On Books, the Proximity to, and the Organizing Thereof:

Three years ago I organized my two Billies' worth of books in the system made sappy by High Fidelity: autobiographically.* The first on the shelf is Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak and the last is The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. How did I get here from there?

I thought that moving the new computer with the highspeed into my room would make me stupider and creepier, a night owl who only eats here and sleeps in a little ball. Instead, now I'm right next to the shelf of the best books I've ever read. And Great Expectations isn't one of them.

This is a long winded way for me to plug a man named Raul Correa who taught me some things about writing in New York City when I was younger and whose first novel, I Don't Know But I've Been Told has been out since 2002. It's about paratroopers in Ft. Bragg who take mescaline and jump out of planes. There's so much more to it but I'll only get it wrong:

Hightower is one cock-strong county boy who plays football for the post team and gets to report to the coach for three months out of every year. He gets sweeter than usual before a jump, and only gets mad when he pulls a box of c-rations with a can of Nut Load for a dessert. When this happens, he stomps the horrible can. In two years I have seen Nut Loafs stomped deep into the jungle floor of Panama, the mud of the Everglades, the red clay of Georgia, the deserts of Mojave and Egypt, and across Ft. Bragg. Like a complicated map of land mines. Hundreds of years from now, smart people in earth science will uncover this trail of Nut Loads under exactly the same amount of ground and will figure them correctly to be part of some kind of ceremony.

Some kind of ceremony. I like that.

Notes:
* High Fidelity: The book, not the movie. I'm one of those people who says the book is better than the film (because usually it is, with exceptions) but this one is bloody obvious. British humour doesn't translate into American irony--when will you mod wannabes learn that? Also it's funny how in the book the one-night stand character is an American in England while in the film she's a black woman in America.