keyboarder needs is a surface emotion and the whole world can hear about it.
All feathers are created equal #fuckpaulinequirk
And all I need to say something dumb on Twitter, which I often do, is my initial, emotional response.
Defined by fleeting emotions. Where did all of the other chapters go? Who cares, because it’s so much easier to rip out the opening page and post it on an open notice board. Slap!
But without the true beginning can we ever really finish anything. Everything just becomes floating emotions. Like, I mean, without allowing every chapter to come through, is it even possible to come to a conclusion ABOUT ANYTHING? Yet again I’m confused, which I think is the definition of not knowing where to start.
Behind the thick backbones of books I can hear her, thumbing over the worn pages, up through oval eyes.
And that’s all anyone wants, book or not, for you to sit down and hear their story. To hear the chapter about loss and maybe add a few about adventure.
“Take your time,” she says, through a gap where I took a book. “But hurry up.”
Maybe this post will make sense one day. I haven’t got time to find out.