New Life

I didn't tell you about Powell's Bookstore in Portland. In fact, I don't think it should be called a bookstore. It's not. It's like this monstrous mansion that holds knowledge and poetry and laughs and tears. It is floors and floors and split levels of shelves filled with words on pages. It requires a map, it's so big. And I thought I should just "browse." Which - yanno. Wander around, touching this one and that one, occasionally pulling one off the shelf because the title sounds interesting. But I was going to get swallowed whole if I did that. I tried to for awhile, but I was just so overwhelmed. I wandered the fiction aisles for a little while, realizing the lunacy that would be trying to take it all in, and found myself going to the fifth floor, where they keep the crazy books. You know the kind I'm talking about. The ones where you diagnose yourself as schizophrenic or OCD or something. My chair at Barnes and Noble is in this area. I call it home base.

I devoured the addictions section, soaked up the psychiatry section and kept wandering. And that's when I found it. IT. The medical section. In which there were at least five mile-long shelves of books about The Black Plague. THE PLAGUE. BOOKS. Books I'd never heard of! Books I'd never seen! Books I had yet to touch! I pulled every single one off the shelf. I just had to! I did. The Plague, Internet! And that's where Melissa Lion found me. Crouching in The Plague section, holding books, trying to figure out which one(s) I just had to have. And that's when she snapped the picture that I will keep for posterity just to prove to myself that there are other people out there in The Universe that think The Plague is just as oozy and disgustingly interesting as I do.

Now, I am on a two book limit at Barnes and Noble. I hardly ever go there because it's just too hard. But when I do go, I end up with an armful of books and then head back to home base to sort through them because I can only purchase two. That's the rules. But I figured since Powell's is like a hundred times bigger than my Barnes and Noble that meant 2 times 100, which is 200. And that's too many. So, I settled for a three book limit. That seemed reasonable at the time, but having to put so many Plague books back? Broke my heart just a little bit.