slugabug
I’m sitting at my table with revival in my hands. A super sharpie is suspended between my palms the stake of a Billy Graham tent and every now or so I’ll catch a whiff of redemption and open my eyes. In my mailbox is a garner of various and neglected “words of the day,” all of which are archaic and relatively useless to anyone under the age of forty who actually knows what they mean. I’m copying them down onto unlined white index cards. I usually prefer the lined brand, so I can feel like my life is somewhat structured. Regulated by symmetry via lined index cards. Every little thing helps.
I should be a nerd for writing these all down. These words that are relics. But I love them. I’m addicted to them. It’s gotten out of control. I get TWO words of the day now. the last one I opened was “slugabed: one who stays in bed until a late hour.” Amazingly, I find this newfound noun to be extremely applicable to the last few weeks of my life. I guess I’ll have to break the habit of brushing my teeth at four in the afternoon before school starts. (The gross part is not waiting until four to brush my teeth, it’s the fact that I brush my teeth when I wake up. Draw your own conclusions.)
In the other room the news flashes intellectual decline. A young girl is seen sitting, hands in lap, her bulky computer delineated in the monitor’s inner and youthful glow (most likely symbolizing the future in metaphorical megapixels), as she tells the camera, “Yea, I just can’t help it. I mean, I don’t even use capitalization anymore. Why should I?” And then time and space move us to her junior-high-grade-whatnot class room where a tall and stern teacher says that too many students are using internet lingo in their term papers. The anchor flies us to New York or some other city with a reputable newspaper. A lady is sitting at her desk flipping through a large book. Apparently she’s some genius grammarian or whatever (probably the last of her kind). “Are you in fear for the English language?” asks the anchor. “No. Not at all. I think it’s great that kids are starting to write for amusement and actually find some fun in doing so.” The audience is given a brief course on how to convert a once decent, self-respecting word into an abominating abbreviation. “Good-bye becomes l8er, while before turns into b4 and oh, i see changes into oic.” I’m trying to utilize the lesson by thinking of how to abbreviate “That lady is dumb. The language is dying. She’s just encouraging idle social habits. I wonder what book she was reading.” The best I can do is, “dumb l8dy. L8ter language :( ”
It’s nearing 9:45 and Lara still hasn’t called me back. I know she never means to purposely a) piss me off or b) hurt my feelings. But at 10 this morning she SWORE she would call, because supposedly we were considering doing something. After waiting half the day for her, I called back, when her brother informed me she had to call me later. Yea, well, she hasn’t. I know this is, perhaps the most hypocritical thing coming from me. When my phone rings I sit on it. Wait, that was before I discovered the silent mode. Whatever. It seems rude, I know. But honestly, I hate talking on the phone. I hate the awkward silences and I hate the distance of the voice, and the annoying task of attempting to hold it and perform multitasks. I don’t know. My social life never reached a zenith of popularity which required me not only talk, but talk on two lines at once. The closest I ever came to anything of the sort was eighth grade, where I would spend long hours a) Talking to Ellen about shopping or b) Talking to Joe about running through fields while fairies chase after us and Ernest Hemingway invites us into a book and maybe we kiss or listen to 10,000 maniacs. In ninth grade I had a group of phone frequenting friends. I built up some true passion for the phone then. But it died down in tenth when no one besides Lara would talk to me. After that I just lost interest. The only person I can talk to on the phone for more than five minutes is probably Lara. Maybe it’s because she was there with me through the majority of my communication preference stages.
I wrote a letter to J.D. Salinger. Go ahead and laugh. Yea, I know he’s older than all of your grandmothers and, not to mention, the biggest recluse I know of next to Heath. But it doesn’t matter. I just wanted to do it. A silly little girl thing. It’s like writing a letter to the past. Solidifying a connection between our shitty age of now and the shitty age of then. It’s all the same... I wanted to write anyway. I should probably send it before he dies. To touch on the subject of recluses, I miss Heath. Sure, he’s only been gone for a couple of days, but he’s one of the few people I talk to on a regular basis. I guess I just miss hearing about his films and his monotonous job and reading updates on how “the song” he’s writing has finally made it up to approximately five minutes and thirty three seconds. We need to get coffee.
(Somehow in these moments of appreciation the thought dawns on me like the rising sun of a revelation..... “What if Bonnie, what if Bob, what if Bradly, what if
I bought books today. It’s a gross obsession. A fascination. A romance. A true enthrallment for books. Not so much for reading them (that too of course) but for the actual body of the book. For the way they all sit with those lovely identifying titles that read like an alternate reality, or a rare antique, or a European trip.
I went to Gardner’s again today. I hate the store so much on Saturdays. People. People. People. Ugh. I feel like I should have some sort of claim to that place.. literally growing up in it and all. I miss its secrecy. Now it’s just another B and N. The only places left that I sit are a) In the middle of the history isle directly across from ancient history/mythology. Of course they’ve rearranged these, so now it’s more like directly under them. and b) The very back of the store along the where the poetry and horror novels are. Preferably on a cement part, and near to the humming of whatever it is that infinitely hums.
What I got:
a) Cherry, by Mary Karr - - - It’s another one of those coming of age memoirs that reads like a modern Kerouac or Salinger filled with tales of drugs and sex and profanity that supposedly forge the way into maturity. I have a weakness for these books. Don’t ask why, but I’m confessing.
b) A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Toole - - - Paul has been trying to get me to read this for a year, at least, now. I probably won’t
c) A National Geographic book about “Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs” I shouldn’t have, I most likely already own this. And I tried not to.. I put it up... but in a last minute panic I got it. Why? Because it’s Egypt, and because I have always had some sort of weird and rare disease, the symptoms being that I love ancient Egypt, I find the process of mummies intriguing rather than gross, and there is some sort of mystical affinity that has always captured me about the whole dynasty thing. Cleopatra, Tutankamen. Everything. And besides that it was so big and beautiful and affluent with pictures and text and discoveries! Ah! Ecstasy.
After Gardners I went to this other small used book shop. It’s pretty cute I guess. But so still and silent. I feel like the books are afraid to move. They’re just lined up like a servile army. You have to pry them out of order. Now I wasn’t planning on buying anything.... but I found this gorgeous copy of Hemingway’s “A Movable Feast,” which is one of my favorite books dealing with poor artists in Paris and meanwhile Gertrude Stein is cursing the generation and all that lovely junk that makes up the decadence of the nostalgic twenties. I already have a copy. But this one was almost brand new and when I flipped through it, seeing the text swim through time like that got me. Right to the heart. So I bought it. Later on I went to the mall..... Idiots. I can’t stand the mall. I left after buying a leather jacket (who knows why, it was cute) for fifty bucks. I came home. I started on Cherry, read the last page (a twisted tradition with every book I read) and fell asleep for a while, until I realized I was hot and my CD had stopped playing. School starts on Monday. I can’t win. I get an opportunity to break free from the tedium of regulated weeks and months of education and I just turn my predictable business into predictable boredom. Before it all, thinking “THIS IS BREAK! YES! THIS IS THE TIME WHEN I WILL REACH NEW HEIGHTS AND MARRY PRODUCTIVITY IN AN UNSTOPPABLE UNION AND LUST FOR LEARNING AND LIVING AND YES!” But, yea, yea, yea.
Now I can’t help thinking that my only quiddity is the fact that I’m associated with a word like “slugabed”. Thinking that in reality I must be ignoring the gargantua of oddness that follows me around, and limps slightly with drama so that he is one big sulking tragedy and I am one smaller version of sulking tragedy and we both meander around life in chains (chains that are rusted because either we indefinitely play in the rain or we cry a lot). Even in the tedium of life there’s such a beauty. A beauty that the tedium is a witness that, miraculously, we are still going, still living.
My mom just yelled the weather out from the living room, squealing, “OH MY GOSH! A HIGH OF 67!” Beautiful weather straight ahead and I’ll be in school. At work. Returning to normalcy. Copying down my words of the day like a scribe. Imagining I’m writing on papyrus. I’m Nefertiti. I’m Hemingway’s second wife. I’m the nurse he fell in love with. I’m the all the days I slept in too late. The chaos. The rain. The tears rusting the chains.