On The Road*

I collect books, which is a douchey thing to say. One time at a party in college my friend Kerrie had invited this dingbat of a guy, I mean the man was legally a vegetable (not a person in a vegetative state, but like a carrot) who was browsing my bookshelf and he picked up a copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends and said, "Where did you get this!" And I said, My mom bought it for me when I was a little kid, and he said, "I collect books! And I've been looking for this all over and I've never been able to find it!"

Which:

1) How hard can you have been looking if you cannot even locate the most standard Shel Silverstein, and

2) Who says that? "I collect books"?

So I'm aware of the fact that making bullshit proclamations such as, "I collect books" drops my IQ by about a billion points till I hover just above the clinical diagnosis of Idaho potato, but in my defense I have been editing for the past several hours and my brain has turned to oatmeal. And also when I say that I collect books I mean to use collect as an action verb, as a form of kinetic energy, as a reference to the activity of picking a book up off the sidewalk (where there are always swarms of them) and taking it to my house.

I do this a lot, the collecting, and as a result my little library is ever expanding, despite the confines of my non-profit salary, and the collection has grown to the point that earlier this week (between the earthquake and the hurricane) I met a guy from Craigslist and gave him twenty-five dollars for a used bookcase from Target. I carried it home and put it in my bedroom to catch the overflow from the first bookcase that was no longer passing muster, and just like that, I became a two-bookcase household. I got to rearrange my elephant bookends and line up all the books just so, and it was a generally lovely evening because when you live alone in a big apartment, this is the type of shit that passes for a party on a Tuesday night.

One such book in my collection (which, actually, I did not find on the sidewalk but paid a dollar for at a charity store in Chelsea) is the book The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I'm sure you're familiar with it. It's a post-apocalyptic masterpiece about a father and son facing the world together after everything has been destroyed and it made me cry at the end. I got it in hardcover, even though I don't like hardcover (because it was a dollar) and when I got it home and opened it up, this is what was handwritten inside:

10-12-06

To My Wonderful, Beautiful, and talented Son, Jack. This is a story about challenges, and we two have them... and the love of a Father and Son, and we certainly have that for each other.

Love,
Daddy

Which:

1) This is a grown-up book and presumably intended for a grown-up son, who, in his manliness, has probably long ago shrugged off baby-talk which makes the use of the name Daddy ring extremely creepy.

2) Jack, you ungrateful prig.

I've already read The Road and I'm in all honesty never going to open it again unless I want to show someone the inscription, but I'm greedy about books the way I'm greedy about music. I don't want to stream. I want to download. So it's all the same to me if people toss out family heirlooms and I get to decorate my house with them; it makes my life a bit richer and my (second!) bookcase a bit fuller. But Jack, I am a little concerned about your priorities. I really think you need to sit back and take stock of what matters. And for God's sake, call your Daddy.

* Get it?