Ramblings from a lunch time

When I started working at this job, Jill had her car, and I drove the van. And I liked to drive over the highway, go to Taco Bell for lunch, or wherever, and sit in the parking lot, listen to the radio. I like sports radio more than I like sports. Open the windows and let the air in. Or keep the windows closed, obviously, if it was winter, just let the cold creep in until it was too much, and I had to start the van and drive back, thawing on the way. If I wanted to, I could stop at Half-Price books or Borders, or whatever. One time I even spent the whole hour driving to the game store to buy a gift for a friend. Even at an easy job where you can do what you want most of the day, the ability to hop in the car and just go feels like real freedom. It's sort of how I've been conditioned. No car? No freedom. Not in a town like this, where the good buses come twice an hour.

But now that I'm riding with Adam to work, it's rare that I get a chance to just go. Most days I either stay at my computer or take the ten+ minute walk to Hy-Vee. We're down to one income with Jill being a stay-at-home-Jill these days, and when I eat out for lunch, I've given myself a budget of the price of a $2 can of soup, since that's likely what I'd get if we went grocery shopping. At Hy-vee, I can buy a really nice roll and a fifth of a pound of rare roast beef for about a buck fifty, and with some mustard that's a right fine lunch. And seeing how I'd like to lose weight, I'm fine with not having expensive options like the only slightly further Sonic.

Sometimes I spend my two bucks on drugs. A 64 oz fountain drink is a dollar nineteen. Of course, making my own sandwiches would be even cheaper. But that means keeping ingredients fresh and available, which we're not so good at. Seems like we're always either scrounging for last scraps, or throwing out food because it's gone bad from sitting around for too long.

But Adam got back from Portland yesterday, so I drove myself to work. Which meant I had options. You can eat good at Taco Bell or McDonalds for two bucks, nice and fattening, but I wasn't even in the mood to spend that, so I ate a $1.29 carrot cake Clif Bar, and given my freedom, headed to Borders with $12.87 in two-year-old gift cards.

I have said it before, and you will likely hear me say it again, but bookstores are dangerous places. It's a bit like a porn addict flipping through the underwear ads in the Sunday paper. You're still skirting the edge of realm of safety, but you've got an outside chance of going off the deep end. I'm just finishing reading Colossians Remixed again, having read Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Watchmen in between, while I'm still in the middle of A Failure of Nerve, and further back, Exclusion and Embrace, so it's not like there's a real strong temptation to empty the bank on books I don't need, but it still felt a little dangerous walking through the double doors with the name of the store engraved in the wooden handles. In the end, it's not owning books, that's dangerous. Not really. It's the potential of books. It's the hidden story, the one you discover, and no one else knows. It's getting lost in them.

Right at the front of the store there's a display of political books, and one of them is a thin biography of Sarah Palin with quotes on the front about her VP nomination. That's really fast. I wonder if it was fast-tracked or re-released. It had a 2008 copyright. I know there are people out there who write insta-non-fiction. Propose a book on current hot topic, write it in a week, sell it, propose another. But this one seemed thoroughly researched. So that's a mystery.

I headed over to the discount fiction. If I needed a copy of all three Lord of the Rings books, I could have had that for $8.97, but I'm already there, more than once, and there wasn't anything else I was interested in. And I didn't feel like a coffee table book, or a book on how to do tai chi, or a miniature zen garden, or any of the cookbooks, so I moved on to the graphic novels, looking for 1602, even though I know it was a cool $19.95.

But it wasn't even in stock for me to be able to check the sticker. I stood there and read Incredible Hulk: The End: the Last Titan. Thematically, it compares the Marvel superheros to the titans of Greek mythology. Hulk is created by the atomic age, and he is the first of the new 'titans.' This story is set in the distant future, the world destroyed, Hulk/Banner and huge cockroaches are the only living things left, and Hulk is the new Prometheus, now the last titan, left to be eaten again and again by the cockroaches, never able to die, even though Banner is trying to end their lonely lives. It's these kinds of modern takes on classically tragic stories are the reasons I like the comics and graphic novels I like (Watchmen and Sandman for example), and this Hulk story makes the link between old stories and new stories even more clear.

As I left the comics section, I got that rich, heavy feeling I get sometimes in book stores and almost always in libraries, walking through stacked rows of books, back cover to front cover packed in shelves, the feeling of so many words and ideas brimming in such a small space, the weight of possibility, the stretch of all that time: reading a book is days, unless it's tiny, and then it's at least hours. And just within my reach are a hundred books, thousands in view. And how long was a single book to write, even? A season of work, solstice to solstice? A year, maybe? And all that time is packed down and overflowing there in the bookstore. Moreso in the library, books upon books, some untouches for decades. That's gravitas, man. That vibe stuck with me for a good hour after I left.

I looked at some other stuff. There are a couple of Get Fuzzy books newer than we have in the Get Fuzzy bathroom. I almost got one, but I wanted both. so I didn't get any. I realize that thinking is bad economics, but that's how it was. In the end, I decided to get the latest issue of AdBusters, an advertisementless magazine that I cannot usually afford since it has to rely on sales for revenue, but gift cards are gift cards, and I pulled $8.95 off the card with the picture of the wrapped Christmas gift on it, even though I meant to use the one with The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe on it first, since it's only got 28 cents left. Almost without thinking, deliberate like in a Wes Anderson movie, I took the magazine off the counter, receipt tucked inside, in my hand so as I was carrying it face up, right side up. Words and time demand my respect, apparently.

This theme issue of Adbusters is the decline of the West and the rise of the East, which is manifesting in the US and China, primarily, it says. And the issue is a double issue, if you start and read it normally for us, left to right, you get the part about the west, and if you read from the end, right column to left column, it's about the east, and the stories meet in the middle, ask you to see the other perspective by jumping to the end and starting over. I'm not done reading it yet, and I'm not convinced the rise and fall business is definitely going to happen; I'm no oracle. But there was a particularly interesting quote at the end of an article on the east side by a guy named Martin Jacques: "America is utterly unprepared for a world in which it is no longer the dominant power: it has barely given any though to the question, not even in its nightmares."

And I'd have to agree, even if I'm not utterly convinced if the west is really in decline or if that's just speculation. It's like we think we're always going to epic-ly rule, and are planning accordingly. But what if the Fed can't keep messing with interest rates? What if the bottom did fall out of the dollar? What if China called in all that debt? I'm not worried about it, and I wonder if on a macro scale preparing for economic disaster brings it (or vice versa), but I also think that occasionally contemplating our west declining isn't a bad thing either. Maybe we'd be more humble.

So I drove back and sat at my desk, nestled in my cube, and helped the people who pushed it to bubble, try to help the housing market turn back again. And read my magazine. And wrote most of this.