Yet another Saturday night, but not an ordinary one, it's the Easter long weekend, so that means a four day weekend which is sometimes a little hard to grasp. I don't know whether there is anything going on tonight, Bruce is up from Melbourne, I don't know whether people are going out or what's actually going on. It seems that my Saturday nights are generally pretty quiet anyway, though Friday seems to be the day of the week where things happen. A bunch of us went to Tilley's for drinks to celebrate Red's birthday. It was actually quite good. I deliberately put on my most bubbly exterior, and that seemed to cheer up the evening since Red was being completely silent all evening.
I was in a bookshop in Civic today and found a "Cigar Appreciaters" Handbook. I bought it and gave it as a present to Paul for the driving he did for us all last year, and as aid to get ahead with his career as a potential politician. ;) I have a tendency to give small presents like that to my friends on occasion. Usually its only because I find a book which is cheap and fits them in some pattern. Like last year when I gave Bridget the "Bold and Beautiful" book. I was thinking again of writing or "assembling" a small book. The reason being that in the future I could claim to have a published book to my name and as a little piece of surviving history of myself to spiral into the future. It is a romantic notion that maybe a long time from now that someone might unpack a dusty bookshelf and in the back would be a slim paperback copy of an obscure little book written by myself for the future. I sometimes wish that there had been someone in the long past who had written a book for just such an event. If you consider that there are journals in the chemistry library which are over 100 years old and they are still quite legible, then these books could easily outlive my own lifetime. I guess the reason for this is trying to send part of my own mind into the future beyond the lifetime of this frail mortal coil.
I would love to think that sometime in the future a child not unlike myself, would find this obscure little book and derive some joy out of it and perhaps somehow learn (?) something about me and make their own life better by it. I suppose I had always hoped to turn up some old letters from the past or a map or something, that someone in the past had left behind so that… I think it's kind of like a genetic thing in a way… if I put the book in a place where only a person like myself would like, then I should select for someone like myself. It could be like a voice speaking back to them from this time. Perhaps I could even leave a trail for them to follow, (something I would have loved to discover) for them to discover more. Like a compute game which has secret levels within levels.
I've thought about the problems of distribution, I though maybe I could just wander into libraries with a copy in my bag, stick one of the loan cards papers in the back and put it on the shelf and then leave. There the book would sit and stay with it's colleagues. Eventually it would be found and used. Like a sleeping beauty waiting to be uncovered. I would probably put it in Junior Fiction (~12-18 years old area) where it would be more likely to be picked up by receptive minds. If a librarian happened to come across it, it would probably just be cataloged and entered, and become part of the library proper. In country towns across the Eastern half of Australia there must be hundreds of little civic libraries. If I ever had a few months to travel around, I could just stop briefly in each little town like Johnny Apple-seed to sow my crop and move onto the next fertile patch.
I guess the good thing is that by leaving at the library I target the audience I want specifically. The people would be book lovers who generally prefer to read and exercise their imaginations rather than beat each other up in the playground. The fiction section and the "youth-market" concentrate on who I want to get across to since the adults are mostly already lost.
I guess the message I would look at getting across are just messages from my own youth which I wish I had received when I needed them. Things like "it's OK to dream", "being different is a bonus not a disadvantage" and "no situation is so bad that there is never light". I know it sounds really, really corny, but if one person reads it and likes it, I'll be happy enough. Yes, yes, I can hear the groans of "not that old quote again", but I guess as long as one person actually reads it then they will "collapse the wave-function" and they will be changed regardless of whether they want to be or not.
I can picture myself touring the east coast of Australia in an old Kombi van with all my possessions in the back with a case of several hundred books. Doing a long tour over six months to a year, maybe there is another way to distribute them, but I guess I just don't want to have to justify what I write to a bunch of librarians.