Monday, 27 Nov 2006 - Late Morning

I lay across my bed shortways, my back to my computer, my head towards my bookcase. I am waiting for a spot to open up in a game server so I can join. The game is set up to ping the server at short intervals and join as soon as there is an open spot, so I am uninvolved with the process and I am taking this opportunity to step away from the computer. It is Monday, only today and tomorrow stand between me and my return to work. The boredom that afflicted me earlier is now gone and all that is left is the sense of the impending return to normalcy. I stare at the spines of the books on the shelves in front of me.

The books were, at one time, nicely stacked and arranged by author. Two days after spending most of one Saturday arranging them this way I went to put a newly completed book back on the shelf and pick a new book. The weakness of the system was immediately apparent. Since the unread books were now mixed scattershot amongst other books, it was very difficult to visually relate to which books were "next reads" and which were not. I rearranged the shelves stacking "read, want to keep, but unlikely to read again soon" books at the back of the shelves, moving "read, want to keep, likely to read again soon" to another shelf, putting the "to get rid of" books in a stack to take to the Goodwill, and setting up two and a half shelves of "next reads". It is the shelves of "next reads" that I am staring at.

Tired of waiting, I pull down a book and start reading the first few pages, just to give my brain something to do. I pick "Catch Me If You Can", the book by noted con man Frank Abagnale that was turned into a movie a few years ago. The book is one of those "movie edition" novels that I dislike so much. One of those books that features some variant of the movie poster on the cover with the words "Now A Major Motion Picture From..." on the front of them. Not sure why I dislike them, but I do. The only reason I have the "movie edition" is that thrift store book buyers can't be choosy about stuff like that when they find a book they want to read there.

I turn back to check the computer and see that the game server is still full. I turn back to the book and begin reading. As I flip from page 3 to page 4, I notice what appears to be an odd black smudge just under the first paragraph. This is typical of thrift store books, especially in cases of classic literature where you are likely to get a book that some 16 year old had to read for English. Those books have large portions highlighted and whole sentences underlined with pointers to things like, "metaphor introducing first thematic element" scribbled in the margin. This was not a classic of course, but I thought nothing of the black mark until I came upon it in the text. Here is what the mark looked like:

I stare at the mark for a moment, and, with understanding failing to come, read on. At the bottom of the facing page I see this:

Understanding bloomed like a flower in the spring. I feather the pages of the book and see more splotches of White-Out dotting the pages here and there. Someone had gone through and marked out all possible bad words, and, in a few cases, rendered sentences un-understandable. "This", I think, "is why I shouldn't buy movie editions of books from the thrift store."

Suddenly a unbidden series of images fills my mind. An elderly fundamentalist grandmother is told that her sixteen year old granddaughter really wants a copy of that movie "Catch Me If You Can" for Christmas because she has a huge crush on Leonardo DiCaprio. The old fundy granny sees the book at Wal-Mart the next time she goes to buy cat food and thinks, well, sure she said movie, but books are so much better than movies, and they don't show you all that naughty stuff, and besides, the book is cheaper and she has six grandkids to shop for and one great-grandkid that is supposed to arrive just before Christmas that she wants to get something for. So she picks up the book. When she gets home, she skims the book and marks out all the bad words because, really, children should not be exposed to such things. When the girl gets the book on Christmas Eve, she quickly replaces the look of confusion and disappointment on her face with a smile that only her mouth goes along with. The book sits on a shelf unread until, after obsessively watching "Clean Sweep" on TLC, she decides to clean out her closets and do a major purge of her stuff. The book goes into a box labeled "Hannah Home" with some old dolls, her old jeans, and some stuff her ex-boyfriend gave her that's "just, like, too painful to look at, you know."

From time to time my brain does things like this. A small observation will lead to my mind being filled with possible explanations, sometimes stark and spartan, sometimes as detailed as a mountain pass village in a model train set. I wish I knew where it came from and why. Why do I feel the need to take a simple thing like someone censoring a book and run with it, creating a whole family from whole cloth along the way. It could just have easily been any number of other reasons other than an overzealous family member wanting to "protect" their progeny. Am I seeking to make odd or strange things more understandable by giving them a backstory? Or is part of my mind just using this to express itself, to take out all of the things I secretly believe about the way the world works and bring them into the light?

Many atheists say that the reason people believe in any kind of supernatural force is that they are incapable of dealing with the idea of the universe empty and infinite. So, they invent a deity, with associated rules and theologies, to compact the universe down into a more understandable and manageable size. As a person of faith, I have never given much credence to that particular claim, mostly because it strikes me as being more philosophical than rational and therefore somewhat self-contradictory.

But...at those times when my mind veers off on these tangents, I wonder.