Hunker Man (1/26/09 Monday)

It's begun snowing, or maybe it has been and I've just noticed it since putting on my glasses. I'm not a particular fan of snow, but as long as I'm off work I wouldn't mind a good dump of it to make things cosier here, with my books, tea, and coffee. If I don't find I need something from the store, I can get away with not speaking to anyone till the girls come over tomorrow evening. By then it will have been forty-eight hours since I said goodbye to Matt after scootering . But the sky's too bright, and already it's harder to see the snowflakes. Still, I don't have to go anywhere. I'm plowing into a stack of books, semi-systemically alternating betyween them, the Richmond library books getting priority because they're due Friday. I could renew them, but I've set myself a challenge to finish at least those three books before getting back to work. So I'm halfway through Ring of Bright Water, Bunker Man, and These Demented Lands. Bunker Man takes up the venerable Scottish literary tradition of the doppelganger where Jekyll and Hyde left off. These Demented Lands is fascinating as long as I can just go with it--that is, not try to pick up the pieces before they're handed to me; and as long as I can suspend my disbelief that Morvern Callar actually has the inteligence to tell a story with a vocabulary that can fluctuate from four-year-old to poet within a sentence. Thankfully, she's not the only narrator, but her voice is never entirly out of the narrative. No complaints at all about Ring of Bright Water. It serves its place will after those other two: It pulls me from the darkness, if only into the cloudy daylight: Out of the mind of the individual and into the soul of man's place in nature. It has stopped snowing entirely. It left not even a wet dot on the sidewalk.

I like the idea of it being February when I get back to the library. Winter will be nearly half over, and I will have skipped the commute through it for five days. I won't miss the load of books coming back, a load that seems never to lighten since too many people shirk shelving. Of course, it will be the worse this week without me, and when I think of those shirkers I am maliciously glad to have thrown my load off on them, though, of course, it will be the real workers that will pick it up, and for them I feel the real compunction. Nobody minds the shirkers being off "sick" or whatever. But none of this was on my mind when I asked off. We all know who was and why, so the less said there the better, it's the only way to make distance.