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.