absentminded

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Had to go to town today to pick up my next year's stock of contact lenses. These are vital insofar as I cannot find my glasses without them. But I had a sharp urge to purchase something not vital at all. Something small. Something of a nothing that would be nonetheless modestly cheering. I spied a book rack in front of the secondhand store. Great! And there was a scholarly treatise on improving one's memory. Great! A buck for some much-needed help. Great! I glanced at the subtitle. It mentioned ten steps. Shit. Ten steps! I can't remember three steps. Pfeh. So I bought a little box of clove incense instead.

I am mightily happy for my many years of reading something like five books a week, even as I have long since given up using them as props for my walls full of bookshelves, one major trip to impress the living snot out of some used book dealers and my book ego was cut off forever. And, yes, lately, my memory is so very strange that I can read the same mystery novel over ten and twenty times and stay entertained, avid to find out who done it. But that doesn't mean I [we!] don't need mountains and mountains and mountains of books churning out for the rest of time. Even if the internet gives us a new kind of smarts, we're obviously dumbing badly already for ignoring those mountains.

Couldn't we maybe put together some kind of global literary coöperative?