first breath.

Today I finally went back to the library. I have been renewing these three books for about three months now. Kafka on the Shore, The Great Railway Bazaar, and the Electric Kool-aid Acid Test. I still have images from the Railway Bazaar floating around my head. Beautiful and dismal feelings of India, which I remembered today while watching Anthony Bourdain traipse around Mumbai and Kolkuta on No Reservations. Kafka on the Shore was horrifying and fascinating, and life-sucking. I read that book for four hours straight on the Fung Wah bus ride to New York City to visit Amy on Veteran's Day weekend. And Acid Test was pretty good for a start, but I was too recently exposed to balls-to-the-wall drug culture in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to really intrigue me that much. Maybe I'll come back to it when I feel a vicarious destructive phase coming on.

So, for the first time in a long while, I left work at a strategic time in order to catch the 90 bus from Sullivan Station in order to get to the Somerville library on Highland. I had to walk briskly along Exchange Street in Malden Center from Wiley-Blackwell's nondescript polygonal office building toward the Orange Line T station there, across the shiny, pockmarked sluices of ice and snow that stifled the sidewalk. I was about two minutes later than I had calculated to be the ideal time to leave the building and arrive at Sullivan approximately 17 minutes later, factoring 8 minute walk/1-2 minute waiting time/8 minute T-ride, just in time for a bus to roar into the busway and scoop me out of this frigid, leaky cave under a 93 north expressway overpass. Believe me, you don't won't to stand in that rattling, deafening, fume-filled pit any longer than is absolutely necessary.

But once you are on that bus, after waiting tensely, bundled, standing uncomfortably for an indeterminate and often extended amount of time on a desolate sidewalk, it is peaceful. Peaceful because all the chaos is happening outside the window, and you are not a part of it. Unlike the T, you can watch the world while you ride. Unlike the T, you can sit during rush hour. Unlike the T, people don't wear designer clothes and high heels. They carry shopping bags and lunch containers and pull toddlers behind them. The people on the bus live in the real world. And they aren't robots reading newspapers and listening to iPods and watching episodes of Heroes on their portable devices.

I feel like I'm actually travelling, actually going somewhere when I'm on the bus. It's not a time-space warp like the underground transporter that is the T. On the T you disappear under the ground in designated burrows, and you magically come back up to Earth when you arrive at your destination, without knowing anything about the space between.

On the 90, we left Sullivan Station, passed underneath thundering 93-north, took a right onto Broadway, passed all the Portuguese check-cashing stores, Tony's subs and deli superette, Khoury's State Spa, and took a left onto Cross Street, a narrow throughway where the bus barely scrapes by passing vehicles squeezed into lanes lined with parked cars. Then we merge onto O'Brien Hwy/28N for 300 yards, while crossing through three lanes of oncoming road ragers screaming out of the city so we can merge left onto Medford St. and immediately after Highland Ave. Just after we're safely on peaceful, tree-filled Highland, I press the yellow tape and ring the bell for my stop at Walnut Street. I dash across the icy sidestreet and skid up the sloping cement walkway leading to the monolithic Somerville Central Public Library, which seems to tower over all of the North Shore because the landscape behind it just drops off to a land of endless triple decker houses with green bushy hills on the horizon.

I love this library precisely because it is so imposing. In a library I want to feel small and unimportant. I want the library to be saying to me, I'm older, bigger, and infinitely more knowledgeable than you. I want to go inside and feel all the tons of possibilities of knowledge physically pressing down upon me. I want all the ideas and interests that aimlessly swirl around my brain all day long to suddenly coalesce and crystallize and shine like new coins and hover right in front of my nose and beg me to pluck them down from there to be clasped into my eager, young, naïve hands. I don't mind the knowledge crystals bombarding me all at once, pointy ends and all. I only mind that they will all suddenly be rendered lifeless and stop and drop to the ground like ripe, heavy apples as soon as I leave that place. So I like to stay there as long as I can.

Today I went in only to return these books, because they were one week late, and I had reached my 3-renewal limit. I had already decided I wouldn't do this anymore to library books. Take them out and then sit on them and renew them over and over. I will take a break from abusing library books and read the ones I bought at the Strand in New York. Or maybe even the New Yorker which I have been reading barely a page and a half of at breakfast every week. But no more library books. Now I just had to divert myself for a few minutes (after stocking up on the bus schedules they display in racks on the lobby's brick wall, and estimating what time the next 88 would come) before I braced myself for the windy bus-stop back on the curb. I wandered into the multimedia room that was next to the bus schedule rack. And as I scanned the ramshackle shelves of ripped, cracked CD cases, I decided I would sit down and write a list of these albums I would like to listen to sometime, but thought it would just be easier to download than borrow and have to return (eternally and hopelessly late) to the library. I think I was probably wrong about that, now. You can't get good, classic music on Soulseek, and I'm sick of "cutting-edge" "fresh" Pitchfork indie bands. It's the stuff that everyone has known has been good for decades that I want to hear now.

Anyway, that list. There's no way I'll be able to recall the ones that I had wanted to put on the list as I glanced on them in the media room. Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. Tom Waits. Robert Plant. Lee Hazelwood. Nick Cave. John Coltrane: with Johnny Hartman. My Favorite Things (My One and Only Love). Dear Old Stockholm (After the Rain). Joshua Tree.

That list turned into the list music that was swirling around in my head from Sacramento driving with Lee and late night allmusic.com haunts and overhead cube-neighbor conversations. In conclusion, maybe this blog can become another sort of library crystallization method. I shall return to make more lists.

Love, K.