Geezus

So I am wondering around the Internet and what do I behold, but the end times.  As somebody said, I'm going to be really pissed when the end comes not from the rapture, or a giant asteroid, or nuclear holocaust, but a god damn debt ceiling economic crash the final parts of which are ushered in by a second rate bag man for the Wall Street bankers, people we've been warned about for over a century. 

I guess we just didn't listen.  I'm waiting for a little while and then I think I'll drift on over to some of the Obama, Obama, sis boom bah, rah, rah, rah sites, that I offered to apologize to when Obama saved SS and Medicare and Medicaid and ask if they would consider apologizing to me.  Although I have had a short discussion with a guy on Facebook. I know him from law school and the Guild and he asked me "Who would you be able to support other than Obama?"  Obviously, I'm not going to vote for Bachmann or for that matter any of the sociopaths from the other party, but then why should I vote for a sociopath from the party I used to consider myself a member of?  In fact that attitude is just the one the democrats are counting on according to Greenwald today.  I have no doubt.  The other half of that is the blame will go to those who refuse to support the people who are screwing us right now, rather than the people (Al Gore/Florida anyone) who participated in the screwing.  Always blame the victim never the never the victimizers.

So any way what I had started to write about isn't at all what happened in the above two paragraphs.  Because, what I was really interested in writing about (well when I'm trying to forget that my world is falling apart around me through no fault of my own) is books or rather books and book stores.  We went to Columbus this week and I spent the morning in trainging and then we had planned on going a dropping by some friends a couple of places one can only find in a big city and one of the Borders since they are closing.  Went to one that I remembered and it was closed tighter than a drum we later learned it had been closed for a couple of weeks.  So we ended up going to another store and just kind of drifted around.  I hate to admit it, because I think I lose my leftist cred, but I like Barnes and Noble.  Although I do like local book stores and little places like that.

Where I grew up was mostly small towns with no real book stores.  Although one could get interesting paper backs at drug stores back when I was a kid.  Got Taras Bulba in a drug store, another had The 20th Maine.  The library would allow me to check out anything I wanted from the time I was about twelve so I could get their entire stock and since they had many of the major 20th Century American writers I got to read Hemingway, Faulkner, etc. 

Definitely not the cover that attracted me.

One of the more interesting stores that sold books in Van Wert was the Hospital store.  It was located down town and people would bring in what ever and the store would sell it and the proceeds would go to the Hospital.  People would dump off old books there.  I got a copy of Sartor Resartus there.  They  also had a number of paperbacks and back in the 50s and maybe the early 60s the covers of the paper backs were kind of risque, to put it mildly.  The cover did not necessarily accurately reflect what was inside.  Which brings me to how I became acquainted with Graham Greene.  I had heard of him, but wasn't really familiar with him.  I had seen the screen version of The Quiet American on the late show, the one with Audie Murphy.  So my understanding of Mr. Greene's politics was possibly a little off.  At any rate I saw a copy of The End of the Affair in paperback.  One can imagine what the cover looked like.  Boy was I shocked to find out it was the story of an incredibly depressed non-believing Catholic and his love for someone who might have been called a saint.  

The Catholicism didn't bother me and I identified with the depression, so I ended up reading most of his novels and a great deal of his non fiction work and found out that I also identified with his politics.

And that is it for today I guess.