A Strange Thing Happened On The Way to Madison
My electric shaver packed up. It was fully charged when I left Pasadena, but was dead when I came to use it this morning. Perhaps whoever it was who inspected my bags in LAX needed a shave: we shall never know. This means I will have to go commando for the rest of the week.
This morning it was drizzling, but I set off on foot anyway, walking all the way down from the capitol building to the place where the conference is being held. On the way I passed a couple of interesting used bookstores that I resolved to visit later. I bought an umbrella in Walgreens, but it blew inside out as soon as I erected it.
After sitting through some rather tedious talks I had lunch with a colleague, and then decided to beetle off back to the hotel, where I somehow fell to sleep on one of the beds in the room. On awakening my mouth felt like a used coffee filter left to dry in the midday sun and then spritzered with fetid water. So I upped and went off in search of a Starbucks. Finding one nearby, I ordered a double tall orange mocha and sat outside in the sunshine, looking at the Madison folks go by. There were a lot of very nubile blond girls wearing ponytails which bounced up and down as they walked by. A disreputable fellow sat down nearby and asked if I had any money. He seemed pleasant enough but I said no anyway, and so he pulled out a Kool and lit it, inhaling deeply on the menthol vapours. “Tastes like pussy.” he said, in a matter-of-fact sort of way. “Oh, really?” says I. “Yeh … lots of pussy around here.” This information was imparted as if he was a fellow gold prospector evaluating the likelihood of finding a nugget in a local stream. Presently, he left, so I made my way to one of the bookstores I had seen earlier.
It was fantastic, the epitome of what a used bookstore should be like. Small frontage, cavernous inside, with several floors. The little old lady who runs it told me there used to be 250,000 books, but now there were only 150,000. Deep in the bowels of the shop I came across a chap who was leafing through a thick tome. “Do you know anything about criminal justice?”, he asked me. I wish I knew what his follow up question would have been if I’d said yes.
It was near closing time, but the old lady came down and asked us if we wanted longer to look, which was nice. I resolved to come back another day, but picked out a 1966 “AA Members Handbook” from the UK Automobile Association. My Dad used to get these books when he was a member, and they are full of maps and road signs and information on all the towns in the UK. What a find! And it cost me $5 … which is how much a used book should cost, IMHO, not $55 like you have to pay for the crap in the used bookstores we have in Pasadena.
Everyone here is so very pleasant. It’s not the plastic pleasance which is so common in Southern California, but it’s more of a naive pleasance that assumes everyone is as nice as you are.
Tonight I will maybe try an Italian restaurant just outside the hotel. Last night, in the hotel, I did not eat well.
