manchester, tennessee, has approximately one bookstore that sells used books.

now it's james's bookstore. back then, it was winton's. same place, different name.

then, as now, out front were two shopping carts full of books. a quarter each. they may have gone up, i haven't stopped lately. i spent hours in the early 90s rooting through these shopping carts while my mom talked to the shopkeeper.

mixed in with the harlequin romances and the louis lamour westerns, now and then i'd come across a gem. most of those gems were written by a certain kurt vonnegut, jr. i used to come up with fanciful reasons -- a single reader who loved both westerns and satire? a spouse who slipped a few into the discard pile for the public welfare? an odd conglomerate of folks all over town?

it doesn't really matter. in an era when i socialized with books more than i did with humans, they helped warp my mind into its current configuration.

it's been a while, but i miss him anyway. r.i.p.

eep. while doing a search to see if i couldn't track down a copy of my old plan file (this would be what spat out when somebody looked you up on the VAX, that lovable relic that we used for e-mail and "IM"ing [before AIM took off!] and such... think of it as the precursor of the modern user profile), i ran across my really old, pre-livejournal and myspace blog.

it's a heckuva lot more entertaining than anything i've written lately.

maybe it's time to start posting publicly again, see if i can't shiny things up a bit around here.