April 17, 2008

Some people get drunk and go to 7-11 and buy 32 oz. slushies and Cooler Ranch Doritos.

Other people get drunk and go to The Strand, telling themselves it's just to get Persuasion for book club, as if that makes it any better, and wander around the entire store, picking up Interpreter of Maladies, and The Shipping News, and The Collected Works of many, and carrying them around with two hands, in a tall stack, still looking for that damned Austen book, and it seems that they have every single other book of hers--three different editions of Pride and Prejudice, and a fucking illustrated version of Mansfield Park, but no Persuasion. None. And all the Austen books are on the tippy top shelf and this person is too short (read: scared) to climb the folding ladder, not to mention utterly dreading the clatter just to get it open, and so they tell themselves,

No. Put all the books back. If you can't get Persuasion, get nothing.

Okay, maybe just Invisible Man. You were reading about the huge undertaking of getting his second book published--thousands upon thousands of pages of notes and half-finished chapters, and complete chunks that are books unto themselves--and you haven't read it since Goldstein's class, and it's so worthy of an impulse buy...

...and in the end this person buys nothing. The guilt of having a librarian for a mother triumphs again. They will take them out of the library. Problem solved. Crisis averted once more.

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