Strangely Socialised

I took a nap this afternoon for a couple of hours, and woke up some time between 4 and 4:30 from a dream in which my dad was calling for me, and needed me to come do something. It was so vague I didn’t know what, but it was unsettling. So I decided I’d call him, after dinner so I could be sure he’d be up. There was no answer, but seeing as it’s Saturday night and all, I told myself he and my stepmother had just gone out.

At 11 p.m. the phone rang, and around my place if the phone rings that late, even on Saturday, it’s almost never a good thing. The first words out of my stepmother’s mouth were not to worry, that my dad was okay, “but…” He’d had another seizure, this afternoon, some time between 4 and 4:30.

Now, he is okay, and he’ll be back home tomorrow. But still. Feeling really weird right now.

[A novel by Stephen Walker]

This is possibly one of the most bizarre and confounding, yet enjoyable, books I’ve ever read. And I say that having a great number of books, and in genres that pretty much require the presence of situations and characters of a bizarre nature. This one really does take them all.

Everyone wants to see Danny Yates dead. Some of them for no particular reason, some of them in purely accidental ways, some of them because they’d like to see the entire human race conquered. But Danny Yates is a resiliant bloke and somehow manages to endure odd incident after odd incident and come out relatively unscathed.

At times the book doesn’t even seem particuarly linear, jumping from character to character and situation to situation without transition, without explanation. Things happen out of nowhere and there’s no way to anticipate them. In another book, this would be just one big giant mess. In this one, it works. It’s the very nature of the story that everyone is bizarre, everyone has their own quirks, and it doesn’t really matter all that much why.

It’s a brisk read and certainly doesn’t really require a lot of rapt attention, though if you’re trying to make sense of it all, you might give it more study than it really deserves. It’s just a lot of fun, and definitely a conversation pieces. And that’s even before you get to pages thirty-five to thirty-eight, which consist of nothing but the words “Sea horsie” over and over again.

Don’t worry, it’ll make sense when you read it. Or not.

Found in the FAQs of the Library of Congress web site, whilst doing research on copyright:

9. How do I protect my sighting of Elvis?
Copyright law does not protect sightings. However, copyright law will protect your photo (or other depiction) of your sighting of Elvis. Just send it to us with a Form VA application and the $30 filing fee. No one can lawfully use your photo of your sighting, although someone else may file his own photo of his sighting. Copyright law protects the original photograph, not the subject of the photograph.

And, as I understand it, this brief quote with accompanying commentary — clearing illustrating that I find the exerpt amusing — qualifies under fair use. Heh.

So I nipped out at lunchtime to pick up a copy of the AP style guide. Which, of course, I couldn’t find at any of the bookstores in the downtown area. There was a single copy at the library, so I sucked it up and paid off my $78 of outstanding library fines to be able to take it out. There was a reason I was looking to buy the book; would have been so much cheaper.

This excursion also forced me to surrended my old library card, making it a very sad day. The card was odd to begin with because, for no good reason, it was issued to me entirely in French. And then, about five years ago, I cracked the end off of it breaking into an office. My office, but still, breaking in, so the broken card was — alternately — a badge of shame and a badge of honour. It turned out to still be serviceable, as the bar code hadn’t been cut off, so I continued using it up until now, when they finally insisted on replacing it with a new card. Oh, the memories.