From Anti-establishment to Executive MBA

About fourteen or fifteen years ago, I wrote a journal entry while sitting downtown at The Market on an early workday morning. I, of course, was not going to work. I had dropped off a lady-friend at work. I sat there, drinking my coffee, in the shadows of skyscrapers about the freshly washed sidewalks, watching the day start, watching the gears of commerce begin to turn. I'd been reading Celine and was feeling very anti-establishment. Watching people going to work, the buildings filling with workers, I wrote a journal entry railing against this world. It was all absurd and served no purpose, I wrote at the time. I had no idea then that many years later would find me at the same location in a very different frame of mind.

This Wednesday morning, I was back at The Market, having a coffee. Only this time, I was wearing a suit. I was wearing a suit and killing time waiting for an interview. An interview for admission to an Executive MBA program. So, however many years ago I had felt bad for those part of the large mechanism of capitalism, thinking about how the system had stolen their souls. And then there I was this week, eager to become further entrenched.

I'm not sure if it is simply ironic, if the system has stolen my soul, or if simply says something about evolution.

Sixth human foot found on Canada's Pacific coast

Sixth human foot found on Canada's Pacific coast - USATODAY.com: "VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — Another human foot was found Wednesday on a British Columbia shoreline, the second this week and the sixth within a year in a bizarre mystery that has confounded police.
Like most of the others, it was a right foot encased in a running shoe, said Sgt. Mike Tresoor of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He said a citizen spotted it on a beach and no other remains were found."

Okay, this just gets weirder all the time. No one knows anything about six missing people? Or six people with missing right feet?

And Another Book Sale

I made it back in time from by camping trip to go to "bag day" of my local library system's book sale, where a bag stuffed full of books costs you $5.00. Coming in on the last day of the sale pretty much guarantees that I missed most of the good books, the recently published books, but "bag day" means I can rationalize picking up books I might ignore if I had to pay more for them.

The trouble is that I have a hard time remembering what's in my own library anymore. There's a good chance that some of these books are already on my shelf. Here's what I brought home anyway:

Tomato Red - Daniel Woodrell
Situations - Jean-Paul Sartre
Rabbit Redux - John Updike
Rabbit at Rest - John Updike
The Road Home - Jim Harrison
Quarantine - Jim Crace
The Plot Against America - Philip Roth
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital - Lorrie Moore
Transmission - Hari Kunzru
Lucky Girls - Nell Freudenberger
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
(1949 Bantam edition, on the back "Brutal...Terrific...Awesome...and Beautiful!")
Them - Joyce Carol Oates
Sometimes a Great Notion - Ken Kesey
The Reivers - William Faulkner
Grendel - John Gardner
Falconer - John Cheever
First Light - Charles Baxter
Rising from the Plains - John McPhee
Waiting for the Barbarians - JM Coetzee
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Sportswriter - Richard Ford
The Western Lands - William S. Burroughs
The Wild Boys - William S. Burroughs
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
Black Water - Joyce Carol Oates
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver
Best American Essays of the Century - Edited by Joyce Carol Oates
A Manual for Writers - Kate Turabian
South of No North - Charles Bukowski

Book Sale Finds

When travelling, I have a natural tedancy to turn my head when I see signs for bookstores. A sign for a "book sale" will often get me to hit the brakes and swerve across lanes of traffic. This is exactly what happened over the weekend when I found myself in Alamosa, Colorado, in the southern part of the state. At $1.00 for hardbacks, and $.50 for paperbacks, here's what I nabbed:

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - Tom Stoppard
Fear and Trembling - Kierkegaard
A Lesson Before Dying - Ernest Gaines
Zombie - Joyce Carol Oates
Childwold - Joyce Carol Oates
Absurdistan - Gary Shteyngart
After Dark - Haruki Murakami

The real find of the day, though, was a rare edition of Anna Kavan's Julia and the Bazooka. Made a whole gas-guzzling, rainy, and wind-blown camping trip worthwhile.