Bullets of Defect.

Bullets of Defect.

This afternoon, in the Animal Rights Thrift Store (no, I'm serious), I picked up an old-looking hardback copy of Marcel Proust's Remembrance Of Things Past, Volume I. It was a buck, and Proust is one of those authors that I feel I'm supposed to know. I also liked the pretty cloth-bound cover and the fact that it has the old translation title. Tonight, I looked inside, and the first page peers up at me and sheepishly announces that it is not Volume I. It is, in fact, Volume III. It's not like I wouldn't have bought the cheap book had I known from the get go that it wouldn't get me started from the beginning of the Remembrance Of Things Past/In Search Of Lost Time series, but I still felt a little cheated. Then I thought that it was kind of neat.

THEN, I started thumbing through the pages and quickly found the pages saying "Swan" something or other which is, I'm pretty sure, something from Volume I. I worked backwards towards the start and eventually found that up until page 18, I do have Volume III. Then, page 18 starts up with page 18 of Volume I. Awesome. Stop looking at me, SWAN.

If anyone would like to tell me what happens in the first 18 pages of Volume I, I'll buy you a latte.

Speaking of defects, temperature charting and an indisputable internet message board diagnosis show that I have what they call "luteal phase defect." Hah. Go on, google it. If your luteal phase (the time between ovulation and the start of your next cycle) is less than 10 or 11 days, it's considered defective. Mine is 6-7. A short LP does not provide enough lutenizing hormone or progesterone to create a happy home for implantation of a fertilized egg. Blah blah blah, I can't get pregnant like this. Some sources use the word "impossible." However, this is super common and easily fixable with a range of things from red raspberry leaf tea to super vitamin B6 doses to prescription medications like Clomid. Unfortunately, we had just gotten ourselves used to the idea that we would go to no "great lengths" to grow biological offspring, and now here we have known solutions waiting for us to use. Drugs and medicine, as a general rule, make me feel un-okay. We're not going to draw the X="great lengths" line yet, but at this point, I just can't envision myself taking meds for this. I'm going to try the slightly more holistic approach first to see if my temperature charts display a lengthened luteal phase this month. Hey baby, nice luteum.

The only red raspberry leaf tea they had at Henry's/Wild Oats was called "Pregnancy Tea." I clenched my teeth together and avoided eye contact with the checker as she rang me up, knowing that if she saw the tea and said something like, "oooh, congratulations," I would die a little on the inside.

Today I'm going to meet my old coworkers for lunch for Craig's birthday, and there'll be newer friends there, i.e., hiking and distance running Brian and the Other Tech Writer. I know I dug my own grave and all, but feeling replaced and/or replaceable is one of my spiritual gifts. I'm very good at it.

I promise a defect-free post within 24 hours.

Wail.

Wail.

I've spent the latter half of June and so far, all of July, hunting for a just-right copy of Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. Why? It's hard to say. I think I fell a little head over heels for Amy's description of the Matterhorn Peak subplot during our brief, brief time wedged between campfire smoke and the crisp Yosemite night sky, stars popping out at us while we both secretly nursed the same something, something between awe and disappointment at the hand the Southern Sierras had dealt us for that trip.

But lately I've also been a little bit obsessed with Allen Ginsberg again. I go through phases with the man. The newest phase came from watching the Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan who can't really carry a tune and was completely in Ginsberg's inner circle. I got caught up again watching him talking about Bob, watching this awkward man who looked more like my second or third or first-once-removed cousin Lawrence (the Very English Old Man-looking relative in all of our wedding pictures) than someone who could write "who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism / and subsequently presented themselves on the / granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads / and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy," which totally reminds me to tell you guys about the economy-sized tub of potato salad I found abandoned on our front steps a few weeks ago. Anyway, to me, thinking about Ginsberg equals being obsessed with Ginsberg. And Ginsberg=Kerouac, which equals I will not pay $14.95 at a chain bookstore for The Dharma Bums. As I told my friend Katie the other day as I tried to remember the names of long-lost indie bookstores: "It's not what Jack would have wanted."

Honestly, he probably wouldn't give a shit. But as I'm quickly realizing, it really doesn't take much to punt me into an emotional crisis/quest for authenticity combo. Entering our fifth month of no-babies-yet, it feels like it's getting even easier to default to crisis-mode. Maybe I just need something to cling to; the best minds of my generation destroyed not by madness but by something a little more apathetic and passive. Something voyeuristic and reality TVish and other people doing the living for you ish. I'm struggling to bring new life into a world in which I can't even convince myself I should be bringing new life and the best support I can find are internet message boards with little emoticon smileys with angel wings for all of their dead fetuses and diligent maps of their cervical position to basal body temperature ratios. To say I'm lost isn't really an understatement, it's just the wrong word.

A boy who gave me my copy of On The Road got the big Sal Paradise quote wrong, reminding me in chicken scratch on the second page that "life is precious and every moment holy," when it really should be the life being holy and the moments being precious. I told Erik on the phone that even though he went out of his way to Barnes and Noble before meeting up with all of us for dinner, he really shouldn't buy the book for me there because it's not right. It's not precious.

So with me clinging away, today we began a tour of San Diego's Bookstores/Holders Of The Moments Precious. At 5:30 pm as we craned our necks to catch a glimpse of Wahrenbrock's Book House on Broadway downtown, the apparent "book-lover's dream with multiple storeys," the bespectacled, amusingly 90s-era-Ginsberg/Cousin Lawrence looking clerk turned the sign in the window to "Closed." Precious. Next on the list was the smattering of used book stores in Hillcrest. We hit the darling 5th Avenue Books, Bountiful Books, and even Bluestocking Books & Bindery (le sigh!) across the street. The quest took a more ridiculous turn after we finally found three crisp copies in 5th Avenue and I realized that I couldn't make this work with a brand new $14.95 copy. Jack doesn't need the money. It had to be used.

We turned back towards North Park, looked in Footnote Books on University (no luck, but the clerk was totally playing dice with his friend), and then tried what we thought was Book Tree in Normal Heights. Regardless, they were closed. One more failed inquiry, Upstart Crow Bookstore & Coffeehouse (not as cute as it sounds nestled in the midst of Tourist Hell Seaport Village) and we called it a night.

I don't care if someone wrote intelligent-at-the-time comments and interpretations in the border in purple glitter pen (please please please don't ever thumb through my copy of my Collegiate Favorite, Cynthia Kadohata's In The Heart Of The Valley Of Love. Just don't), or if pages are held together with tape; I will buy the first used copy I get my hands on. By now, I probably would have finished the copy Erik was going to buy me a few days ago. But Barnes & Noble did not deserve my completely fabricated quest, my mocked-up Matterhorn Peak.

If I can't create little nuggets of meaning in my life, then I probably don't belong in the sweet-smelling used-book stores. Grammatically only, that's a tidy little conditional statement. It's comical that the nugget of meaning I created was to place myself amongst those precious bookshelves.

I readily admit that things like this are self-perpetuating cycles, and damn it, I like it. I need it.