Demiurgeous Faults vs Obliquitous Progress

My idea of paradise
is endless hours browsing in bookstores ...
Heaven is losing hours carefully moving one pile of books aside to
expose other rows of books,
in search of the book I forgot I wanted,
or never knew about before now,
or never saw
in such a good-looking font."

-Karen Lillis

They're closing down the Borders nearby and so lured by both guilt and the mating call of the scavenger monkey's el dorado (A Clearance Sale Everythingmustgo Madness, Fever, etc.) I went in amongst the wreckage to point and laugh with one of my disposable girlfriends, as I do. I hadn't been inside a bookstore in, we figured together, two years, and it had been longer for her (although looking back on it I think all she said was “since high school”, so it might have been only a few months... more questions therein raised— Remind me to ask whatshername how old she is if I see her again, which I probably won't— bad teeth...)

If anyone else in the world is like us then I guess that might be part of the reason bookstores are closing down. Two years ago when I went to one of the greatest bookstores imaginable it was on that same night cavorting with Cozolino and some of Rachel’s friends that I first met Rory, the man the myth the legend, conducting what he referred to as empirical research on the long-term neuro-psychological effects of stress-induced binge drinking on a praeternatural adolescent. It was after the bookstore visit which was until today my last and we had ended up at some bar on 25th where the music was jubilant and he stormed in looking scrawny and scrappy and reckless. His head shaved to the stubble revealing two curlicue scars shaped almost like Captain Hook's famous appendage, which suggested a pugilistic affectation that I later learned was all show, mostly. His semicleft upper lip snarling slyly as if he held the answer right up under his sleeve.

“Let's cook. No one has anything cookin'.”

He was with a small doting entourage and as they entered the room a beautiful bright young blond averting her eyes was in the process of trying to rush out. He grabbed her from behind before she got a chance to escape and she raised her eyes and her fists in the shock of it and blushed deep red when she saw him.

“I’m Shigeki-of-the-Jungle,” he purred. The boys whooped.

“He’s El Bullshito, darling.”

He cupped a hand across her fists to bring them down and his face went serious.

“Okay now. You have . . . " and then he stopped. For a second I figured this was either going to be "you have a great set of tits" or "you have to let me buy you a drink." But then after this weird pause he continued, repeating himself: " . . . you have a GREAT, GREAT, GREAT night, okay?"

Well, it was quite a night, including, later, a fire in a church parking lot and an impromptu living room punk concert that devolved into several simultaneous multi-room make-out sessions including one that, Rory told me later ended in his famous 21 cum salute. Ahem. Anyway I feel compelled to document it now because it was the night I met Rory and we’ve been friends ever since and also it bookends my trip to the bookstore nicely as well.

Where once there had been wall-to-wall merchandise packed tight, the shelves were startlingly half bare pathetic sad. It stunk of bait and brine, paused next to an arrangement of Hardcover Bestsellers that included a kids magnetic doggy puzzle, three sewing magazines and a couple red-sticker paperbacks on Africulture. The smell of overwhelming munificent sale, the ruck of humanity scrambling for the checkout line...

I must say that I’ll miss bookstores when they are gone, though I’m certainly not the first to say it. I seem however to actually feel physically hurt at the prospect, and this is troubling. People browsing, browsing, ceaselessly searching for something they don't even know exists, you can’t get that shopping online. Remember the thrill of a bookseller not merely pointing you to a section but directing each customer to where the book should be, walking with them, talking about books and shit as they find the right shelf section together, run their fingers over the spines to find the very book requested, and perhaps even an additional suggestion, and have it handed to you, BY HAND? Using Google to search for something specific yields nothing akin to the resonant emotion of searching for a needle in a haystack, and the golden jubilation that abounds when the book you know you want is found. The freedom to luxuriate over the decision by browsing, smelling books, the capability to feel their cover and binding before purchase, like leafing through new acquaintences. Or the acquaintences themselves. Online bookbuying lends nothing to the giddy thrill of watching nervous lawyers puruse Economics tomes, or sketchy kids steal peers at the sex books. At a real bookstore you know not to talk to a hot girl, because she’s in the Self Help section trying to read a manual on STDs upside down. Online it might seem like a wise idea. We lose something more valuable than books when we lose our bookstores.

“What about the Barnes and Nobles?” my disposable date asked.

“Man! Fuck I hate Barnes and Noble. Barnes and Nobles Sucks. Total Suck.” I had forgotten I had her with me. It wasn’t just her though. I find I’m forgetting more and more lately, or maybe it’s not forgetting. Not remembering perhaps. When you’re connected to the web all the time you never need to know anything, just how to find it and fast.

Books require concentration. The fewer bookstores there are in the future, not only will there be fewer books we’ll read, there will be fewer things that require us to focus. Online, there is no real need for such purposefullness. I type words into a search engine and feel like a little kid on a swing, reaching out into the void only to fall back into the debilitating pit of my own questless gravity. We’ve created a monster. It’s gotten so easy for us to create and find and reproduce information that we seem to have forgotten how absurdly difficult it is to create something engaging, or even interesting. He said, on his lame ass blog. Go online to look up the correct a fact for school and emerge, several days later, blinking and bleary, having skimmed countless contentless “content” articles, watched scores of porn, and parsed several ill-advised tweets to your ex unrelated to reality and, now that you think about it, not all that charming or funny. That doesn't happen at bookstores or libraries. Sure, they had less information, but more chance to follow through on your thoughts undiscracted. Books you don’t need surround you and in each there are symbols and plots and arguments that require repose and concentration.

What was I talking about?

Oh right, well today we waited in line long enough to decompose and while I concocted plans to ditch the broad I texted Rory and asked him what he was up to.
“I don’t have enough money,” my date whined. I forgot that this always happens with her. Her other boyfriend is a pot dealer so she never carries money around, I guess. She bought two chick-lit books and I picked up Tom McCarthy’s C. Still on about not being able to focus, I dropped her off at her boyfriend’s house and met Rory at the bowling alley.
“Selling pot. Ef. That.”
“I know right.”
“Why do you even go out with her?”
“Oh. You know. Nice, friendly, personable and down-to-earth girls aren't really my type, apparently.”
“Chanice was like that to me, until she fucked that guy from San Jose.”
I am in awe of how open he is with me and how much of his life and his feelings he discloses to me. I can hardly say I've repaid the gesture. My insecurity issues manifest themselves as a real life where I appear confident and happy and a blog full of self-loathing as the next person underneath. Masks.

Rory is, himself a complex personality consisting of equal parts passion and parody. In him however it’s essentially a social tactic, a means of drawing a line between those who, like me are subtle enough to hear all the tones and those who aren’t.

“Masky the internet is characterized by a collaborative vanguard. Books apply words with an eyedropper but the internet sprays them through a fire hose!”

“There’s no truth to any of it. Just voices, facts and random obsessions.”

“Dude you need a place to fuckin’ flourish again. Like that blog, what it was anyway. Delineate a quiet patch of interweb, or better yet, get off the web and turn off your phone and get that peace of mind. Go where the world is untouchable.”

“There’s no such place.”

“It's actually everywhere.”

“I deactivated my Facebook in an attempt to stop thinking in terms of status updates.”

“Sometimes I pretend that she’s dead instead of grappling with the truth that she broke up with me.”

“I want to control my life again.”

“I want to go jogging.”

“Maybe go to church or something.”

“No.”

“I think I should.” The jukebox kicked in. LOUD. Toby Keith loves this bar, it seems.

"I've gotta pee!" I hollered.

“WHAT?"

"Pee!"

"WHAT?"

"Take a piss!"

"I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"

"I've gotta fucking micturate!" He nodded.

I'm overwhelmed by everything, I think, standing over the urinal as I imagine a waterfall and wait for the moment to come. I'm tired of everything and overwhelmed by it. I’m sick of being cabined up in all my own preferences, some machine telling me I am who I was. Look, I know people who like this might also like that but I’m not people okay. It’s personal. I want things that probably don’t exist. Things I’ve never heard about.
I’m depressing when I’m depressed. I tend to ramble. It's hard to focus on thoughts. Thinking. I used to think all my thoughts eagerly and intensely and now I can't get it up, intellectually that is. I zip up, wash.

“Let's go swimming,” suggests Rory, sick of bowling after 3 frames.

"I don't want to go swimming."

One of the most amazing things about Rory is that when something goes wrong he is always thrilled by what he can learn from it. If it rains he’s rapturous about staying indoors. If you get in a fight with him he’s keen on pointing out it will only end up making you closer.

“I don't want to go swimming either.”

"Okay let's go swimming."

“Let’s go!”

I know him pretty well and I worry that it’s just a way of keeping despair at bay, deflecting vulnerability with smiling exuberent relentless resilience. I worry that for all his sharing the brilliant gory intimate naked details it was all shimmering surface and there were occluded depths I was never going to see. Or, at least not until it was too late.

“An expedition!” he exclaimed gleefully, starting up his car and swerving out. We drove and my mind went blank until we were about as far as we could get and then we got out to walk the rest of the way to the beach.

The beach!

Rory had been talking the entire twenty minute drive and he made no indication of stopping... “some motherfucking idiot wrong numbered us and woke us up at 8!... reading The Decline of the West which postulates that the patterns of history are not just subtle interactions between many cultural factors but also express a deeper dialectic about the nature of each individual human life... full of shit writhing about on the floor drunk and getting wasted talking about fucking fucking nothing nothing bands...”

I smiled. It was nice to be around someone so full of life as we walked gingerly into the darkness. At times like this I wish lived in the Sunset. A gorgeous, gorgeous night. Why did he park so far away? He probably just wanted to continue his one-sided conversation. He barked about music, which I loved but which Rory knew much more about than I did, and about history and philosophy, which I didn’t really understand any of but whatever. Rory’s Cosmic Weeknight Filibuster. He talked about his other friends. All younger than me, like him, but still getting old, like everyone with their hidden loads and small dramas and scattered events. Nothing makes me happy anymore, I thought. Nothing inspires me. No one is doing anything good. Food and sex will kill me. The air is toxic. The water poisoned. The world is nasty and people are cruel fucked up beasts, and as soon as I start to like something they make me feel guilty about it. There is no dislike key.

Finally I shattered the internal reverie. Interrupted: "Nothing is doing it Rory man. Nothing is hitting the spot anymore. I don’t want to do anything anymore. I don’t want to be left alone but I don’t do anything good warranting company either. Fuck!"

“This is what I believe is called a transitional phase man.”

“I hate transitional phases.”

“Life is a transitional phase.”

“I hate transitional phases.”

We walked on, his footsteps beside me dropped back until I could no longer hear them. He had a pawky tenacity though. Just as I knew what demons he was grappling with he knew mine in me, and I think in a way he pitied me. He thought I was mad, crazy, sure, but wanted to help me.

“So you hate life?”

“Is that what I said? That's not what I said. I’m just convinced nothing matters. I'm I'm in between thoughts at the moment. When I'm in between thoughts I eat. I've gained 30 lbs in the last 6 weeks. Not kidding. Other than that I've got nothing to be ashamed of, which means, nothing to write about. I want to think more daring thoughts: genius thoughts as opposed to the minor keys of craft. I am beyond unispired. I'm unspirational, and that is unacceptable. I want my shame back dammit!”

The ocean came into view. A big flat shimmering incursion of darkness ready to swallow us whole.
"You're the Masked Man! The Masked Fucking Man. You used to be my hero, like, that sounds bad but back in the day. That Masked Man shit was pretty much the manifestation of who I who I wanted to be."

It was a lie, but it was enough. Almost.

Waves crashed down is massive doses. The mind is restless and difficult to restrain. Rory started running across the sand, snapping his fingers and clapping his hands and screaming, stripping off his shoes and clothes. I stood back on the bank watching him go. Soon he had disappeared into the waves, into the endless sea, and I sat, gazing into the darkness, wishing I had a coat, wishing I had a word I did not know that would be exactly, exactly, exactly, right.