The View From Scranton

I'm All Logic

If, as the Stoics hypothesized, logic is bones and sinew, and my bones are brittled and ill bore and my sinew is ached and torn, I'm all logic. I gotta be. Why else here?

Again with the Auster. You gotta be here. Fully in a place. In place. Fully in a time. In time. Fully in the moment. Doesn't matter where, so long as you're there. Here. Completely.

But my here is incomplete. Mind wanders, soul shifts, body aches on impulses even it didn't know it had. Half life. In a perpetual half time. The throngs are all at the concession stands feeding their faces while I sit stirred in a locked dressing room, my swagger on a hanger.

I'm ready to resume play, Mr. Demille.

Today again with the rains, not as spitting as it has been, but nonetheless wet. A cloak of nature's tears wrapped around an ingrown cry baby. The slog gets called on account, I get giddy. Thank some lucky stars. Perhaps today will be the day that I get to make my play.

So Paste. A surprisingly splendid offering of smart pop arcana. Yesterday was the first time I've been in a bookstore in almost four years. Not for lack of trying – many are the days that I've tried to bribe and cajole a ride – but for geography. There is no Borders, no Barnes, no little indy in downtown Scranton, and it's a long, long way to Dickson City. Yesterday I made my way, for minutes, minutes enough to find that Paste might just be the place.

It was a stewful few minutes, the wash and the rush of the rash of titles nearly overwhelmed me. Stoked some faraway flame. I wanted to spend hours, days, cracking covers and delving into stacks upon stacks of the written. Even with the occasional mail drop (thanks Craig), I still do so miss the written. I miss its browse, its spur, its contagion.

Yes, there is the public library, that blessed Gothic fortress which has become my defacto office. If not for them there'd be for me recently no Auster, no Berendt, no McCarthy. No On Bullshit. Yet, good and great as it is, the library cannot replicate the thrill of an at once all new.

The rest is lining-it as I can. The quick cyber fixes at the aforementioned Albright Memorial mostly, and, if I'm feeling particularly pocketed, Northern Light, the kinda cool coffee klatchery where two Site Kiosks allow timed email checks and a semblance of surfing.

There is too the some small public access provided at University of Scranton's Weinberg Library, but the three ancient, weathered, Word-free terminals assigned non-students are hidden away in a closet that can only be accessed by passing through battalions of spanking new work stations which of course are off limits to the common folk. Like this half world, you must make it through a maze of can't-have before you get your morsel.

Morsels I've learned to find fulfilling. Tidbits of food, thimbles of drink, slivers of minutes. Pieced and parsed properly, they can almost sate. The Big Almost. It's not quite, not because I like too – I'm nothing if not interested in the quite – but because I'm mandated to. Because it is.

So I let the Bacchanals commence without me, Dionysus dance in another sphere, and I tow the Apollonian line, it is my burden, it is my joy, it is only logical.

posted by John Hood. @ 12:31 PM