Robo-readin'

I worked at Borders bookstore for about three years, right up until they closed down. For many months afterword, jobless and nigh-on-homeless, I subsisted on beans, ramen, and stolen Pub Subs. Pub subs are Publix submarine sandwiches. I stole one of these sandwiches up to four or five times a week. I'm not proud of it, but it was so simple. I would just walk in and get them to make me a sub, then walk right back out, sandwich in hand. I was never stopped or questioned, probably stole about a hundred or so throughout those destitute months.

I used to look back on that time as one of the worst stretches of my life. I was living with a girlfriend that was quickly growing sick of my shit. We were over each other completely, but I felt trapped because no $$$ and she was too timid to break it off, I guess. I drank a whole lot of cough syrup and stayed drunk or high pretty much 24/7.

But, looking back, I had something like 300 books. The extent of my personal possessions. These were friends that remained while 'real' friends slunk off into shadows and disappeared. I got to know Kafka, Beckett, Kosinski, Hamsun, Woolf, O'Connor, O'Brien, Ligotti, Mishima, Jackson, Dick, Dunn, Conrad, Camus, Schulz, Ducasse... my intimates, my asylum inmates.

Robitussin and Ginger Ale, 1:1 ratio. Life becomes a cartoon. Within these waking dreams I would copulate with great whites in Maldoror, bother aristocracy on cobblestone streets in Hunger, cry from the beauty of the sun refracting light from The Temple of The Golden Pavilion, stand in terror before The Castle. My friend's became as real as you feel you are. Time became elastic. It was as complete an education in the finer arts as I would ever get.

Memory, though, is obliterated through continual indulgence in volatile substances. Eventually, my new friends disappeared like the rest of 'em. Well, I had to sell almost all my books to help pay first months rent in a shitty apartment after the GF finally got the guts to break it off. Maybe that's why I return to these authors specifically, time and time again. Those brief months where our worlds merged...it's like reading transcripts of half-forgotten dreams. And maybe that is the closest an author and reader can come to achieving the sublime.