Finding Things
It’s funny how you seem to find some things at just the right moment. It mostly happens with something I’ve read, but it could be that gift card I forgot I had just as bills were about to go unpaid. Mostly though, I find things in books. But I suppose books are like that. You find one, open it up, and depending on your state of mind, the first thing you read can seem like a message finely crafted, just for your precise experience.
I love little libraries. Those tiny house structures, some on poles, inviting you to take-a-book/leave-a-book. I owe my fascination with alternative history to a coffee-shop little library. So whenever I pass the diminutive hut stationed along the path of my morning walk, I check for goodies. Yesterday, I found Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings. Having never read Mailer, I snatched it up and took it home. Today, I’ll go back to the little library and fill the hole I left. I have a copy of Stephen King’s The Long Walk that I’m sure someone will enjoy, seeing as the show is in the works.
Yesterday was a markedly bad day in a drooping string of pretty bad days. The morning walk was doing its job and forcing dopamine into my system when I found the book. Alright. Good day perhaps? I hadn’t even made it home before I got a call with yet more bad news. Ok. Fine. No problem. I repeated these thoughts internally until I stepped in the front door, sat at my desk, and began to try to work out the seeming barrage of problems. A real Monday, good and proper.
But the cover of Ancient Evenings was performing some hazy siren-call in my peripheral vision. The exotic papaya-red sky emblazoned with slender fonts goaded me into sampling its wafer-thin pages. And boy I tell you, I was not expecting that intro. To suddenly be thrust into the mind of some recently dead guy as he wrestles with his discorporate state and the anger and misery that comes with knowing you could have done more with life. The acute sting of regret for a life now fading from memory.
That scared the shit out of me. So here I am at the keyboard, clacking-out some words; doing something, because I found a thing that reminded me I’m still alive.
B