Wear Clean Draws  (’coz there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

thinking a lot about home lately as we try to figure out where we should live. i realized that i want to be home, someplace a little more settled. i have moved four times this year and i’m tried of not really having my own place. i’m terrified of buying because i don’t want to be tied down until i figure out what i want and whether R will ever, ever get a job. *sigh* so, we’ll rent for now, so i can decide where i want to be. i’d love to stay in the city, but the best i’ll be able to do, I suspect, is a place in a little subdivision about a mile or so away. it’s still got the hustle and bustle, but it’s not the same. I like the tall buildings all around me. I like looking up and seeing the contrails dissipate, watch the moon rise, see the high rises with their lights on, occasionally spying someone working late or seeing lights go on and off as a security guard or cleaner enters and then leaves a room.

i like sitting out on that wonderful veranda, watching people go by. I love looking up, with my hands clasped behind my head, peering up at the penthouse apartment in the condo high rise nearby. the lights are always on b/c it’s their model home, no doubt. the place is probably only a 1/3 occupied. they built too much new housing downtown and people would rather move out, 1, 5, 10, even 20 miles away to get bigger places for the same money. it’s just not a downtown living kind of town. then there’s the real estate bubble bust, so that didn’t help.

I will miss living here, miss walking to work, miss walking to the gym. Oh, with any luck, I can still walk about a mile to work on nice days. Or walk a few blocks and catch the free bus that courses up and down the main downtown arteries to alleviate parking woes and encourage more downtown shopping. I have also become spoiled by being surrounded by such gorgelicious things. I don’t mean things, but craftsmanship. The beautiful wood floors. The care that was taken painting this place. The wood trim — no paint dripped anywhere. the granite counter top shines so and the Kraftmaid cabinets are a wonder. The way the pocket door slides perfectly instead of precariously as one made with cheaper materials would do. The way the tile feels in the bathroom — such excellent quality.

there is a feeling you get when you are really tired and lack of sleep makes your body hot and then you hit that pillow and you just can’t get enough of the coolness against the warmth, the enveloping against the convex, softness against hard, fresh against sour.

that is how home feels.

Of course, I’ll be happy wherever we choose — and isn’t it marvelous to be able to actually choose — for a change? Some days, I can’t believe it: I can make a choice about where I live that isn’t so horribly constrained by so many considerations.

I don’t suppose anyone really understands how I can be such a sap about stuff. But I am.

I stood at the circulation desk, feeling greedy and desirous. I was there to return books and to pick up ones that had been on hold or had come in through interlibrary loan. I always feel so greedy at the library when I have to pick up books on hold. They mosey on over to the shelf and I watch, straining to see the placard with the letter of my last name: how many books are there and which ones are mine? Oh! there are 5.

The librarians there all think R and I are nutty: we get so many books. Well, most of them act that way. They seem irritated that people actually check books from the library. Never encountered anything like it. Tonight, I met one who is happy. This is the first time I’ve encountered librarians who don’t seem happy about people who check out lots of books. When the librarian returns with my books, I want to grab them from her and start looking at the pages to see the cover, the typography, the chapter titles, the back matter. Will there be something different? A snazzy new page layout? Something clever for the typographic design? How did they design the title? Subtitle? Author’s name?

I pore over these things whenever I get a book because, for years of reading and learning on my own, with books, with no teachers giving me lectures, it was me and the author, unmediated in a way. And when I’d read something interesting or the author intrigued me, I’d pore over that book, every last detail of it because, for some reason, it gave me something to go by as to who this person was. Of course, now I know that this hardly tells me anything given how little authors have to do with typography, page layout and cover design. But I still can’t help myself since now it’s about examining the craftsmanship of typography, design, illustration.

I am greedy as I watch her with my books. She won’t turn them over until they’ve been properly checked out. But my hands twitch and I fiddle with things so I won’t just reach over there — and I’ve done this — and start feeling that book — almost always still kind of new because nobody reads at libraries, not these books. I love getting these books no one reads and cracking the cover. I love that feel. I have to fiddle so as not to rudely grab the book before she is done. I need to feel it up. Fondle it. Gaze at it. Wonder. Devouring. Will I fall in love? Will I despise?

I confess my desires to the librarian. She smiles a crinkly smile and winks. I blush. She pushes one over to me so I can cop a feel.

Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the politics of Respectability. I pick it up in my right hand, running my left hand down the cover, smoothing. soothing. I long. I contemplate the way the title design works as my hand moves from top to bottom of the book, exposing the title to me again. E. FRANCIS WHITE. will I fall in love with you? Will you disappoint? will you spurn me? Will I feel indifferent? Uninspired?

I turn the book over for a quick brush and back again to crack the cover for a peek inside. Oh, how long in the preface? Is there a foreward? What will I learn about E. FRANCIS WHITE?

I love reading the preface. For so long, I’d take my stack of books home for a course and sit there, huddled up in my home, reading while Sonshine napped. I’d turn to the preface to read again. Who is this author? How can I discern, from the structure of the preface, who they thank and how they do it, who they are? I always read this part of a book carefully, and several times. I had no teachers — only mentors and tutors — so no physical body with which to associate my lust. The physical book was all I had, the words on the page, the preface where often even the most tight-lipped, tight-assed authors would reveal themselves to me, their loves and losses, the friends and rivals, the supporters and the challengers. As I grew to know more about a field, the preface or acknowledgements would reveal the political territory within which the author positioned herself. Whose ass she kissed, whose she didn’t. When she took risks. When she rode the fence.

I always avoided discussing this at bitch lab and queer dewd. My entry into feminism was through black feminism first. When I ordered these books, it was to put me in touch with a literature I hadn’t read since 1997 or so. I feel so at home with E. FRANCIS WHITE. oH, i know, she’s think I was a crazee bitch — which is why I never discussed this. I knew enough from minoring in African American studies that it wasn’t something to advertise. Not because it was shameful, but because just who did I think I was? Are you here trying to get you some of that culture white people don’t have, hmm? Are you trying to prove something? What do you think you’re doing? Probably going to take jobs from the people who *should* be teaching this stuff.

And of course it was none of those things but still I knew that no one would understand. It would be read as something … wrong. Appropriation? I am not sure, but the message was always there.

And so I never mentioned it much, the kind of abiding love I have for this body of thought. I don’t know what it is I don’t know how to explain it I don’t know if it’s right or wrong or both or more I don’t know how to say it.