i believe jon d is overdue

Perhaps not the thing to read on a Friday night...
But maybe just the thing?

MY RETIREMENT PLAN:
Since it already happens, why not? Might as well cash in, right?

One day I will open a bar and call it "The Library": The unashamed premise being that you come to check out and pick up "some reading material" for the night. Our job behind the bar? give you enough alcohol that your heart will be numb enough to believe you are happy. Maybe we will even provide a screening service (medical and criminal records), and we will have card carrying members: a clear symbol of status and distinction!

I can't even check a book out of the library because I hate the idea of returning it. When I "loan out" a book, I usually soon afterwards go out and purchase a new copy for myself. I just hope that the "borrower" will like it enough to hang onto it or pass it on to someone else. I am the girl whom publishers love. I once purchased 3 copies of a single title (at various times)- all of them now long since passed on to others. Because of this ridiculous tendency, we purposefully purchased multiple used paperbacks of Walker Percy's writings. Can't give away our first editions. If I like a book, I read it over and over again. I have not read much- the repetition slows me down.

With this obsessive/ possessive nature of mine, I find the picking up and tossing aside of people quite... disturbing but also fascinating... Kind of like watching the twitching of the huge dying cockroaches that, like left over leaves from fall, litter the restroom floor of the UTC library following Christmas break. Grotesque, but I find I am drawn to observing the delicate legs and waving antennae while the creature lies on its back flailing as it tries to right itself. I wonder, "How did it get on its back in the first place? Why don't they die on their feet? Do they have some sort of seizures that flip them over?" They panic when approached but calm to a gentle scraping of air when they find themselves undisturbed in their dying moments. It probably takes days. I remember visiting one particular insect over the period of a week before it finally disappeared. That was the closest I have come to visiting a dying loved one. I remember one day leaving the restroom with tears in my eyes because I could do nothing for that small body- actually quite wonderful in its complexity. The way its legs attached to its body, the armored body segments. The precise oval shape, the delicately veined wings. Perfection, except for a poison that caused it to flip. A poison that made it unable to function- unable to walk or eat or drink. I knew it couldn't survive the toxins in its system, but I would come and squat by it each day just to ponder its beauty and the strength it had to fight every day to hang onto its minuscule life. It was dying all alone. As far as I know, I was the only one who came to visit. A puff of breath to see if my little friend was still alive. If yes, then a fluttering wave of legs to greet me. How sad the Monday I returned to find he'd been swept away like a stray piece of toilet paper. I had become attached even to a large, dying cockroach.

At least in some matters my nature remains consistent. I become attached and place high value on the people and things that cross my path. I gather them and collect them and ponder them; but I suppose at the same time, there is also a perverse fascination in knowing that we are all dying and that most of the time we don't even realize it. We are all lying on our backs waving our legs at each other. I have heard insects don't feel pain; we have to numb with alcohol, chemicals, pleasures... We could lie on the floor of the bathroom for years, tossing our evening's libations into the toilet, smiling because we had so much fun.

Oddly, the ones who realize they are sad and dying become the outcast... Perhaps it is just too undignified the way we don't stop flailing and trying to right ourselves.

Perhaps we will also provide counselling services at The Library
for all those who really meant the things they said and did the night or the week before.