Nights Like These

After agreeing to work after closing, in order to unpack books and put them on shelves without the interference of customers asking for Animal Farm or The Awakening, I nearly regretted my decision when the clock rolled around to 1:00 am and for once I made it past the midnight mark.  However, driving home on an empty highway with the windows open, music blasting, and cruise control set at 65, I believe I tasted what some people love about the night.

Here is a snippet from Kate Rugby’s song “Planets,” which I listened to four times in a row between 1:08 and 1:24.

On nights like these,
I could fly up to the sky above me,
Like Superman,
I would change the course
Of earth below me.

The moment of tranquility was not quite enough to win me over to the dark side (I will ever be a morning person), but the silence and solitude sounded a chord within me.

Would I volunteer to work late again?  Probably…but only because I’m getting paid.

Lofty Goals

Today it is my lofty goal to stay home all day. Some of the things I plan to do include the following:

• Cleaning up all the papers that have accumulated on my desk
• Lounging in the bathtub until the water gets cold
• Finishing The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence – at last
• Arriving at something that looks like a clean draft of the short story I’m working on
• Attempting to update my catalog of books
• Wasting time on YouTube and other addictive websites
• Et cetera

Here is a passage from Lawrence’s memoir.

So we…drew westward over the open ridges, until far enough from the wells to acquit raiding parties from the need to stumble on us in the dark. There Joyce [a British colleague] and I sat down and watched a sunset, which grew from grey to pink, and to red; and then to a crimson so intolerably deep that we held our breath in trepidation for some stroke of flame or thunder to break its dizzy stillness. The men, meanwhile, cut open tinned meats, boiled tea, and laid them out with biscuits on a blanket for our supper table. Afterwards there were more blankets, in which we slept lusciously.

This is how I would like my day: residing out of the range of danger, and complete with accomplishments, the majesty of a sunset, a meal, and a fine sleep. And also I would like the eloquence and poetry of Lawrence’s prose to follow me all the days of my life. Amen.

Man-Eaters

Yesterday during my break at work, I read “The Man-Eating Lions of Tsavo” by Lieut.-Col. J. H. Patterson, D. S. O. (Zoology, Leaflet 7.  Chicago:  Field Museum of Natural History, 1925).  It is the account of how two lions held up the construction of a railroad in Uganda for almost nine months.  They would hunt and kill the railroad workers, and despite elaborate the elaborate protections and traps that Patterson laid for them, they were such bold and skilled stalkers that the local workers began to think of them as devils.  If you happen not to own the pamphlet produced by the Field Museum [*smug*], you might watch the movie The Ghost and the Darkness (1996).

On the way home, I was detoured due to a car accident.  As I drove by, the part of me that observes my surroundings thought, Oh, a car was flipped, and then worried how I was going to turn left.  The part of me that analyzes everything I think thought, How could you not be shocked about a major car accident?  Someone could have been killed! And then my Third Thoughts (see Terry Pratchett) kicked in: There’s no blood and no ambulance so probably no one died.  There would have been nothing you could do to help anyway, and once you’ve been in a flipped car yourself, it can’t possibly be as interesting as it would have been before.  Turn…now.

Sometimes I think I’m strange (for instance, for being more emotionally involved in a lion hunt than in a car accident), and then I chide myself for thinking I am strange, and then I think I’m strange for scolding myself for thinking I’m strange.  And I chide myself all over again, get confused, and go back to reading.  Perhaps someday I’ll discover what I really mean.

To occupy myself at work, I constructed a Top Five list (see Nick Hornby) of living authors to whom I would want to write a letter.  Perhaps, if the boredom continues, I actually will.

1. Ursula K. Le Guin.
2. Mary Doria Russell.
3. Ann Patchett.
4. Megan Whalen Turner.
5. Umberto Eco.

I’m Back.

I suppose I’m not so much ‘back,’ as finally here, the place I’ve been anticipating for so long.  My apartment in Texas with Philip, and it’s a very nice apartment indeed.  The books are mostly unpacked, which is most of the work, and we’ve already started putting things up on the walls.  We live on the third floor; therefore on move-in day, we decided, “Let’s live here forever.”

My honeymoon in Portland was lovely.  The hotel (Marriott Waterfront) was exceptional, and we had the concierge floor so it was exceptionally exceptional.  We had a view of the Willamette River, and we were in walking distance of Powell’s City of Books.  We went twice.  Also, the weather was amazing, a cool seventy.  Pictures forthcoming.  I also promise pictures of the apartment, when it is a little more assembled.

I went jogging for a very short while this morning.  There’s a public track that runs right by our apartment complex, and I followed it across the street to Serenity Park.  It was indeed serene: I was the only person in sight as I crossed the shaded wooden bridge over the gully with a trickle of water.  And then the path dead-ended and I turned around and did it all again.

Hello and Goodbye

Or rather, I suppose I ought to say, Goodbye and Hello. Goodbye, Kelly Brubaker: it was real, it was great, and it was really great, but this is goodbye. Not goodbye, but just…goodbye.

Tomorrow it will be hello to Kelly Ledbetter, whoever she is. My new self.

Tomorrow.

I don’t feel able to communicate what I want to say, so I’m going to go pack my suitcase for my honeymoon in Oregon. (Never thought I would be writing anything like that.)

When I return, I will be someone else, only complete this time.

Stageplay

Last night I dreamed you and I were lying in bed with the television on and reading books.  It was a little like the ending of If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino (with the Reader and Ludmilla in bed together at last), except that I think you might have been a mix between Vidanric from Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith and Mairelon from Magician’s Ward by Patricia C. Wrede.  Only when I woke up, I forgot you at the same time that I reached out for you to hold me.  I elbowed an empty space and felt sad, because now I think that you might have been my Ideal Reader, the me who is smarter and kinder and wiser than me.  I might miss you, but I’m not sure.

As I got off of work, I walked through the parking lot toward my car, unlocked the door, and got inside.  The problem with this emerged only when I realized I was sitting on the passenger side.  I took this as another sign that my subconscious contains two people, Author and Reader, Speaker and Audience, Lover and Beloved.  Self and Other Self.

I guess my other self is male and likes to drive, heh.

Also, I may have made all this up.