Excuses Excuses

I've been terribly negligent of my blog. The blog that helped me write my way to peace-of-mind after a difficult break-up, the blog that provided me with an outlet for griping and ruminating, stroked my ego through comments from readers (a very important group, as people I've mostly never met go), and has actually allowed me to improve my writing and sense of humor.

So what do I do? I go and run off with another, Facebook. It's an addiction I tell you. Getting out of bed at three in the morning to see if anyone has written on your wall or commented on the Pretenders video you posted is not healthy behavior. It feeds too heavily into the desire to be accepted, and that desperate guy who strove to fit in at high school (actually blowing the majority of his Christmas money on clothes from Chess King--anyone remember that store? Think 80's neo-gangster), is reborn as he strives to collect "friends" from a pool of people who he more-than-likely just sat next to in one class.

Yes, I'm ranting. I knew I was too old for this stuff, but I tried it anyway, and now I've become cyber-space's version of that old creepy guy that sits at the end of the bar at the club and tries to act hip. A cyber lounge-lizard. Lindsay--the song was prophetic I tell you.

Another reason Facebook creates anxiety is that unless you only allow your aunt Gladys to view it, many people can get an idea of the "real" you by checking out your profile. That means if you write something like "I'd rather be listening to Bob Marley and smoking ganja right now" your minister and probation-officer might read it at the same time. Sure it's the same with blogs, but with blogs you might have to wade through paragraphs about how your porch swing is listing to the left before you ever get to the good stuff. Also, people in this day-and-age are more than ready to jump to any conclusion that agrees with their Access Hollywood frame-of-mind, so a brief salutation on Facebook might be regarded as a sign of a torrid affair that's left eight or nine love-children stashed around the country.

Facebook has this feature where you can state what you are doing at that very moment. When you do, all of your friends can get a glimpse at what a cool, smart, interesting life you lead. You rarely read things like "Ian is having a prostate exam," or "Ian just found himself in a compromising position with a Brazilian transvestite"(although admittedly,that would be interesting). Since college students and grads are the primary users, these statements usually read something like this: "Edgar is having dinner at The Trellis and then going to the Bergman film festival," or "Nasuru just based-jumped and is enjoying hummus."

Not to knock it you understand, but I just don't want to get totally immersed because I've never been one for moderation. Many people use Facebook like they drink. Some folks (I stand accused) don't know when to leave the party until they start talking about old times in Modern Art Class with a guy they only actually said two sentences to. Others are very conservative, they ask how the newborn is and give gardening tips. Others bound about checking on everyone's status like a host refilling glasses and picking up used napkins. And all the while you are trying to add more friends to your profile, pump your numbers, be the guy with the most little pictures of people on your laptop. It's like Fantasy Football. It's Fantasy Friendship.

The wall is where I get into the most trouble. The wall is this message board that everyone gets where you can leave messages like "yo, what up dude," (I know that's outdated language but I'm dealing with a generation-gap here). This is where the cyber-lizard kicks in full force. I'll leave messages like, "What up buddy, when we gonna get tgthr and prtay yo." Michael Scott's got nothing on me. I don't know why I try this stuff, it's kind of like gambling, you think you'll win the pot somehow but you end up going back to Iowa having lost the farm.

Yes I know, it's a great networking tool, this is true. Whenever I need the guy who showed up drunk to Political Science class to write a reference letter for me I'll be in luck. I feel like I've been behaving like a freshman since I've signed on. Committing faux-pas, or should they be face-pas, and learning as I go. I'm thinking of trying to go the wine-and-cheese route from now on, networking with connoisseurs, or at least people who know how to spell connoisseur (I don't, spell-check saves the day again). The shout-out isn't me, it wasn't me when I was twenty, so why should it be now?

So back to my blog. The Facebook hangover is almost over. I hope I can make up for lost time. Maybe I should change the blog's name to "Tales from the Doghouse."

He kept getting lost on the way to the airport. She didn’t notice until he turned around, and then he had to admit it.

“I went the wrong way” he said.
“Haven’t you been to this airport before?” she asked.
“Yes, but they’ve changed the roads so much since the last time,” he bluffed. “They’re always fucking around with the entrance. It seems like it changes every time I come.” He regretted swearing, especially that word. She had put up with so much free cursing from spoiled American co-eds, he didn’t want her to associate him with them. She once told him to stop saying shit.

Soon he became sure he had missed the turn into short-term parking and swerved into a Marriot driveway in order to circle around again. When he discovered the road was one-way, straight to the departure terminal, he continued forward. She made no comment about his ineptitude. Instead she gazed at him with the look of a small child hypnotized by something on TV, just standing there in front of it while the rest of the viewers crane their necks around and call for her to move. The stare was so committed and immobile that it unnerved him a little, but he never wished for it to stop. Always self-conscious, he glanced at her and said, “You’re looking at me.” She answered with a quick nod, a single up and down motion of acknowledgement, turned away for a second, and jerked her head back to continue the stare.

A haggard, falsely-jolly ticket agent greeted them at the counter. There was a verbal exchange about how the automated ticket system was going to put the agent out of a job, followed by a transfer to another airline due to the cancellation of her flight. It worried him that she was getting into New York after midnight, having to find her way to Brooklyn at such a late hour, but he scolded himself for being protective. She was an adult, she had flown all the way from Tokyo, and she could handle it. Still…worry.

Filled with the needs of an entire year abroad, her suitcases teetered on tiny wheels, straining his shoulders and accenting his awkward lope. He wrestled them down to the far-end of the terminal where he was able to hand them over to equally harangued baggage-claim-attendants who spouted out travel information with detached impatience. He wouldn’t let his embarrassment for his country-men shine through at this moment, and he was thankful for her limited understanding of nuanced American griping because at least he was able to spare her that side of him.

They sat on a bench in the corner and watched as security personnel prompted passengers to remove their shoes and lap-tops for inspection. Soon her stare was back, and he tried to hold it for a moment this time, but the intensity made him look away and mumble something about calling him when she arrived in New York. She turned her face away from his, and he felt helpless to do or say anything that would relieve the gravity of that moment. He felt he knew what was coming, and he dreaded it. He wished he could reverse time and freeze it there, Tivo it: to the baseball game where she patiently sat with him swallowed up in his coat, the walk around the campus where he would attend graduate school, the library where he often hoped to see her standing there in front of his desk; there to relieve his boredom and insecurity.

She turned to him with an expression of someone who, in the split second between calamity and physical pain, is about to burst out in tears or screams. But she did neither, instead holding her expression as the corners of her eyes became wet. A tear rolled down her cheek. His existence ended then. He couldn’t bear it, and all he could supply to relieve her sadness was a cliché, “C’mon, don’t cry.”

He asked her to get out her camera. They’d taken plenty of photographs together, digital photography supplying what the old photo-booths used to for couples and friends, an immediate viewing of the shot. His bulbous blotchy head, a product of too many bad habits, always seemed a bizarre contrast to her smooth complexion and camera-friendly smile. The camera appeared to mock his poor-self image, accentuating his features and making him look older than his years. He didn’t look this way in the mirror, but something about a camera caused him to stiffen and distort, as he became phobic of the most innocent of snap-shots.

She took a few shots of him, declining when he asked her to delete them. She was smiling now though, and he took the initiative to make himself as ridiculous as possible to elevate her mood, to send her away from that place which plunged them into the act of prematurely missing each other. They took a shot together where he raised his eyebrows and puckered his lips as she stuck out her tongue. It worked beautifully, she was laughing now.

In the next shot he blew out his cheeks and crossed his eyes as she maintained her friendly smile. He couldn’t remember what this reminded him of, this clown juxtaposed next to this beauty. Was it Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft? Did Mel Brooks ever look this ridiculous? Whichever, she was doubled-over now and laughing harder than he’d ever seen her. There were still tears, but now they were from joyous hysteria. “This is better,” he thought.

They set up a shot where they both gave the most serious look they could manage. These too brought peals of laughter, but this time he was joining in, crouched over with her in blissful, ridiculous giggling. Security officers glanced their way, curious at this young woman and her red-faced…father is it? Adopted? Surely they can’t be together.

In the final shot she smiled warmly. He, meanwhile, made the most expressive face he could muster. He threw his head back, closed his eyes, and made a face that reminded him of the photographs of volunteers on their last night before going off to the trenches of WWI, shit-faced on champagne and singing a loud patriotic hymn to blast out the thoughts of the horrors they would soon be facing. She was in uncontrollable hysterics by this time and he began to worry if he hadn’t caused another problem. Which would be worse, a young woman crying tears into the shoulder of his shirt, or a young woman pissing herself before departing on a domestic flight to New York?

He then realized he needed to put change in the parking-meter. On his way back he stopped into the gift store to see if he could find anything worthy as a parting gift for a friend like this. He searched in vain, nothing was suited, so he began walking to the other end of the terminal. She was running toward him.

She told him they were boarding her flight early and she had to go. They hurried back to the security gate and hugged deeply. As they parted he noticed that the tears were back, and her frown cut through the features of her face, returning the dark spot to his heart and forming a twitch in his neck that he was only just able to conceal. He stood with his hand on the hollow aluminum rail, trying to look upright and supportive as she followed the maze to the metal-detectors and X-rays. She was in group of fellow passengers now, all being thoroughly checked for contraband and explosive devices, and as she followed the curt directions of the security officers she looked back at him continually, each time welling-up again. He stood as straight as he could and watched her, and each time she looked back at him he blinked several times.

It took a number of minutes for her to pass through security. She then entered a corridor which would lead her to her gate. She stopped before turning the corner to go and just stood there, looking down, her black hair hanging about her head like a shroud. She looked up at him, crying gently, and he didn’t know how to walk away. He passed a large barrier and saw her a final time, standing at the corner watching him. He let his eyes fall to the floor and started walking.

Sunday Bullets

Sunday Bullets

Here is a quick recap of last week’s events. Things are moving along with lots of choices and things to do, and, meanwhile, spring has sprung!

I found out yesterday that I’ve been accepted to George Mason for the masters in history. This poses an interesting dilemma, but I’m kind of having fun trying to figure it out. I’ve already accepted UNCG’s offer, but George Mason, to me, has the more appealing program. GMU is in Fairfax, Virginia which means renting my house and relocating, but they offer research fellowships at the freakin’ Library of Congress which houses my great-grandfather’s papers. He was Washington architect and a great subject for a research project. On the other hand UNCG is an excellent program with a strong tie to their English department which has an amazing creative-writing degree (I’m thinking hard about another cross-disciplinary scholastic experience) and it’s practically in my back-yard. No moving, I keep my jobs, I keep playing music with the guys, and I continue to nurture new and old friendships alike. Hmmm… a tough one. I’ve given myself a week to think it over.

I broke two necessary household appliances in a matter of two hours. First was the washing machine. I loaded an extremely large comforter (seriously, this thing is too large for a king-sized bed—do they make emperor-sized beds?) into the ancient old Maytag that I inherited when I moved into the house fourteen years ago, and after a while I smelled a burning electrical odor. I had toasted the washing-machine’s motor. I gave it a day to cool down and tried it again, but to no avail. The worst part is it burned out when it was full of water. So now I have a soaking wet giant comforter to deal with and I’ll have to bail out the washing machine. I figure I can wash cloths by hand for a while—the dryer still works—until I can get the washer fixed or afford a new one. I’m trying to fit this into the ecochallenge somehow, using less electricity for the sake of the environment.

The second appliance I destroyed was a borrowed lawn-mower. I had just started it, but I couldn’t figure out how to lower the blade. I turned it off and investigated the under-side and then tried to start it up again. But it wouldn’t start! I tried several times and finally gave the pull cord one enthusiastic yank which caused the cord to break off. No lawn-mowing for me. It distressed me because my friend Ryoko was coming over and I wanted to impress her with a kempt yard. She didn’t seem to mind though. If the lawn mower was mine I would get it fixed, but now I just have to pay to get it fixed and return it to the owner. But I’ll work this into the ecochallenge as well. I’ve always wanted one of those rotary mowers without the motor, and now I have an excuse to buy one. No gas, and no noise pollution.

I read two very powerful graphic novels/comics this week. The first two volumes of the Barefoot Gen series by Keiji Nakazawa. The works are Nakazawa's autobiographical story of the bombing of Hiroshima. His life was spared because he was standing with his back to a concrete wall, but his brother, sister and father were all killed. These books are some of the most disturbing I’ve ever read, even more so because of their form. The Manga-like caricatures of life in Japan during the war do little to prepare the reader for the descriptive images of the atomic bomb’s aftermath. I found supreme irony in the fact that the cartoons borrow heavily from early Disney drawings—especially the eyes. I’ve been thinking long and hard about my county’s choice to use the bomb on Japan and am finding little to nothing to justify it in my mind. All those innocent citizens!

I continue to transcribe letters to the Meetings for Sufferings of the Society of Friends. The letters tell of the plans for removal of African Americans to Haiti and Liberia in the 1820’s. I really enjoy this assignment; it’s giving me a broad concept of the efforts toward colonization by Quakers. I try to withhold judgment from my safe-haven in the 21st century, but the whole colonization movement seems more-and-more like forced exile under the guise of freedom. Much to think about.

The library job is going well so far. Librarians are amazingly committed. They’re also really nice. So different from the kitchen world.

In keeping with the theme of war and atrocity in comic form, I bought both volumes of Maus by Art Spiegelman. It was a gift for myself for getting an offer from GMU. I probably don’t have to describe this one, but most know that this was the 1992 Pulitzer Prize winning story of the Holocaust. Another moving and distressing graphic work which doesn’t give one much confidence in the benevolent nature of man. This story should never be forgotten.

Ryoko turned me on to Edward Said. I’ve been curious about the literary theory of Orientalism; we didn’t get into it in my English courses. She gave me Representations of the Intellectual and signed my name using Chinese characters on the first page. A cherished gift.

Well, I think that’s about it. I just heard thunder, and if we get a storm I want to be out on the porch reading Maus.

Plugs

Two new blogs that show great commitment to life. One is a food blog that has darn-near turned me into a vegetarian. The author is a fellow alumnus of my college.

parsnipsaplenty

The second is from the irrepressible Emily. Get ready to show your commitment. Emily is in charge of the environment now :I

ecochallenge08

Remember, green is the new blue.

Seven Weird Facts about Me

I’ve been putting off the “Seven Weird Facts about Me” meme that Danny tagged me for because I couldn’t quite formulate seven weird things that wouldn’t make me look too weird, only endearingly flawed. It’s taken me two weeks to find this equilibrium.

I just had a twenty-ounce cup of black coffee and a bear-claw, which was way two sweet, so I’m feeling slightly nauseous. I hope it wears off soon because it’s Sunday and I don’t want to spend the-day-before-Monday feeling sickly and unmotivated. I was productive yesterday, cleaning the back-porch, kitchen, living room and fixing the screen-door. My friend Kevin came by last night and we worked on three new cover-songs “Under my Thumb,” Dwight Yoakum’s “I’ll be Gone,” and the unplugged version of “Layla.” It was encouraging to be playing well through the P.A., and the two of us became quite enthusiastic. We’re trying to bring ourselves back up to gig-readiness. But I feel I’m stalling here…

So, without further adieu, are the Seven Weird Facts about Me.

1) I have a phobia about the number 13. I’ve mentioned this in posts before but maybe I can go into some depth here. A couple of years ago I started realizing/imagining that every time I looked at the clock it would be 13 minutes past-the-hour. (seeing the number written in this post is actually starting to freak me out a little.) For a while it seemed that I would only happen to glance at the clock when this was so. The 13 would predict a bad day, and this was at a time when I was having a string of bad, if not self-inflicted, days. So the number still causes anxiety, but for some reason the occurrences of it appearing on the clock have diminished—let’s hope forever. My rational side thinks this is all about my body-clock, which is conditioned to prompt my brain to check the time based on years of scheduled patterns, if that makes any sense. This is what I tell myself when it happens several times a day. I also tell myself that in some cultures the number 13 is extremely lucky. I need to go join those cultures.

2) Numbers divisible by 7 are my heroes. Okay, here’s where it gets really weird. (“You mean it gets weirder?”) If I look at the clock and it is, say, 7:21, I feel relieved and encouraged. If it says 7:14 I feel doubly so because I was born on the 14th. For some reason I really like it to be 28 minutes past-the-hour. And who says I’m no good at math? You just need to bring irrational fear into the picture and I’m a whiz. (Boy am I glad that this meme is seven weird things and not thirteen!)

3) I’m extremely un-photogenic. When someone pulls out a camera I turn into the Wicked Witch of the West—the part where she’s melting! I don’t consider myself a bad looking guy, I’ve seen myself on video and I don’t come off too repulsively, but when someone takes a snapshot of me my teeth are out, my eyes are closed and young children start to scatter. I think it’s because I hate to have my picture taken, and this shows in my expression. It’s a catch twenty-two because the more terrible pictures taken of me the more I hate having my picture taken and the more it shows in the next picture. Or maybe I’m getting paid back somehow for all those family pictures I ruined by making funny-faces. I’m thinking of posting a few of my worse portraits, but I seriously don’t want to remain single the rest of my life. I really need to embrace amateur photography.

4) I’m Zen Buddhist about killing flying insects. Okay, this one might get me labeled as the mayor of Flake-ville but I try not to kill bees, wasps, yellow-jackets etc. that are unfortunate enough to fly indoors. I try to scoop them up with a towel and let them outside. Flies don’t count—any insect that craps every time it lands on you is not participating in my idea of the cycle-of-life. Mosquitoes as well, I like my blood and want to keep it in my body.

5) I don’t own a cell-phone. This is becoming more-and-more of an inconvenience. I was on the phone with a customer-service-representative the other day and she was practically appalled to find out that I had no cell-phone number. I calmed her down and tried to convince her that I was part of the living and not some throw-back ghost or time-traveler lost in the future. She told me she didn’t even have a land-line. I plan to get a cell, but I’m not much of a phone talker and I’m still prejudiced against the ruder aspects of the device. Having a date check her text messages during dinner is enough to keep me away for a little while longer.

6) I used to love watching cricket. I believe it is known as the most boring sport on the planet, but I got hooked while watching one-day-test-matches in South Africa. It’s been so long that I’ve forgotten any rules I grasped at that time, I just remember the Pakistanis being the team to beat. Their bowlers were comparable to the Atlanta Braves pitching staff during the 1995 season (subfact: I’m a slight baseball geek). They don’t show cricket in America, at least in my neck of the woods, but on the tennis courts down from my house I’ve seen East-Indians practicing their bowling recently. I’m anxious to find out if they have a league.

7) I’m not really all that weird. Does this count as a weird fact? I’m often silent, or boring even, but extreme weirdness eludes me. I grew up in a fairly normal home, I was a lazy, slightly dyslexic student, who worked hard later to redeem himself, and I continue to work in fits-and-starts to maintain the life I lead and possibly improve it. I love my family and friends; I get justifiably pissed sometimes but try to keep it in check, and I halfway buy into the American dream. I hate injustice though, and narrow-minded arrogant people get my blood up. For all this, I think I’m pretty normal.

So those are the Seven Weird Facts about Me. Not exactly a concise list, but one I can live with. Weirdness is a good thing in my opinion as long as it doesn’t infringe on other’s rights to be weird in their own way. Think of all the great artists who were and are weird. Without them, life would be boring and, well, pretty Republican. Now no one in their right mind would want that!

No tagging…just do it.

Emily: REM post in the next day or so.

Sunday Bullets

Since consistency appears to have left me temporarily (damn ye Facebook) I will try, I mean really try, to post bullets on Sunday to list developments and such. We'll see how long it lasts.

• I'm accepted at UNCG for the master's in history. I'm debating whether to defer for a year (if they'll let me) because...
• I've been granted funds by Guilford to go to Africa in the next year. Starting grad school and planning a trip to Africa while working full time seems like it might make my head explode say, sometime around early November. Deferment seems practical. The only misgiving I have is that I'm ready to keep moving on this degree-earning-path so I can start making the big bucks;) No seriously, I'm not getting any younger and I feel I need to keep plugging to make up for lost time. But I in no way want to jeopardize this opportunity to return to Africa after 21 years. My proposal is to research and write fund-raising material for our friends' medical mission in the Eastern Cape. An online travel-log is also planned. These things will take a certain amount of preliminary planning and follow-up and juggling them with school and work, for someone who is a hopeless procrastinator, seems a little tough. Wow, that was a really long bullet point.
• I'm two weeks into my job at the public library. I can cautiously say I love it. I'm sent to all nine branches, which relieves tedium and gets me familiar with the county, and I've rediscovered that libraries are well-springs of positive energy. Except one incident with a shredder--pretty bad but it got resolved (never try to put more than four pieces of paper in at a time)--and the fact that telling a date you work at the library has the ability to shut down conversation permanently, I'm enjoying the job. But I'm only two weeks in...so stay tuned.
• Booker's breath has become unbearable, but other than that he's still catching frisbees and tennis balls and can still distinguish a cheese rapper from any other food wrapper that I open. He wants me to walk him more though.
• The archive job is great. I'm transcribing letters regarding the manumission of slaves by Quakers--this is right up my alley, the period and topic of my historical interest. The medium--correspondence of the Friends Meeting for Sufferings--appeals to me because stories, to me, unfold through letters better than any primary source.
• I haven't finished a book in a month or two. I've got three going, The Peculiar Institution, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, and I've just started Walking the Bible by Bruce Feiler. I'm dying to read Animal Vegetable Mineral but four books at the same time might be too much. If I could just curb my curiosity for a while and stick to one topic.
• The Office is back finally. Phew.
• I downloaded the new REM and believe it is their best work since Life's Rich Pageant. I plan to post on it soon.
• That's all I can think of right now. I sincerely hope this will be a regular event, but looking at my track-record of late I'm just happy to be posting something today.
• One last one. Blogspot is such shite that bullets don't come out correctly. I can't figure out how to put spaces between points.

Recurring Dream

I used to have a recurring dream years ago. It wasn’t quite recurring because I believe I only experienced the dream, in a couple of incarnations, two or three times. It is also unknown whether there was a measurable amount of time between the dreams; all I know is that out of all the strange dreams attached to my conscience this one is still with me in vivid recollection.

The dream starts somewhere in the basement of the house I grew up in. It is the normal arrangement I remember as a kid—short green shag carpet, cinderblocks painted white, a record player playing “Mama Told me not to Come” by Three Dog Night. In the back corner is the furnace and water-heater, and beyond that a little wooden door that leads to the crawlspace. There was an actual tombstone that we discovered as children under our house toward the dark shadows of this dirt and plastic cave, and as if in a strange nightmare already, we would take expeditions with nervous childhood friends to view it and ponder why it was there.

The dream guides me to this door, behind it anxiety and adventure, and the sensation is one of running away and escape. Someone, my sister Emily probably, is urging me on, and this prodding leads me to discover a trap-door just above the door to the crawlspace. I push through loose bricks and mortar and crawl up into a tunnel which quickly turns into a rickety flight of stairs. Following the stairs I am presented with a cavernous high-ceiling attic, also like the one in our house growing up except a number of times bigger with large windows on either end that channel in ample light.

The attic is full of crates and boxes, steamer trunks, furniture, standing-floor globes, mirrors, portraits and bookcases. Whoever was with me in the basement is no longer there, and I eventually open one of the trunks to examine its contents. In it are nautical charts, diaries and personal effects of an unknown ancestor. As I rifle through the artifacts I realize that all of the boxes and crates are full of such things—all there for my perusal. As my excitement builds I, annoyingly, wake up.

I’m almost convinced I dreamed this dream as a child and have kept it with me for the three decades since. If this is not the case, and how in the world will I ever know, I’m positive that it was many many years ago since I dreamed it last. I remember having similar dreams in my youth, ones that had to do with bottomless boxes of matchbox-cars or a daily allowance of a hundred bucks, but those dreams rarely connect to my point of view as an adult male going kicking-and-screaming into middle-age. This particular dream endures because it keeps recurring, not as I sleep, but while I’m wide-awake, as the strangest sensation of deja-vu that I know.

I started working at my college’s archives last August. The first order of business on that first day was a tour of the collection. At the end of the tour we ended up in the rare-books room, a locked-down receptacle of leather-bound volumes, minutes from forgotten meetings, portraits of prominent dignitaries and much of the things I feel comfortable around—namely, old stuff.

As we walked up the stairs and into the rare-books room the attic-dream swamped my recall. Here in the organized stacks of a southern collection of historical artifacts was my dream coming true, albeit in not as romantic terms as the reverie from my past. This isn’t the type of collection that contains buckets of musket balls or Great Uncle Wilson’s wooden leg, but the idea of things that people used, wrote, held all kept carefully in one place prompted a consideration of the prophetic nature of the attic-dream. It was a reversal of the sensation of deja-vu which says "I feel this has happened before but don’t know why." Instead, this sensation was saying, "I knew this was going to happen, the dream predicted it, and here it is."

Admittedly, many of the details between the dream and the experience in the rare-books room are divergent at best. The room has no windows. It has a low ceiling and things aren’t strewn around in dusty chaos like they are in the dream. It is a stretch to believe the dream to be a pinpoint prediction of a future moment in time, but rather a prediction of an eventual course in life, a discovery of a trapdoor perhaps.

Last weekend I was visiting my parents and had the chance to carefully examine the contents of my Grandfather’s steamer trunk. The trunk, lead-lined to prevent damage from moisture, is a record of a life from a very young man who fought in the trenches in France, Turkey and Palestine during the First World War through his career in the British Foreign Office and ending with a note to his daughter expressing his wishes that the contents be preserved for the posterity of the family only. His wishes were that the trunk would act as evidence, to tell a story in the way he would have told it had he the chance. There are important documents and certificates of merit, speeches and maps concerning world-events, and I feel I am doing no injustice to his wishes by relating these items only in the broadest of terms.

But below all of the evidence of permission into the halls of foreign-policy is a small notebook not 4” by 3” large. In it, written in pencil in neat sure hand, is his journal of the last year of the war. Everyday is represented, and the entries are short but telling. He had endured France (there is a map showing the stale-mate of the Western Front in all its bloody rigidness) and was now in Turkey. Casualties recorded time-saving brevity, the death of a fellow officer explained with no urgency but perhaps a heavier script, and details such as a tedious Christmas at the officer’s club or long marches with little water somehow reveal the character of this man I was never privileged to know.

While digging into his personal effects the attic-dream was definitely present. The steamer trunk was, as in the dream, full of maps influenced by the military movements of men. But another sensation prevailed over the first, one where my grandfather peered over my shoulder.

My grandfather was, to some acquaintances' recollection, a tempestuous bully at times. I can’t say—I never had the chance to experience this. Since my mother probably knew him best I can be sure, according to her accounts, he often betrayed an impatient nature, dressing down a young officer for returning his daughter home five minutes past her ten o’clock curfew. So as I carefully removed items from the trunk, it wasn’t necessarily as if a kindly old gent leaned forward to experience his grandson’s discoveries from a benevolent ethereal perch, but rather a red-faced product of the Empire leaning over my shoulder and shouting “for God’s sake, be careful you bloody fool!”

So this is why I like digging around in dead people’s things. Old photographs of people I never knew peering back at me lead me into the dangerous but fascinating practice of trying to identify their character. The diaries and letters certainly aid in this, and a trunkfull of personal effects is like having that person over without having to offer them a glass of wine or a snack. Thinking about it now, the attic-dream probably just reinforced my desire, made me realize what I enjoyed. Many people, and I know plenty of students who feel this way, would consider being trapped in an attic with dusty old “stuff” the worst nightmare imaginable. Not me, this is where I thrive.