i went to ikea with my mother the other day. it's like a whole other world over there. all of the furnishings have these weird
(swedish?) porn star names: the pax stordal? sultan hasselback? tindra ljuv? i think little gnomes live in those model spaces they have set up...they hide in the dresser drawers and sneak out at night, all-hopped up on those mini meatballs and fat-free vanilla yogurt (they don't bother with cones, they simply stand beneath the dispenser open-mouthed while one of their friends turns the valve unleashing frozen, swirled crack . then they run through the store chanting, "come on over, the pax stordal is warm!"). i purchased the billy-god save us-a fine book shelf, neutral wood color, relatively simple assembly procedure. unfortunately there were some complications in the execution of said assembly procedure, but, my billy is, nonetheless, functional. i can't feel settled in a place without my books on display:

"I have my books and my poetry to protect me."

-Simon and Garfunkel

i had my books stacked in these haphazard piles all over the living room when i was in L.A. i could never just scan the titles, run my fingers on their spines. it made me anxious (welcome to my ocd lair). i finally got these dark shelves at the salvation army. they were coated in a pollen-like orange dust that got all over my car. but once i got started filling the shelves, it was so satisfying, picking through the piles, reading the back covers, touching the varying textures of all the pages. but i soon realized that many of my books were missing. it's strange. i don't own many movies, but there are definitely films that are very important to me. i am just fine with not owning all of them, although i would not complain if a certain mover and shaker returned MY copy of resivoir dogs and any given sunday. but with books it's different: i feel the need to own the texts that really speak to me. i like to reread my favorite passages when ever i want. look at their covers and think about the different places i curled up to read them. i'm afraid that if i don't have them i will forget, or the click they caused in my brain that left me different will be lost. sometimes it feels like there's a possibility that the prose will evaporate if i don't have a concrete version of it in my possession. can you imagine if you had read lolita and then woke up one day and it was as if the entire book had never existed? the probability of a human being producing words that beautiful is infintesimal. the sentences happen in a given moment. the proper sequence of nuerons fire and BAM! it's like mathematics in a way. when you finally solve the word equation. i like to think about everything that brought nabokov to the moment when he was capable of writing:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palette to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

i imagine that he had to sleep afterward, spent. i imagine he was exhausted before he even wrote the words, because he had to write through all of the bullshit and throw it away until he could get to this. i wonder if he knew something amazing had just happened.

there's not really anything that floors me as much as words (ok, other than certain people), so i like to have my books.