Open Daily 11am to 9pm

Me and My Life, Portraits of People and Places

Next time you pull up to a bookstore that sells “books and resources” to the politically radical, and find that it’s located next to “Sweeney Todd’s Salon,” be prepared for oddness. The sign saying “Open Daily: 11am to 9pm” will probably be more of an educated guess than a statement of fact, the implied message being “Well, you know, if we’re not busy doing something else — and we’ve got a lot going on.” And they do. They’re sorting and packing books for prisoners, running discussion groups about the G20, stopping the war in Iraq… The 200 or so square feet of book shelves are kind of an after-thought.

I didn’t know this, though. So I was a little confused to pull up at 11:30 and find the place dark. There were people inside, and the door was unlocked, but the people seemed pretty surprised when I actually entered.

“Are you open?” seemed like it should have been akin to a rhetorical question, but apparently not.

“No, not yet.”

“Do you know when you will be?”

“Usually we’re open by about now, but we’ll open when they get here. They’re volunteers, you know.”

I wondered who “they” were. The girl seemed to think I’d know. And since she was busy sorting and packing books, I thought I’d just return to my car and ponder the question from there, stopping first to retrieve my book from the trunk. I no longer trusted Them to appear soon, and yet I didn’t really feel like driving the hour back to my house now that I’d made it all the way here just to see what kinds of zines they’d carry.

A heavily tattooed couple clumped by in heavy black boots, their hair styles leaving it to the eye of the beholder to decide between “bed head” and “I spent hours moussing it to look just like this.” I wondered, as I often do, how piercings like the one woman had feel in -20 weather.

A preppy looking couple walked their black lab while sipping coffee. The lab peed on the bookstore’s sidewalk sign.

A middle-aged woman in grey sweats and lime green crocks shuffled along next to her miniscule grown daughter.  And then several minutes later walked back and entered the darkened bookstore.  Were these They? I closed my book and glanced at the clock: 12:10. Ten minutes after the store event I’d seen listed on the website was scheduled to begin.

But no. The lights didn’t turn on, so I returned to my book.

Not long afterwards, though, They arrived in the form of a diminuative college-aged guy carrying a satchel that was easily twice the size of his torso. The lights went on. A sandwich board went out on the sidewalk declaring “OPEN: 11am – 9pm.” And I went in to browse zines while They talked on the phone about an upcoming meeting to discuss “the war, abortion, and health care.”

Crossing the Road

Randomness

I don’t know how the squirrel ended up huddled under the center support of a highway overpass, five lanes of highway traffic on one side, five equally perilous lanes of traffic on the other, concrete on all sides and overhead. Having gotten there, though, is it any wonder he’d want to get back to a less concrete world?

I imagine he tried to climb the concrete supports. I imagine he spent some time calculating just how far he’d have to run before finding the end of the highway. And I imagine he even made a couple of trial runs in each direction before coming back to the overpass and desperately trying to memorize traffic patterns in hopes of finding a gap.

By the time I approached, hurtling towards him at 55mph, the squirrel passed the point of desperation. He had seen the possible futures that lay before him if he stayed and if he ran. He had begun the run.

In a series of mad, tail-frizzing dashes, he crossed all five lanes of traffic and then leaped at the concrete barrier that separated him from the blighted grass…

…and leaped again, panic mounting as his claws scraped uselessly down the barrier.

I wonder if he ever realized that he could run 10 feet in either direction and find the relative freedom of inner-city grass or if he kept flinging himself against the concrete. I’ll never know for sure.

It Was A Very Good Week

Me and My Life

It’s been a good week. A better week than I’ve had in a long, long time.

I was in moods that ranged from decent to good nearly all of the time. In fact, things that I expected would plunge me into the Pit Of Despair let me just sit at the edge of the pit and dangle my legs over the edge.

It’s also been months since I had so many days of good energy in a row. Four Days So Far!! Four days of feeling like a normal human being. Four days of walking around town at a normal human speed. Four days of skipping the cost-benefit analysis when accepting invitations or suggesting activities with friends. When I did get tired, it always felt like legitimate tiredness born of long days rather than sinister exhaustion designed to keep me from doing anything interesting or fun. This week’s tiredness had none of the attendant numbness (physical and mental) that serves as disproportionate punishment for the slightest movements during my wilty phases. This tiredness would even have been pleasant if I weren’t always just a little bit worried that it was just the prelude to something worse. Luckily, though, the Something Worse never materialized. I hope it doesn’t for a long, long time.

What’s more, everything at work seemed to go my way (a pleasant change after the last couple of months). I even made decent headway in catching up on many of the things that had gotten away from me recently. But better than that, a series of pretty intense projects that could easily have worn me out and derailed my moods served instead to reconnect me with my colleagues and my enthusiasm for our mutual goals. And it reminded me that I have some pretty great co-workers, and that we have some pretty great mutual goals.

This weekend I have a series of fun things lined up, including catching up with a friend from college, seeing a Shakespeare play, and hanging out with a couple of other groups of friends. I also plan to go through last week’s list of Things I Like To Do and actually do a couple of them.

Which brings me to the best part: a gift of charcoal, pencils, and a sketch pad from a good friend, all of which arrived in today’s mail. I grin from ear to ear whenever I look at them sitting on the table beside me. I couldn’t have asked for a better ending to a good week.

Hopefully next week will be similar, plus an actual appetite and less of a cough.

Remembering What I Want To Do

Me and My Life

Well, I do not lead a charmed life. I lead a mundane life where, if I drop the ball, gravity prevents that ball from magically hovering and not hitting the floor. And this week that ball broke a few things on its way down.

But, it’s not the end of the world. … I’m reasonably sure it’s not the end of the world. I’m just frustrated with myself.

Meanwhile, I’m reminded of an idea from a book I read on the brain chemistry of introversion. Introverts sometimes need to keep lists around of the fun things they enjoy doing so that when they need to get out and do things they’ll be able to look at that list and just pick something rather than try to come up with stuff on the fly. Introverts are very very bad at coming up with stuff on the fly.

And so here are some things that I may want to do, in case I forget.

  • Write, here and elsewhere. I always always always feel better when I’m writing. (And if you’d told me that 10 years ago I would have laughed at you heartily.)
  • Go hiking in the woods (I’ve lived near some famous woods for years now, and never visited them)
  • Meet acquaintances at the local coffee shop or pub, even if all we do is read in tandem
  • Go on an excursion to Ikea to buy a floor lamp for my office
  • Do some research for that article I want to write
  • Invite people to play Liverpool Rum
  • Plan and cook a special meal
  • Knit (I have two projects lined up – materials all bought and everything – but nothing started yet)
  • Explore the local zine store
  • Spin some of that roving into yarn
  • Find a book that engrosses me, and allow myself to be engrossed
  • Create and post a mini-movie so that my friends in the computer can see what MPOW and my office look like
  • Sketch (I should buy some charcoal and pencils. And a sketch pad.)
  • Write letters to friends.
  • Go to a symphony or chamber orchestra concert

A couple of those might be a bit of a stretch at the moment. Setting up the loom, going dancing, and learning Japanese are even more of a stretch, so I’ll just leave them off the list for now.

It’s sunny today, which is a welcome change after the past week of unrelenting clouds and rain (and even some snow). The main highway between me and Everything Else is closed this weekend for bridge demolition, so my options are a little more limited than usual. Given this development, I think I’ll find a sunny window, write, read, and goof off online. I have some actual work to do, too, but after the week I’ve had at work, I think I’ll give myself as much of a break from that as I can.

Let There Be Light

Me and My Life

I’m trying a new thing this year. I bought myself a light box (after some helpful friends who specialize in medical research pointed me toward some good specifications), and every morning I sit in front of it for half an hour while it hums at me, hisses its little ions all over me, and surrounds me in that kind of intense blue-ish light that makes the rest of the house seem dark as night in comparison. If you were to sit outside on a sunny summer morning, and if the sun hummed, hissed, smelled of ions, and didn’t heat anything up, it would be just like sitting in front of this light box.

I have no idea if it’s helping. I have no “control” of myself to compare against on a day-to-day basis. But I think I’ll keep it up because if I had to guess, I’d say it’s helping a whole lot. What I don’t know is if the light is helping, or if the half hour sitting in front of the light with cocoa and my laptop is helping. Maybe it’s the enforced time spent watching the birds fight over the pine seeds in the bank of trees outside my window, or reading my favorite blogs, or listening to a podcast. Maybe it’s the promise that, if my concentration and brains return, I could actually spend this time reading a real, honest to goodness book.

Or maybe it’s just the massive doses of Vitamin D and fish oil my doctor put me on. Who knows.

Whatever the reason, October isn’t getting to me the way I expected it to. We’ll see if all this stuff continues to ward off the “damp, drizzly November of the soul” (Melville7).