cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I would like kids to be on the table. At this point, I'm kind of The Man. I have a little kingdom. Most days, a parade of people come in to visit me. Artists and writers and lawyers and judges and scholars and miscreants. Winter is generally a desperate time for used bookstores. January and February are a starvation time. My January was 50% over the last January. For the last week, we averaged almost $400 a day during a period when we need to average $350 a day in order to survive. This past Saturday, we did $1,000 while the other bookstores within a few blocks did less than half that. This past week I accomplished incredible feats of carpentry. I built new bookcases and tore out the old ones that stuck out 6 inches into a doorway and were great, hulking presences that forced books to be stacked horizontally. Gender and women's studies have their own bookcase now and Native American also has it's own bookcase. We sold absolutely nothing out of Native American for the last six months and then the day after I rebuilt that shit we sold two volumes. I suddenly have a first edition of Titus Groan and of Gormenghast after months of dealing with an elderly crying woman who could not decide whether or not to dispose of her mother's books. With dust jackets. About two years ago, I conceived of an art installation. A collection of the debris that accumulates in people's drawers. Objects connected with memories. Loose buttons, coins from countries we have visited, broken watches, stamps, notes left in books. That sort of thing. I conceived of a vending machine. One that you put quarters into and it dispenses a plastic capsule full of those objects of memory. I bought such a vending machine. I have filled about 15 capsules, I still have to build a stand for the machine and fill the rest of the capsules. This is the place for that thing which I envisioned a few years ago. What is this bookstore that I allegedly own and am in fact steward of but a vast repository of the memories of strangers? We have a collection of things that we have found in books. Postcards and letters and recipes and crayon drawings from the 1890's. The memories of strangers. And the things they have underlined or circled in these books that they have been reading for hundreds of years before their books came into my possession in my bookstore, The memories of strangers. I have envisioned this vending machine for the last two years or so. I am now in possession of a place in which that vision is appropriate. Random elderly men thank me for what I have done to rejuvinate this place. I thought that I would be fending people off who were angry about my changes to the bookstore. So far, everyone is pretty happy. The good Lindsay is still very good. I am not in love with her. She is a very good person. She is also a very delicate person. I am responsible for her well-being. She has attempted suicide in a serious way several times. I am responsible for her well-being. I do not want to spend the rest of my life with this woman, but I am responsible for looking after her and ensuring that she does not kill herself. Also she decided to be surgically sterilized last week. I would really, really like to have more children. But she decided to get herself spayed. I took my cues from her and she asked for no input whatsoever from me. She did not ask, at all, how I felt about that decision. It was her choice to make. I was as supportive as I could be. I gave backrubs and tried to take her out for dinner, but she's not really eating much lately, which she thinks makes her look good but she's really just getting creepily thin. I feel mentally checked out of the relationship. She doesn't want to have children with me, There is no future with this woman. It isn't that she is in the zone of it being difficult -- she does not want it to be a possibility. I don't think that she has thought through the enormity of the door that she has closed. 3:31 a.m. - 2024-02-05 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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