Biking Jest
You can kind of see the trouble in trying to fit a doorstopper into an e-reader, but for some self-comforting reason, just ignore it. One of the excuses for such a pricey device is the loss of weight, but in reality the book has a weight in itself, in its entropy-decreasing existence. The weight that transcends the extensive network of human (and potentially non human?) communications. This weight does not depend on the physical size of the book I guess, but it does correlate in the object of the story.
So there I go, back and forth, footnotes and back, bookmark one and back, bookmark two and back. Is this a kind of meta-metaphor for tennis? You smart bastard, the receive-and-return of the understanding of a story that I sometimes doubt if it was written to be understood.
I gotta give credit for (probably unintentionally) finding a way to prevent the ARR! pirrrrate reading of your literature, although I find it hard to believe that you would care at all.
Once an e-reader breaks from trying to read a doorstopper with uncountable, unmeasurable footnotes you will probably not see yourself in the reflection of the device, and say: I should just buy the fucking book.
I found the book on the forest-named website for a cheap price, but I could not help but feel that it was too easy. On a sidenote, I feel a kind of reticence with respect to buying things so. freaking. easily. So I just couldn’t hit the Delivery Now button and went into the maps app to search for nearby bookstores (but please not that hipster bookstore that despite really liking it, it sold really strange books, among other things, or that other non-existent bookstore that proved its non-existence after a few biking kilometers) that could potentially sell the book.
(Un)fortunately for me, the closest bookstore the app spat out was 6.8 km away from my aposentos. Without giving much of a thought, with the fear of eventually not going because of a distance-induced change of hearts, I got my bearings, and rode my bike.
Plenty of the most notorious examples of loving unliving things come from my mom. What I do is just tease her, until she sometimes gets rid of some of the stuff I tease her about. Lately I’ve been realizing this is a pretty shitty thing to do, so I’ve been trying to control the teasing. Deep down, I think, the machine pulling the strings of the teasing actions is the fear of seeing her turn into a hoarder, seeing her turn into something similar to my grandma, a house full of shiny cats, scented candles, out-of-season christmas decorations, talking fish, artistically varying rugs, normally distributed sized gemstones, single examples of different kitchen-ware sets, all threatening to cause an aesthetically-induced seizure right into my understanding of color schemes. I guess the attitude blaming goes trans-generationally, as these things usually go.
But when I get on by bike, I finally understand, and as the cliché usually goes, with reason, Mom was right all along. As I ride the bike along the wrong side of the sidewalk of a relatively busy street hearing the squeaking of every foot rotation, staring at the rust and cracked paint of my unliving companion, ironically, there in the defect contemplating moment is when I realize that I cherish this crooked bike. You see, if it were shining new, deep cavities on tires, perfectly greased and undirted chain I would not have felt this way, it was as if it was not only me making an effort to take my own person places, but with its own weariness my companion made the effort to not fall apart when getting together somewhere.
There we found ourselves, driving my red bike in these hillless streets with one kind of oniric music in the background, music I’ve already listened a hundred times but, makes me feel like home. I wonder if it was a good idea to leave the house at this time in midday where the sun doesn’t care about asking for permission to increase your skin’s temperature unboundedly, and the sadistic fuck kind of likes it when you start to perspire more water than you thought you even carried inside. That’s Florida for y’all. I make the effort still. Going from corner to corner I find the grinning sun, I feel it, unlookable, above the frustration that’s starting to gestate in my head, the clouds are not yet here the narrator reminds me. This country, man. Designed for the wheel-footed. Minutes go by in each corner hearing the beeping of the streetlights, patient, just looking ahead. When you’re so frustrated you don’t even bother to somehow play the system, just wait… for the foot-footed silhouette which only appears when foot-footed 3D projections summon them. Hopping from corner to corner, with intermittent episodes of frustration that disappear as soon as I am able to go further north, same kind of feeling you get when you get sick and notice that you didn’t appreciate your healthy moments, hopping from corner to corner, is how I finally get to the bookstore.
With the looming fear of repeating the mistake of orbiting into the remnants of what used to be a storyplace, armed with a bottle of the so famous electrolyte replenishing drink that everyone seems to like (I gotta tell you, it really quenches your thirst faster than water) I wonder around curiously looking at the different stores and thinking if the actual curiosity stems from finding interesting objects or finding a store that doesn’t conform to the Ctrl+C Ctrl+V leitmotif that seems so prevalent in this all -you-can-buy buffet of a place. Although this time luck smiles at me, the long awaited bookstore sits there presenting itself with big, astigmatism-friendly letters: BOOK GALLERY WEST.
Back sweaty, swampassed, I walk with a slow pace along a couple of used books book shelves laid outside the bookstore. Even though it’s unbearably humid, the covers’ and titles’ aesthetics, the spines’ wear, and the yellow color of the leaves cue me to almost smell their age. Nothing in particular peaks my interest, so I just stroll into the western gallery. As soon as I’m inside, the smell of a completely recognizable (but not by me) variant of incense fills up my nostrils while at the same time makes me realize that it has been a long time since my nose hairs actually came in contact with the smoke of one of those inedible skinny smoky corndogs (emphasis on the inedible part). How the smoke twirled and turned as it left the incandescent pointy edge was always a good source of joy to me, how it always seemed to eventually come to a stable position only to be disturbed again by some deterministic or random air current. But this time I’m only enjoying the non visual part of it, the source absent to both my knowledge and interest.
LIST OF THINGS YOU CAN FIND IN AN INCENSE DRENCHED BOOKSTORE:
– An ethnically south asian guy going about awkwardly between the classics shelves. – A couple of particularly nice staffers with soothing voice but you won’t know about this fact until you leave the library. – The delicious almost absolute silence that is so characteristic of rooms where the book to person ratio is notably and unsurprisingly high. – A section of self-help books intermixed with cooking books that in a maybe not so subtle manner suggests that cooking is a way to become a better person which I totally agree. – Little boxes of wood, unlit incense sticks, and similar kinds of mystical paraphernalia elements adorning a shelf being taken over by tiny shiny animals made of porcelain, but mostly alligators. – A book by a whacko author that you just cannot believe he’s this famous and that one of your dearest friends requested a book of him when coming back but just that one whacko volume wasn’t available. – A big shelf of science fiction and fantasy books that make you wonder what is the maximum possible set of books that can make it into a single meta-scifi-universe without contradicting each other and losing consistency (not that some self-contained universes are clean of that habit). – A deep sense of disorientation primed by looking at so many books and at the same time none at all and realizing that they say don’t judge a book by its cover but Marta do you expect me to read every fucking book and make the judgment right here and what is the point of buying at this juncture if I already read the whole thing. – A salvaging fine lady that to your question of ‘You don’t have any Infinite Jest copies, do you?’ smiles and answers ‘Actually, I think we had two copies here in the back’. – Two copies of Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace.