The Unreadable

So Let’s take note, or a list if you will: refrigerators, handbags, monstrous DVD collections, Bedrooms, content of backpacks, the alphabet, Cinema ticket Stubbs, ipod artists, things we see upon waking, items in front of us, landmarks, dogs... All these topics have been covered in the great quest to create the most boring and unreadable blog. I guess I’ll add my own list to the list . . .

I present my bookshelf. I will list them in the haphazard order in which they have been arranged . . . this will be much more entertaining for me than the reader . . . if you do read this . . .enjoy.

Walden – HDT
The Contrast – Royall Tyler
Advanced Racquetball – Strandemo and Baum
The Constitution of the United States (2 copies)
Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglas
Blindness -José Saramargo
Tortilla Flat – John Steinbeck
The Prince – Machiavelli
The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
Cannery Row – Steinbeck
Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday – James W. Baker
The Heath Anthology of Literature: Volume A
Outer Dark – Cormac McCarthy
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
Lost Victories: The Military Genius of Stonewall Jackson – Bevin Alexander
For Whom The Bell Tolls – Hemingway
Giants: The Parallel Lives of Fredrick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln – John Stauffer
Candide – Voltaire
America and Americans – Steinbeck
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Metamorphoses – Ovid
Moby Dick – Melville
Romantic Art – William Vaughan
A Clockwork Orange – William Burgess
Ishmael – Daniel Quinn
Hunger – Knut Hamsun
A Sand County Almanac – Aldo Leopold
The Rules Of Attraction – Bret Easton Ellis
A Confederacy Of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Farewell To Arms – Hemingway
Burmese Days – George Orwell
1984 – George Orwell
The Red and The Black – Stendhal
Island – Aldous Huxley
Off To The Side – Jim Harrison
Farmer – Jim Harrison
Warlock – Jim Harrison
White Noise – Don DeLillo
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Lullaby – Chuck Palahniuk
Haunted – Chuck Palahniuk
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
Winter In The Blood – James Welch
Travels With Charlie - Steinbeck
Travels With Charlie – Steinbeck (yeah, it’s there twice)
The Pearl – Steinbeck
East of Eden – Steinbeck
The Short Reign of Pippin the IV – Steinbeck
Once There Was A War – Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath – Steinbeck
Hot Water Music – Charles Bukowski
The Reader – Bernard Schlink
Ask The Dust – John Fante
Invisible Monsters – Chuck Palahniuk
Growth Of The Soil – Knut Hamsun
One The Road – Jack Kerouac
The Dharma Bums – Jack Kerouac
Cry, The Beloved Country – Alan Paton
No Longer At Ease – Chinua Achebe
My Century – Günter Grass
Survivor – Chuck Palahniuk
The Harper Collins Study Bible
Lost Illusions – Honoré de Balzac
The Histories – Herodotus
The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
The Theban Plays –Sophocles
The Iliad – Homer
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
1919 – John Dos Passos
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Waste Land – T.S. Eliot
Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
Suttree – Cormac McCarthy
The Following Story – Cees Nooteboom
The Skin of Our Teeth – Thornton Wilder
America – Johan Huizinga
The Waning of the Middle Ages – Johan Huizinga
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert Pirsig
Ordeal By Fire – McPherson
Black Elk Speaks – John Neihardt
Holidays On Display – William Bird
The Death of Superman – DC Comics
Rupay: historias graficas de la violencia en el Perú 1980 – 1984 – Luis Rossell, Alfredo Villar, Jesus Cossio
Batman: Year One – Frank Miller
Pride of Baghdad – Brian K. Vaughan
Watchmen – Alan Moore
Japan: A Cultural, Social, and Political History – Anne Walthall
The Black Cat – Edgar Allan Poe
Women in Love - D.H. Lawrence
To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Leaves of Grass (First 1855 Edition) – Walt Whitman
Bob Dylan Chronicles – Bob Dylan
Cities of the Planes – Cormac McCarthy
The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka (again)
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
The Absolute Diary of a Part-Time Indian – Sherman Alexie
Fools Crow – James Welch
The Golden Fleece
The Burial At Thebes – Seamus Heaney
The Myth of Sisyphus – Albert Camus
Cupid and Psyche – Apuleius
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
The Rum Diary – Hunter S. Thompson
The Motel Life – Willy Vlautin
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
Black Boy – Richard Wright
All The World’s a Fair – Robert W. Rydell
White Guard – Mikhail Bulgakov
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
Blood Meridian – Cormac McCrathy
São Tomé – Paul Cohn
Personal History – Katharine Graham
Letters on Life – Rainer Maria Rilke
Fencing the Sky – James Galvin
The General In His Labyrinth – Gabriel García Márquez
Popism: The Warhol Sixties – Andy Warhol
Party Monster – James st. James
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Beautiful and the Damned – Fitzgerald
OK, I’ve made it about a third of the way through, if I continue I’m going to fail a test tomorrow. Maybe I’ll continue someday…

Groundhogblog

Since I haven’t done this for a while I guess I’ll start from a place I’ve been before. The dentist’s chair. That is where I found myself on Groundhog Day 2010. And perhaps there is more truth to those opening lines than their obvious inadequacies as gripping turns of literature. It doesn’t really pull you in does it? Regardless it’s the truth, and the truth can be boring…get used to it. Maybe if I twist it a bit, give it a ferocious turn or a mighty stretch, gripping and interesting would be the adjectives that float to the surface of your thoughts in describing a routine as humdrum as teeth cleaning. Is this all sinking in? So, I was in the dentist’s chair. Drooling between monosyllables as I attempt to answer to the dental hygienists trivial questions. The same questions, reformatted every six months. My son did this; my son did that… blah…blah…blah. I hate to fain interest during polite formalities, such as the conversation I’m describing. I usually prefer no refrain from all forms of communication during moments of relaxation. And having my teeth cleaned is certainly one of those moments. Oh how I enjoy those biannual cleanings. I have heard there are those of you who fear, dread, loose sleep over those preventive upkeeps, and I will say now that I do not understand you. We are incompatible. How can that be? You obviously do not frequent the same Zen-garden/dentists office I do. I’m not joking. The chair in which I find myself twice a year is front row seating to a visual feast for the meditatively inclined mind. Six very large windows on the north and east walls make privy an enchanting view of a dense thicket, back dropped by celestial reaching mountains. So it is here that I purposely schedule my cleanings, always in the mornings when I am still tired, this is very important so as to allow for the ideal state of relaxation. I sometimes think about grapes. Grapes large and small. Red and green, dark and pale. I like grapes. They make a delicious snack or juice. And treated just the right way they can make a wonderful muse. Would I make this up? Other times I find myself thinking of nothing at all. I really strive to think of nothing. Zip. A blank Canvas. A dumb horse’s mouth. Mouth…mouth teeth…teeth chatter…chatterbox? No. Teeth? Yes, teeth…talk…talk, too much…much too much…yes! The dentist talked too much I mentioned earlier, and it still holds true. But now I realize that I’m talking too much. I’m being way too long-winded, but perhaps I’ve lost my way. Or is my way sound and the path is where the fault lies? We are constantly concerned with moving forward in a linear fashion, we sometimes miss the turns and folds in the labyrinth. But not that morning, no that morning I was tuned in; I didn’t miss a beat. Literally not a beat, because, as it were music clued me in, it was the device that exposed the glitch. So there I was in the dentists chair when the landscape fell flat and I could see forward and back, side-to-side, up and down. The Sound of Silence was deafening. Or rather not, it was adjusted to a reasonable volume but the effect was sublime. That overplayed classic by Simon and Garfunkel could be heard softly, accenting the sterile quite of that office. And I realized that I had been there before. But of course that is obvious, I go there twice a year. But no, this feeling was different. I knew that exact moment had been mine once before, I had played that game previous, I knew my lines well, I was my own understudy. Everything became clear. So there I was. My moment of Déjà vu struck me in the dentist’s chair. I was tense as hell, anything but relaxed – having my teeth cleaned is like a death march through the mud – all I wanted was a bit of small talk to ease my mind.