Monday, December 18, 2000

 

9:44 a.m. I can only think about climbing into bed and nursing an impending cold -- it's not even 10 p.m. -- and I'm heavy-headed and chilled and I feel like my hair is crawling all over my scalp. Must be bugs.

So, I'll just have some fun here. I'm posting a photo I found on the web a long time ago. In the same way the guys lust after the semi-nekkid ladies in the center of magazines, I lust after these drawers. They are all for sale, but they are in Canada.

This looks like a perfect wall arrangement to me. Needless to say, I loved the card catalogs in libraries for their woodenness, their alphabeticalness, their orderliness. In a dream room such as this, every drawer would slide on slick gliders and every label would be written in an almost calligraphic hand.

Most of all, you'd have enough to fill the drawers: buttons, ribbons, flat sheets of hand-made paper, rubberstamps, inks, you name it. The tools of your trade, lovingly collected and organized. Dreamy.

As Bush chooses his cabinet, I choose mine ... these.

And here, since I'm not breaking any new literary ground tonight, here is a joke. A Buddhist priest says to the hot-dog vendor: "Can you make me one with everything?"

I love that one. If it's familiar, it's because it was the only guffaw in the rather awful Bicentennial Man, starring Robin Williams, which I watched the other night because I'll watch just about any movie set in the white-washed "future."

As for my future, I'm continuing to build it from whole cloth. My book-store research has taken a strange, if predictable turn, and I am now looking at Macintosh servers and the software you run them with. It seems as if one lower-cost way to go is to do it all yourself, from home, with your own machines serving up the page of the day.

Or not. It's getting complicated. I'm going to go to bed now. If I wake up at 2-ish and can't sleep, I'll come back and finish this entry off in a more polished way, but for now ... ciao.