Okay, I can’t even try to pretend that’s a bad thing. More books! More AWESOME books!

So here they are, no particular order:

Memory and the Mediterranean,  Fernand Braudel. History of the Middle Sea from the late Paleolithic to the rise of Rome. I’m a sucker for books that take the long view.

The Horse, The Wheel, And Language, David W. Anthony. Someone attempting (again) to pin down the origin of the Indo-Europeans. J.P. Mallory gave a blurb on the back, and since this is also a subject I’m a sucker for, I got it. It beat out the other two I was considering, one of which was a pretty thorough translation of Gilgamesh, and the other a translation of the Shahnameh.

A History of Inner Asia, Svat Soucek. This was a total impulse buy. We’ll see if it was worth the six bucks.

Cooking with Love and Paprika, Joseph Pasternak. I like paprika and Central European cuisine. Also, Pasternak was a Hollywood producer who, rumor had it, would go into the commisary, order spaghetti, and shovel it into his mouth with his hands. I admire this.

Warriors of the Steppe, Erik Hildinger. Military history of Central Asia. Mongols!

Early Ottoman Art, various scholars. Lovely pictures! Scholarly explication! Diagrams! Footnotes!

I declare April a month of walks in the park and reading while lounging on my veranda.

I was once drunk and bored and without a lot of money, walking with a couple of friends in downtown Minneapolis. We were heading to a party, but we had plenty of time to get there. As we were walking, I said, HOLY SHIT, THE CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY! THEY HAVE FREE PERSONALITY TESTS! LETS GO!

One friend ducked out and went to have a cup of coffee. But me and Isaac, we bopped on in, where we were given a multiple choice test, in format almost identical to the standardized tests that represent the keys to the gates of education in America. Having been a washout from University, I wasn’t up for it. I always hated these tests, so I just did the random thing. I made nice patters; christmas trees and so on. Isaac, a graduate student, could take a test as well as he could take his liquor (provided it’s not cognac), and dutifully (but easily) answered all the questions quicker than I did.

The man, with gray/blond thinning hair combed straight back, wearing a gray sweater that I normally associate with librarians, came back and took our test forms to correct them. We assumed he would scan them through a machine and have our results in a moment or two. So we excused ourselves to the restroom, took a shot off of my friend’s flask, and then I stole some coloring markers (my Scientology markers, which I kept for a long time; I told people I was saving them to draw something crazy). When we returned to the table where we had taken the test, we waited…and waited…we finally noticed that he was entering the results of the test into a computer by hand. And the computer looked like a 386. Maybe a 486. This was in like 2004. I remember thinking, Jesus, Tom Cruise better make another movie, because the Church is really going to hell. What was Elron thinking, out there in Outer Space, on his non-corporeal research trip into the cosmos?

Also, why were taking the test, my friend noticed (I didn’t) that the phone had been ringing fairly frequently while we were there, and the man kept answering, Hello, Church of Scientology Minnesota. I thought nothing of it. But my friend (who is perceptive) noticed that was all he said. He just would hang up after that. Was it wrong numbers? Did they have a similar phone number to some very popular or well used number? Or were they people angry at the Church, calling and yelling expletives? But in that case, I’m sure they’d just block the number.

My theory was this: They had set up an automated calling machine, maybe inside the Church building itself, and had it calling the main number every five minutes or so. This way when people were in the building, it would seem even more busy than usual. Now, to pull this off, the person answering the phone should say something like, Hello, Church of Scientology, how can I help you? Why yes, we do offer that service! Would you like to make an appointment?

But it’s kind of a drag. I mean, every five minutes, having to have a fake conversation? It’s one thing to talk to a real person every five minutes, but it’s another to have to invent a person to talk to every five minutes. Even if you take away the constant invention and have a nice cheat sheet of scripts to use, it’s still boring to play the same role constantly.

So like every job, he was slacking. He was still doing his job, but you know, he wanted to get by as easily as possible. Yes, praise Lord Elron. May he be exalted, etc. I deem you Clear. And so on. But as far as he’s concerned, that first hour of work is his, Elron-dammit, and leave him alone until he finishes his first coffee, and he’s had a chance to visit his friends who are working in the education center on the third floor. He’ll wander down to the staff room, maybe grab a doughnut, lazily say whatever the Scientology version of Grace is, and then he’ll be more than happy to get to work, thank you so much.

(We can maybe imagine this is why after inventing the idea of plurality God had to go through with it and really create it. It was just to hard to imagine plurality all the time. The universe tends towards entropy because the agents of the universe tend towards laziness.)

After using the E-meter and the spiel that he’s given a hundred times before, and telling us how depressed we were, he could tell, oh yes, look it’s right here on the graph (as if not realizing that using graphs to make a point is a technique that died when Ross Perot used them in the longest infomercial in American television history, and convinced the American people that if Ross Perot stood for anything, it was that he was boring as fuck).

He asked us if we watched the news on TV or read the newspapers. We told him that we were, indeed, well-informed individuals, full of information about the world.

Well, he said, why don’t you try, just for a couple of weeks, to avoid this sort of information. It’s almost always negative, he said, and it’s what’s depressing you. He said, Do this, and come back in two weeks, and take the test again, and I think you’ll find that you’re a lot happier.

And because I was drunk (because I am not normally such a daring smart ass), I looked him in the eyes, with deep seriousness, into the pale and faded blue surrounded by pale and faded blonde hair, eyes that had the look common to both kinds of Catholics; practicing and non-practicing: When you ask about religion, you’ll find that ex-Catholics and Catholics answer in the exact same tone of voice, one of weary resignation. And they both have that look in their eyes, that says, yeah, yeah, I know. So here was this Scientologist, eyes saying, yeah, yeah, I know. And when I said (out loud and not with my eyes), “So…ignorance IS bliss?”

And he looked at me, with his yeah, yeah, I know eyes, and said earnestly, Exactly. Like it was the first time he’d had someone come in and who had actually got it.

And that’s Scientology.

No, I’m talking about the class of married men who never say a single good word about their wives. Wives who are deficient in every possible way: stupid, lazy, free-loading, etc. At least if one listens to their husbands.

They talk and complain, and bitch, and in general are kind of a pain in the ass to be around, because their conversational turns are as predictable as a NASCAR track. “Hey, did you see that throw Ichiro made yesterday?”

“No. I told my wife to tape Sportscenter, but she didn’t. SHE IS A HORRIBLE CUNT.”

“Uh, you know, you could probably catch it on YouTube, or it might get played again later today on like ESPN News or something.”

“SHE CUNT AND ME HATE! RAH!”

And there it ends.

Because the universe is an ever recurring leitmotif of ‘STUPID CUNT’. All other melodies are relegated to playing counterpoint to that basic point. And I can’t understand why they think this way. I can’t even begin to wrap my head around the level of negativity and pettiness that’s necessary to look at the world that way. Thank the Lord.

Whenever I meet guys like this, and if there is no way for me to get out of the conversation, I always tell them that’s why I’m happy to be single.

But what I really mean is I’m happy I’m not a misogynistic douche bag.

“Guess what!” he said. “I traded the Husqvarna!” This was a motorcycle he’d fixed up. It was a special model that was designed for riding up steep grades. Very low-geared.

“What did you trade it for?”

“A cow!”

If he had said, “Magic beans!” I would have been less annoyed. As it was, I found myself uncharacteristically angry. A cow. A cow? A rage more intense and focused than my normal hormonal teenage brooding welled up inside of me. I now know what this feeling is: The feeling you have when your sense of reason is horribly violated. I felt the need to make my position on this development clear.

“I am not going to take care of a fucking cow.”

“What? No. I traded it to Jerry for some beef.” My father was so confused that he didn’t even comment on the fact I’d just dropped the f-bomb. Jerry was a friend of my father’s who owned a ranch down near the Coumbia River. He’d traded the motorcycle for the meat of a whole cow.

But what you have to understand is this: The idea that my father might buy a cow made perfect sense to me because thats the sort of thing my father might do. “I’m tired of paying for fucking milk! It’s bullshit! I’m gonna just get my own damn cow!”

One day I found a piece of white wood stuck in the ground, and it was in the shape of a sword. A pure white blade, and I roamed the forest looking for evil to thwart.

The sticks were actually markers left by a survey crew, outlining a new highway that would eventually destroy the big hill that wasn’t a big hill and the great forest that wasn’t a great forest.

I designed a flag, and my grandmother made it for me, because every young Prince in exile must have a flag, and I fought hard to reestablish my kingdom. I would lose or sometimes break the swords I had found, and luckily the survey crew, no doubt angry as hell, kept replacing them by leaving new ones in the ground.

I believed, really believed, with the intensity only allowed the fresh convert, in The Hobbit. It seemed real to me, more real than the Bible. I went to church, and made an effort to understand but Gandalf always seemed more real than Moses to me. All those pictures of Jesus in a desert made little impact, but living in the Cascades meant that I could imagine the smell of the Misty Mountains on a cold morning. And as a frightened child, living in a place where I had no friends, and was pretty constantly picked on by the other kids my age, it wasn’t hard to imagine what it was like to have Orcs and Goblins chasing after you.

I eventually lost faith as I grew older, and the new highway removed my lost kingdom I’d spent so many hours fighting for. There is something about puberty and the influx of hormones that drags a child’s brain screaming into adulthood. It permanently alters the way one thinks, and childhood’s intensity is lost.

The white sword is only a white stick, the big hill a clump of garbage. It becomes impossible to ever forget the belief, and it remains just outside the edge of consciousness, tickling your memories, because you know that your memories are incomplete. I remember the stick, I remember it’s grain, the roughness of it in my hand, and wrapping the ‘handle’ in tape. I remember imagining that I was ‘forging’ the sword when I wrapped the tape around it, but I can’t ever actually be forging the sword the way I was then.

That intense imaginary world is what kept me from going nuts as a small child. This was what kept me company until I made my first real friend, another kid everyone hated. We could be hated together. It was our personal mythology, the legend of two losers.

As the hormones did their work on my brain, my friendship with Matt became based a lot on music. We didn’t have a lot of spare money (no jobs), so we would copy cassette tapes from the library. For a four year period, I think we had the exact same music collection. If I got something, I would make a copy for him. If he got something, he would make a copy for me.

Then I went to university, and he went to work. I never finished school, but it put me on a different trajectory, and except for a few months this last year, we never lived in the same town, or worked at the same place. And so I had to find something else to replace that friendship. I tried ‘love’ or whatever the hell I thought that was when I was eighteen. I tried Philosophy (yes, with a capitol ‘P’), and even, for a very brief moment, thought of trying to live like Gandhi, on the basis of reading the Louis Fischer biography. It’s a pretty ridiculous story, and maybe I’ll write it down sometime. If you’ve already heard it, well, it wasn’t really as many hot dogs as everyone makes it sound like. I swear.

I’ve tried to be an artist, a working class hero, a performer of some kind, a man of the world (ha!), and I once thought my laziness would make me an excellent Stylite, but I wasn’t born in the sixth century, so that wasn’t an option.

I used to think that being loved would fill whatever that little blank space in my heart, but that didn’t work either.

I’m not wearing a hat anymore. The reason (besides wanting to enjoy my hair before it all falls out) is that I somehow acquired the habit of doffing my cap at people. I am the only documented case of an individual under the age of 70 who does this. And I can’t stop doing it, so no more hats for me, thanks.

And I really think it’s because doffing my cap is the sort of thing that a hobbit would do. It’s the sort of thing that an inhabitant in an arch-conservative’s pastoral fantasy would do.

And I do it because it’s hard for me to have friends. I’ve never figured out how to make friends easily. Even people who I’m pretty sure like me I won’t open up to because I don’t want to bother them. (As I wrote this, I typed ‘pretty sure don’t like me’, which is a pretty accurate summation of the way my cursed brain works.)

I read a book about the Clay vs. Liston fight years ago, and the only thing that I remember is this: When Sonny Liston was an old man, he was jogging with a guy he’d known for ten years, and Liston turned to him and said, “Hey, we’re friends, right?” The guy was flabbergasted. “Yeah, of course we’re friends, Sonny.” And Sonny shyly looked away and said, “Okay, I was just wondering.” Sonny Liston was a bad son of a bitch, and to the day he died, I think he was painfully alone.

I’m not that bad, but I can understand the impulse. I’ve got friends I’m really close to, and other people not so much. I tell people I don’t have a lot of friends because I read a lot, and I have lots of solitary activities that I do that satisfy me. But it’s actually the reverse, though I’m usually not unhappy. Certainly not as unhappy as Sonny Liston. I’ve been satisfied with life, but something is still missing.

What’s been missing, I think, is that confidence and faith in a surveyor’s marker, pale white wood that in my mind flashed silver in the sun, just before the calvary charge began. So I think it’s finally time for me to fill the empty hole of childhood sureties with something. Faith in myself? Confidence? I don’t know what to call it, but whatever it is, I’m glad it’s filling that empty place in my life. It seems like it’s easier going.

I realized a few days ago that I’m verging on becoming a cat lady, only without the cats, and also without being of the appropriate gender. One friend claims I’m a shut-in computer nerd, which isn’t true. Because nerds make good money on their obsessions, while I am merely a geek, one who has odd and interesting knowledge that is not easily monetized.

(As an aside, a dork is someone who has completely useless knowledge, such as knowing the complete layout of the U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701D.)

And really, computers are just shiny, pretty, and wonderful things that I like to tinker with. Sometimes I like to know that you can do certain things with them that I would never in a million years actually do. But it’s nifty, and I like to play. It’s relaxing.

Where I’ve usually been obsessive is my book buying. And also my tendency to eat out way to often, which I seem to have finally cured, by the way (three trips to a restaurant in a month, and two of those to a pizza by the slice place). And I’ve even managed to refrain from buying books, which is hard because I live next to two used book stores, which usually have a sort of crack cocaine like pull on me. But having a good internet connection, and my lovely Sony Reader give me new and cheaper ways of soaking up information.

I used to be terrible about buying books. My rationale was that I would forget to return the books to the library, and have to pay fines, so hell with it, I might as well buy it. And after I read them, they became my reserve capital; If it was drinking night at The Red Dragon and I was short of cash, well then, that copy of Plutarch wasn’t really a necessary part of my library. Or that book on the history of food. But I’d go by a couple of bookstores and turn them into sweet, sweet liquor.

I once even cut out the middle man, showing up to an open mic at First Avenue with a suitcase filled with books, and offered them at the rate of two drinks for a book. Since it was two for one night, I thought this was a good offer. So did several people, and that’s how my copy of Jon Ronson’s ‘Them: Adventures With Extremists’ ended up in Guatemala.

But I digress. My current collection has been shorn down by three moves, and further reduced by the great sci-fi and fantasy bloodletting (really, I do want to get laid again someday), and the expulsion of every public domain book in my possession, since I can get these on the internet through Manybooks.net, and read them on my aforementioned Sony Reader.

So I’m left with…well, with what I have. Some are things I couldn’t quite part with, like my copy of ‘Bunnicula’. Yes, I have a book about a vampire rabbit. Shut up, it was an important part of my childhood. Same with my copy of ‘The Rape of Kuwait’, a propaganda book put out by a public relations firm hired by the Kuwaiti royal family to help get American opinion behind the first Gulf War. A book of poems about Istanbul. Etc.

Others are books that are thick and heavy reference books. ‘The Oxford Companion to United States History’ and ‘A Guide to the Ancient World.’ I should sell them, since really they aren’t as useful as a Google search. But I like to browse with them, so they’ve stayed.

There really isn’t any rhyme or reason to it other than at some point I decided, “Well, it’s worth carrying this fucker up another flight of stairs.”

So I’m going to start putting pictures of my books on Flickr. All of them, eventually. Some of them I’ll give a little mini-summary on Flickr. Others I’ll review here. I could use any number of websites that are out there for sharing and storing book info, but I don’t feel like signing up for another website. And I’ve got that Flickr Pro account I’ve paid for just sitting there.

I also haven’t read all these, by the way. I mean, what’s the point of owning a lot of books you’ve already read, right? So I’m hoping this spurs me to reading a little bit more again, or at least reading away from my RSS feeds.

And also, these are my kitties. I am mad old book man, screaming insane gibberish to randomly accosted strangers. If you’re not careful, I’ll start throwing them at you.

My grandmother is the one who helped steer me onto the path I’ve taken in life, when she gave me a radio drama presentation of ‘The Hobbit’ on my seventh birthday. This is what made me become the great honking geek I am today, and also meant that I would never date a girl until I was eighteen. Had she not given this to me, I may have perhaps gone on to be normal, perhaps even popular, at school.

Of course, I would also have been infinitely dumber.

I’ve told this little story to a lot of people, but like most stories, it’s just a short hand way of summarizing a complex and unwieldy string of memories, filled with so many details it would be impossible to take them out of your head in their entirety and make them sensible for others. It captures every encouragement she gave me, and every book she gave me, gently prodding me along the Right and True path.

I don’t really regret not finishing school anymore. I regret that I don’t have a degree that gets me paid oodles of money, but from what I hear, that’s a myth anyway. But I do regret the sound of my grandmother’s voice when I told her I’d been kicked out of school over the phone. I usually claim that I have no regrets, and that you should never regret anything, because that’s a terrible way to go through life. But this is the one I can’t dodge.

I went to Minnesota and then to Europe to make up for my lack of formal education. I went for a lot of reasons, but I’ll put the psychological desire down to a desire to erase that sound of regret.

(Yes, I know, you’re thinking, “Minnesota?”, but really it was a very educational time in my life.)

Then again, I was so far away, I never got to see my grandmother. Or really, any of my family, since they all live in Washington State. And it was painful, because as my grandmother was declining, I saw it in drastic, yearly increments. And, coward that I am, I tended to avoid it. It’s hard to see someone so vital and loved so reduced in stature.

I showed her pictures of my trips in Europe a few days before she ceased to be lucid at all. I felt better about it, but that’s what moments like these are all about: making us feel better. I don’t know what it was for her. I hope it made up for my past fuck ups. I hope it made her proud of me again. The next time I saw her she didn’t recognize me and thought I was just some nice young gentleman who was helping her with her popcorn while she watched Shirley Temple in ‘Heidi’.

But most likely, she was always proud of me. Disappointed, yes, but she was truly the sweetest of us. I think she wouldn’t have been able to not feel happy with me and my life. Certainly all outward signs would say so. She knew I still read voluminously, and that I was engaged and curious about the world. And as far as I could tell from anything she said to me, she was happy for me.

And that is all we have in life, those surface details from which we have to divine the inner feelings of others.

I’m writing this down because it’s the only way to remember. To try to pluck whatever fragments of memory can be saved from the tangled webs in our head and put them somewhere we can reclaim them should they ever get lost in our own minds. I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t expect to have some sort of tearful reunion with her, bathed in the light of whatever higher power there might be. She’s dead, she’s gone, and I will never see her again.

But I’m writing this to leave a marker, a place to go back to when I find it impossible to navigate my own brain, a map to follow to lovely memories of watching the Disney Channel at her house, of the clothes she made me (the lovely blue corduroy outfit I wore until I just couldn’t fit into the damn thing anymore), of the time when she wrote my report on Virginia in sixth grade for me, because I was a terrible little child. Of every hug, encouragement, and laugh I ever heard from her. This is the treasure map of my brain.