Remaindereds of the Day

A confluence of recent events will explain something more (than you asked) about my particular take on life.

My reading habits, budget, and space constraints make it incumbent upon me to sell my books and sometimes my music on half.com.

I don’t, as often, buy there (for reasons noted above, and then some). But when I do, I am notoriously cheap about it.

Besides which, I love nosing around in other people’s underlines (underlines, I said) and so I don’t mind buying in the Acceptable range.

Of a recent day, however, I had recourse to look for my own book among the Like News.

See, what had happened was, I finally hightailed it down to Fairfax County Circuit Court last week to be qualified as the executrix of my brother’s estate. Since I am an out of state resident—yes, living over the river in Washington, D.C., I am—I had to post a pretty big bond.

Rhymes with abscond.

And the guy who did the paperwork for that, a charming person named Greg Grimes, asked me for a signed copy of the book.

He’s kidding, I thought.

Then I got his bill a few days later, and there was a post-it attached reiterating the request.

He likes me! My bail bondsman likes me!

Well, I don’t have to tell you, dear reader, that when a man who holds a bond on you and knows where you live asks for a signed copy of your minor novel twice, you hop to.

Am I right?

So I looked high and low in our trashed, contractor-dusted house for the cache of shrinkwrapped Borrowed Lights I have been keeping for just such an occasion, and damned if I hadn’t already given them away.

I don’t remember being in court that often since 2002, but there you go.

So. I went to half.com. There I was able to purchase the book “Like New” for only half its original price. The comment from the seller was worth the price alone: “Read only once.”

On further digging, I found plenty of other copies available used on half.com and at Amazon (if you have to ask for the URL, it isn't Amazon). To a book, they are copies pulled from library shelves—a reverse peristalsis of the gleeful speculative consumption that took place in 2002, which I noted feverishly in many midnight hauntings just like this one. It’s still available new from Amazon, though it’s "on backorder" at my beloved Powell’s.

Barnes and Noble, my stalwart friend among the big retailers, still carries it, and as a bonus, they have an online excerpt I actually like. But I know it's only a matter of time.

I couldn’t help recalling the previous week, when I sold a gently worn copy of the wonderful Carolyn See’s wonderful Making a Literary Life. As always, I leafed through before shipping it, and something in the last chapter caught my eye.

The book’s gone to its new reader now, so I’ll surely mangle the quote, but it was something to this effect: that all of it, every last thing we do, the love affairs and books and busy activities, are just so many distractions and ways of passing the time until you die.

Yep, that’s Carolyn See. Bracing, funny, and brutally honest.

And that’s me, too, a lot of days—not always, of course, and haven’t always been. I keep it in check, at least out loud, at least in front of my daughter, about 90 percent of the time.

I hope.

If you want to read See for yourself, that vinegar-tonic voice, click here.

[interview with Carolyn See via the exquisite zinkville]