It’s
January 2023 because it’s always been January 2023. I’m tucked away
in our little house in old town Longmont. I want to while away these
cold winter days. I’ve got a half assigned, if not totally arbitrary
reading list. I want to reread all these Richard Brautigan books.
At one
point I had all these books. Somewhere along the line I lost all
these books. I carried a few around, but many of them I lent to
people who have not brought them back to me. Perhaps the old owners
of the used books have come back either as criminals or ghosts and
reclaimed their property. I realized there were a good many of these
books that I did not have on my sagging bookshelf.
I’m
old. I started looking for these book right here in Longmont at both
of the used bookstores in my neighborhood. There were none there. I
knew this was going to be the case, but I went in anyway. Any day in
a bookstore is a good day.
I have
a mistress, a really dark one. This mistress’s name? Ebay.
I made
a list of all the Brautigans that I did not have and I bought them on
Ebay.
Not
everyone gets Ebay. I love it. I explain it like this: Amazon is like
a really big Walmart. I don’t like either Amazon or Walmart. Ebay is
like going into the world’s largest flea market and I think flea
markets are great. The only real downside I see to Ebay is that I
don’t get a churro when I log into it like I do when I go to the flea
market.
I
spent all year 2003 driving all over the country stopping in all
sorts of towns and cities hunting up Brautigans in the bookstores. I
found, at that time, that if I did find a Brautigan it was almost
always in a bookstore in or west of Denver.
I
spent about three hours in 2023 finding everything I wanted on Ebay.
My how the world has changed.
As I
started my journey again it was with Trout Fishing in
America, In Watermelon
Sugar and The Pill vs
the Springhill Mine Disaster.
They
were all pretty much the way I remembered them to be. I like the
short episodic chapters. We’ll see how the next groups will treat me.