Jonathan goldstein
‘There are details in life that seem as though they’re teasing you with the fictiveness of the world.’
Sunday. 9:30 a.m. Being an adult is hard. This is the only excuse I have for forgetting to renew my driver’s licence. For the past two years. And now I must retake the driver’s test, an exam I last had to deal with when I was 17. The whole thing smacks of one of those anxiety dreams where you’re back in high school and unprepared to matriculate.
I can’t find the driver’s handbook at any of the city’s bookstores and since I’ve retained very little of the book since I last read it almost 30 years ago, I head to the library to cram. 11:30 a.m. Even with a particular book in mind, when you enter a library the desire to browse is irresistible. I’ve discovered many authors I was unfamiliar with just because they were shelved beside authors I’d come in search of. I discovered Knut Hamsun on my way to the Jack Kerouac shelf and discovered Sherwood Anderson on my way to Saul Bellow. I’ve found books left on library tables that have drawn me into whole new worlds, books that, in retrospect, seemed as though they were left out just for me. It was after finding an unshelved Krazy Kat book that I developed a lifelong interest in old comics.
These are chance encounters that require the chaos of the real world. Chaos does not exist in the same way in the online world where our interests and desires travel in straighter lines and our tastes are reinforced.
These are my thoughts as I peruse a book about Victorian-era robots that I found on a shelf adjacent to the driver’s handbooks. 11:45 a.m. As I read, my mind drifts.
What would it be like to be a character in a book? Would I even know I’m in one? Maybe I’m in one now. If so, I don’t think I’m entirely fleshed out. 11:50 a.m. There are details in life that seem as though they’re teasing you with the fictiveness of the world. For instance, I once worked with a radio technician named Al Mix. “Mix” as in “mixing board.” You can almost see the hand of a cheesy author in such too-neatly-drawn moments. (Al was a large man like the kind you’d see in Coen brothers’ movies, lumbering about in white leisure suits and drinking mint juleps. Odd, too, that after a lifetime spent recording musicians, Al said there was only one song that he ever truly liked. I wish I could remember what it was.) 12:10 p.m. If the hand of some almighty author can be divined, what theme does having to retake my driver’s licence test illustrate? Does forgetfulness and incompetence count as a theme?
Given the choice, I would prefer to be a character in a book who drives, and so I shut the biography of Gertrude Stein I’m reading and begin studying how to make a left at an intersection. I assume the characters in a driver’s handbook know how to drive and so I try to get into it.