Sagging Shelves

I am never going to move again. I will live in this house until the bitter end, or until I must be wheeled out to spend my final days picking at my Attends in some elderly care center or other.

There have been many major moves in my life, and at each of those junctions came losses, accidental and planned. The old army bugle that somehow disappeared during the childhood move from Woodstock to West Hurley via a summer in Hopewell Junction was one item that I am fairly sure was deliberately forsaken, as my musical talents did not lie with that instrument, nor horns in general. My parents tossed it, likely, to their great relief.

Later in life is was mostly books and records that accumulated between moves, only to be shed at the next round. I am still waiting for Hat Hut to re-release all those way-cool Steve Lacy records from the 1980's. I only disposed of them in the hope that these could be easily replaced in digital format. I long to hear Stamps again.

Hundreds, no, thousands, of books left behind. Unraptured.

Alain Robbe-Grillet novels like "Topography of a Phantom City." Tolkein in hardcover, from the first time around, when we read him to escape from Kurt Vonnegut.

Now we just don't have the space for every book we want, as the shelves are full enough. But there is one more (there is always one more) that I want to have, then pass along.

Over at AZ Place, Naum has a July 11th review of Dying to Win by University of Chicago Associate Professor Robert Pape. It's an exhaustive study (oooh, I like those!) of terrorist suicide bombings world round. Sounds like a "gotta read." Maybe you would like it when I'm done.

Why do they do that? I want to know. But does President Bush, really? Would he care about what they think? Or is he just too busy seeing to it that the Rove/Plame cover-up proceeds with all haste?

Or maybe he is busy helping Karl with his packing.