The Goldfish Pile

I went to Buffalo, and from there to Lockport, the ancestral manse, to look at my bookshelves. And after about thirty-six hours, I put a bunch of the books from my bookshelf into a bag and got on a bus and just before seven this morning, put the books in a pile on my bed. I don't know when I will read any of these books; none of them are books that I, say, had urgent needs to get my hands on. Now I am sitting on my bed, and the books that I got off my giant wall-sized bookshelf have been moved to the floor. Although the bag in which I moved them across New York state (and probably part of New Jersey, and Pennsylvania; I fell asleep after Syracuse) also had some clothes and some other books (ones I had read/read from on the way to Lockport), the new recruits to my little room in Brooklyn are now sitting by themselves, in a pile next to the cardboard box that I use for a desk. I felt like it was necessary to do, like how when you buy a goldfish you put it in the fishtank still in its plastic bag for a while.

When I got home, finally, from my overnight trip, and before I had even got the books out of my baggage and into their new goldfish pile I thought about whether or not to go to sleep, and listened to a podcast of Baseball Today from last Thursday, and eventually decided to sleep, from maybe nine to noon. While I was asleep, I had a dream that, while I was on a lunch break from my current job at a Barnes and Noble, only it was the dream version of the Barnes and Noble where I work (it has appeared on previous dreams; it is somehow still at Lincoln Center, but also in a wooded environment). I was running late, in the dream, to get back to work, so I recruited some of my friends, all of whom were about fourteen, to pick up my Honda CR-V and carry it over the turnstile into the subway. "Too late to drive!" dream-me must have thought. "C'mon, my young friends, let us get our Honda onto the uptown 2!" This resulted in trouble of a nondescript variety; when I woke up, the thing that I thought of was that what I was remembering -- the manifest dream content, as I quickly realized -- was in fact the plot of an episode of the Wire. I cannot for the life of me account for why that is what I thought of first, but it is. I thought about that for a few minutes, and thought that 1) although I have seen every episode of the Wire, I was not familiar with the events of the dream; 2) none of the episodes of the Wire take place in New York and most saliently, 3) I was prominently involved in the dream content, and I was not featured even a little in any of the episodes of the Wire.

I can remember literally nothing about what I thought or did for the three hours in between when I deduced that the episode of "Putting Jeff Schratz's Honda CR-V on the 2 Train to Get to a Sylvan Version of Barnes and Noble Store 2628" was not an episode of the Wire and when I actual got to the non-bucolic BNS2628 at around three. I must have showered and ironed my clothes and taken the subway, and I must have put the books that are new to my room in their current new goldfish pile next to my cardboard desk. That makes the books of my room into three segregated groups: on the maimed Target bookshelf, decapitated in the U-Haul when we moved here, are the books I haven't read but that have been here since I moved to New York. In two piles by the wall next to my fan are are all of the books that I have read at some point during my New York life. I keep imagining that they will get lent to people, but no one comes by to see them. And then there is the goldfish pile.

Not only is the bucolic version of the uberurban place where I work bucolic, it also appears to be in a cross between the Hundred Acre Wood and Lockport, New York, where my ancestral manse and my wonderful wall-sized bookshelf are. And not only was the Honda CR-V that my young wards and I were muscling onto the 2 a Honda, but it appears to have been the very same maroon 2005 CR-V that my father drives in the winter and my brother the Duck in the summer, and of which, one year on the night before Christmas Eve, I flattened the tire driving home at two in the morning. All but one of the lug nuts came off easily enough, but one of them needed a special Honda lug nut device which was, though I did not know it, in the glove compartment. When I prevailed upon my poor father to come to my aid, he did not know it either, so he came and we kicked at the tire in the snow in the parking lot of a donut store for ten minutes before we went home, wet and tired and befuddled.

I haven't decided yet whether to know for very long that the books in the goldfish pile have unique status, or that they are in some way brothers. I can't decide whether it is inane or thoughtful to keep in mind their biobibiliographies, to associate Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth just as much with Kafka's the Castle, which is now on top of it, as with Goodbye Columbus and American Pastoral. More than likely, it will not be up to me to decide to know; I will just know it, and every time I think about either of them or Four Plays by Henrik Ibsen or the Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks or the Checklist Manifesto, I will think too about the assimilatory quality of plastic bags, about shoving one favorite means for getting about your home into another with the help of young faceless dream-strangers, about being two places at once.