Errands

Needed groceries, mostly liquids, and I wanted to stop at the Goodwill Bookstore (a separate building), to start a pile of books for winter. I'll need to shuffle some piles this fall. The book situation is no longer critical, because I found a couple of boards from a bed, in a dumpster in town; I never saw the bed put together, but these two boards were 1.5 inches by 10 inches, 70 inches long, poplar; I always have brackets, I collect them, so I put up another couple of shelves in the girl's room and I'm suddenly 12 feet ahead in linear feet of storage. 300 to 400 books. It's cool. I can take last year's pile of winter books, which I read in no particular order, and simply stacked back on top of the pile, and file them horizontally, thus clearing the space where I pile next winter's pile. They take up space, we have to allow for that. A grotto of entombed and dusty books. B is off to Mexico tomorrow, but brought over, before he left, Ken Warren's amazing collection of essays, covering thirty years of writers both in and out of the system: "Captain Poetry's Sucker Punch". Ken is an incredible reader and thinker. There were four of us in Joe Napora's kitchen, once, B, Ken, Stephen Ellis, and myself; we were doing a pretty good job of hacking the universe into knowable and unknowable. I was just picking up scraps (an adumbration of my custodial future), as the other three guys at the table were talking in a language that I barely understood. Joe was standing at the doorway that led to the living room, where the other half of the party was taking place, Janus, looking both ways; his wife's family, and he needed to keep a foot in both worlds. These are the conversations that live in memory. I've been blessed with a batch of very smart friends, and I only, barely hang on to their coattails because I know them all. I'll take what I can get. Right now, let's go back, I cleaned out the refrigerator and ate some things I probably shouldn't have eaten. But I hate waste, you know? Pretty sure it was the chicken salad that tipped the cart. Explosive diarrhea and I really don't want to get very far from the outhouse, I may have to call in sick. Admitting failure. On the other hand, I've worked a lot of extra days.