Shipping containers

The weekend was sunny, cold and dull.

There wasn't much to do.

The church kids next door came outside but didn't play. 

They looked at the bikes and toys scattered across the lawn and when back inside.

The apartment was too cold and I couldn't find any motivation to do anything.

Three days like this. 

That weekend I'd written 2 new letters which I was reasonably proud of.

After coffee, I went out and distributed a few of the older letters first in the snooty bookstore near the cinema and then in the secondhand bookstore across the street.

Really it was like shooting fish in a barrel but I wasn't in the mood for tromping around the city.

I talked to an American law student about the Confederacy of Dunces and Cannery Row.

He had these books on the table in front of him along with a yellow legal pad. 

"At the moment I'm into novels that deal primarily with a setting", he explained. 

I told him I hadn't read Confederacy of Dunces but that Canary Row was a favourite from my adolescence.

I told him I'd never really considered how Steinbeck focused on setting but, now that this American kid had mentioned it, this approach made sense.

Especially when you consider that extended and odd description of an empty landscape in the Grapes of Wrath. 

Then we talked about David Foster Wallace. 

How long and tedious he was. 

How just because you could do something, doesn't necessarily mean you should. 

I told him I once tried reading The Pale King and failed.

I got exactly four pages in.  

"I read it cover to cover! Can you believe he wrote an entire book about the IRS?" The law student announced.  

"That'll happen when you're young. You can read great slabs of literature! I read Faulkner when I was your age. The Sound and the Fury. It was going along okay for a while but then it turned into a stream of consciousness mush. Didn't understand a word of it!"

"Cool!"

"Okay," I said. "Could you please read this letter?"

"Okay....sorry....now what is this?'

'It's a letter. A fictional letter. You read it. You either like it or you hate it. Or you are indifferent."

"Okay....and then what?"

"Nothing. No sting. Then you go ahead and leave it somewhere else when you're finished." I said. 

"Right on", he said. 

"Rodger that", I replied. 

"I like this idea".

"Beats watching TV", I said. 

I came downstairs and looked at the new fiction releases. 

These books were all lined up in neat rows. Some of them seemed plump with stylistic possibilities while others less so. 

Then I went across the street to the second-hand bookstore. 

There were people jammed in alcoves drinking earl grey tea and flipping through books. 

There were other individuals who were positioned on miss-matching antique furniture, peering into their laptops and tablets.

They were working on their blogs, manifestos, thesis, crappy novels, autobiographical memoirs, comedy routines, steampunk erotica, rants.....

For the most part, they looked urbane, knowledgeable and well fed. 

I didn't have the energy to do anything other than just loitering around. 

Then I saw someone's nude charcoal drawings pinned to a wall. 

They were okay.

Just nude people laid out like slabs of meat. 

To me, this meant that perhaps the bookstore manager would allow me to leave a few letters around. It seemed like a reasonable enough request. 

A few minutes later I met the owner of the bookstore. 

I asked if I could leave my stuff around.

He seemed okay with the idea. Not overjoyed but okay. Perhaps even a little bemused. 

The woman next to me, perched on the edge of her laptop asked if she could have one.

"Sure," I said. 

"This is something different", she said. 

"Yep! That's the idea", I said. 

I turned back to the bemused bookstore owner. 

"Nothing political, violent or obscene", I said. I don't have an axe to grind with anyone. This is purely a work of fiction. I am just trying to get my work off my hard drive and into reality."

"I understand", smiled the bookstore guy. 

"Thank you very much", I said walking back up the creaking wooden stairs. 

"You're being a little bit condescending to that guy", said my wife.

I was responding to someone who had written a comment about one of my letters on my blog.

He had been complimentary yet he had a few scathing things to say about the quality of my characterisation.

I was getting together some ideas in the form of a defence.

I was keen to explain to this guy, whose name was Paul, that this was a letter and not a conventional short story. Therefore character development was going to be stunted. 

Or maybe 'limited' was the word I was looking for. 

"I don't think I am", I said. 

"You don't have to tell him not to 'get bent out of shape about gender inversion'. I think you're missing the point of what he is actually saying" said my wife condescending. 

I looked at my wife.

Then I looked at the laptop on the coffee table.

An episode of Grand Designs was streaming off the net.

Kevin McCloud was standing in a rain-drenched field in the UK talking in his pithy, somewhat condescending tone about how things have gone wrong on the building site behind him. It wasn't a very interesting episode.

I liked the episodes in which people built gigantic modernist monstrosities.

I liked the wrap-up, where Kevin came back and these people tried to rationalise living in an empty luxury aircraft hanger in the middle of nowhere.

In the episode we were watching, the house in question was being built on the ruins of the cowshed.

It wasn't good.

It occurred to me that on several occasions I had told people how I wanted to build a house out of shipping containers in a rural environment. 

When exactly this supposed to happen, I wasn't sure.

"This is just the way I express myself.....in my own words", I said, referring to my response on the blog.

"I just think it's condescending", said my wife. 

"I think you're playing devil's advocate", I said.

She shrugged and resumed dividing her attention between the laptop on which the Grand Designs episode was playing and her own tablet on which she was typing emails to somebody. 

Or it could've been an eBay purchase.

My wife liked to buy shit off eBay. 

I finished off the response to the guy who had commented both positively and negatively on my letter.

It occurred to me that this guy had an impressive vocabulary.

It also occurred to me that I was enjoying reading A Farewell to Arms.  

The whole iceberg strategy of writing was appealing. 

I wondered if it was true that Hemingway had blown his brains out while dressed in drag?

Was that true?

Anyway, it was good to have someone who had written in.

When I was finished with my response, I hit the 'publish' button. 

Then I spent another hour looking up well known and obscure people on Wikipedia.

Where they had come from.

When they had reached their peak.

When they had died.

Of what.

Who they had left behind.

Their cultural legacy. 

It was all a bit morbid.

Is this what other people do with their phones on a dull Monday night? 

Research the dead?

After this, I went to sleep listening to a podcast. 

And that was the end of the long, dull weekend.