duck-shaped pain

9 June 2001
Wrong Crease, Right Book

I had a dream last night where I was smoking pot in my office with my cousin Eric. We were rifling through my record collection, looking for a proper gatefold double album on which to sort out and clean the pot. All we kept running into, though, were these epic triple and quadruple albums, each of which, once you folded out the entire thing, stretched to more than six feet in length. Deciding on the proper crease was too difficult, so we just gave up.


Went to farmer's market this morning, and they didn't have much. Swiss chard and peas. I bought some sugar snap peas, remembering that the ones I bought last year were really really good. I got them home, de-stringed them, and cooked them with some garlic and butter.

I would have been very happy with my lunch, except that the peas were tough and not at all sweet. At first, I thought that I had accidentally bought some shelling peas, but I was wrong. They were just defective sugar snap peas. So much for my first real produce buy of the summer. I hope this isn't a trend.


My mom is in town, so we went shopping for a bit this morning. She needed new wiper blades for her truck, and the only non-auto geek store in town that sells them is Wal-Mart, so over there we went.

It was insanely busy. I couldn't believe it. People were stacked up like cordwood in the checkout lanes, and one had to be constantly on the lookout for small children and runaway shopping carts, lest one injure one's shin.

Then, the lights went out. It became completely dark.

People still kept shopping, even though they could no longer see what merchandise they were selecting. At least no one panicked -- in a store that packed, one scream could start a whole stampede.

Then the lights came back on. No one blinked.


While we were there, I ran across an item I would have always wanted had I known it existed, prior to today -- an enormous body pillow shaped like a rainbow trout, about five or six feet long. Since they only had one rainbow -- the rest of their selection was smallmouth bass pillows or some other dull earth-toned fish -- I figured I had better get one while they had it.

I carried the big, unwieldy pillow around the store with me. I did not get that many strange looks -- people were too wrapped up in purchasing for that -- but I did get to hear one dad reprimand his son as I went by:

"Son, a woman came through here carrying an enormous fish, and you didn't even try to get out of the way�"


Got a haircut yesterday, a good one. Since I am too cheap to get a decent haircut at a normal place with a regular hairdresser (money is better saved for buying books and big fish pillows), I have to take my chances with whoever I get at the cheap haircutting places. But I ended up getting someone yesterday who I'd had before, someone competent [1]. Competent is always better than not competent.

There's a used bookstore right next door to the "salon" (I hesitate to use that word). It's an okay store. I complain about it a lot, but it's infinitely preferable to the other used bookstore in town.

Once in a while, I have to go in the really bad one to remind myself just why I dislike it so much. It's run by this really creepy man and his son, neither of whom seem to get out much. It's a bookstore for those sorts of people who are obsessed with Editions. Every single book in the store, even the crappy mass-market paperback, is marked with what Edition it is: "6th edition, 5th printing," something like that.

I can see marking first editions, even though I'm not that big on having them or seeking them out or seeing them as special in any way. But beyond that is just going too far.

Plus, all their books are incredibly expensive, for used books. Many of them cost more than they would new, and this includes books that are still in print and readily available at any other bookstore. I went in there once last year, looking for a copy of John McPhee's Encounters With The Archdruid and the only copy they had, a near-brand-new paperback copy, was priced at $18. It looked exactly like the new copies I had seen, and still had the price tag on the back from its original purchase. Whoever bought it new had only paid $13, but since this copy was from the all-important 48th printing, it was now worth $5 more.

Plus, the younger creepy guy always calls me by my first name. I don't know how he knows it, but he's not allowed to. Very few people are, and those are the people who gave me it in the first place.

This other one, the one I visited yesterday, is much different. My main beef with them is that their main book buyer is the same person who sorts and shelves the books down at the Salvation Army. She gets first pick of all the books, which means that I don't. Which makes me bitter. But it also makes their books cheap.

This store has the good sense to keep its first editions locked up in a cabinet by the register, where they can't bother anyone. The rest of the store is thus dedicated to people who just want a nice book they can read and possibly write in or set their drink on, not something to just place on a shelf and dust once in awhile. No chance of finding the book you've always wanted and falling over dead from shock that the grimy, dusty copy you have in your hand is $40 due to its luck in being one of the first out of the printer's.

I bought two books: Cooking With Pomiane ($2.98) and , amazingly enough, a brand-new-looking copy of The Timeless Way of Building for a mere $7.

The Timeless Way of Building is one of the companion books (actually, the first book in the three-volume series, The Oregon Experiment being the remaining book) to A Pattern Language, a book which I briefly enthused about here. I have never seen a used copy before. I know I will never see a copy for $7 again. Happy day.


[1] Last haircut I got, I got someone really bad. I should have known something was amiss when she entered by name in the computer completely wrong. Three letters (only one of which is in my name), a period and no vowels. My name is a little odd, but believe me, it has vowels. Several of them. She didn't shave off enough hair, and she said "oops" a few too many times during the cutting process.

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