must stop buying books

some women can't own enough shoes. they are experts in footwear: "oh wouldn't this t-shirt look just great with a pair of lizard mules?" i'm still not sure what a mule is. these women know their shoes and can basically write a dissertation on the sociological impact of fuck-me pumps. not that there's anything wrong with that.

for others it's handbags. this, i never understood. all i need is a place to put my stuff. something i can easily carry, something practical. it should have various pockets, yes, for pens, eye drops, blistex, etc. but it need not be leather and it certainly need not have a brand name attached. and i could not care less about whether it matches my shoes, which mainly consist of flip flops in summer and ugg boots in winter. is there a bag that corresponds with either? backpacks suit me just fine, unfashionable as they may be.

for me, my compulsion buy is books. i can't seem to stop. there is a small bookstore across the street from my apartment where i spend inappropriate amounts of time. it doesn't hurt that the store clerks watched my dog, oscar, grow up and that he is greeted like a king each time we stop in. they have a "cookie jar," full of dog biscuits behind the counter and he inevitably makes a bee-line for the back right hand corner of the store, right where the jar is kept, where he will promptly sit and wait for his treat. while the store clerks fawn over my dog, i browse...no, browse may not be a strong enough word...what i do is more intense. i scour, i rummage, i smell and examine. i make lists of all the books that i might not buy on this trip but will certainly have to pick up at some later point. i almost never leave the store without at least two books.

i do indeed read these books. this is not merely an exercise in gratuitous spending. but, as one might imagine, there's a bit of an overage of books and as fast as i may read, i've always got stacks of titles on my "to read" list.

today, i was compelled to pick up three titles, all non-fiction: "Legends of the Chelsea Hotel" (who doesn't want to read about the ghosts of the place where sid killed nancy...or maybe she just died of an overdose); "Deluxe: How Luxury Lost It's Luster" (i don't know, it just sounded interesting); and "I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays by Sloane Crosley" (I mean come on the title alone is worth the cover price). Here is why i bought this particular title. the opening of her first essay, called The Pony Problem:

"As most New Yorkers have done, I have given serious and generous thought to the state of my apartment should I get killed during the day. Say someone pushes me onto the subway tracks. Or I get accidentally blown up. Or a woman with a headset and a baby carriage wheels over my big toe, backing me into some scaffolding, which shakes loose a lead pipe, which lands on my skull. What then? After the ambulance, the hospital, the funeral, the trays of cheese cubes on foil toothpicks...

Back in my apartment I never should have left, the bed has gone unmade and the dishes unwashed. The day I get shot in a boedga (buying cigarettes, natrually) will in all likelihood be the day before laundry Sunday and the day after I decided to clean out my closet, got bored halfway through, and opted to watch sitcoms in my prom dress instead."

had to buy it and might even bump it up in the queue of books waiting to be read.