Connections

It's always good to have friends in nearly every sphere of human existence, but sometimes those connections atrophy, leaving you with no access to, say, free day-old donuts, or the inside scoop on the next cool things going down in town (like, another bike-in movie theater in PDX, location and dates open TBA).

It hasn't been since I worked in the book mines back in the late '90's / early 2000's that I had a decent (and reasonably-priced) book connection, and while school has given me more than enough to do with regards to textual interfacing, I missed the joy that comes with acquiring new, inexpensive leisure-time books. (I have yet to find any joy in the academic past time of acquiring old, extremely-expensive and difficult-to-get-through books.)

Fortunately, one of my old roommates has scored a job at a warehouse sorting books for an amazon.com bookseller. (One of the independent sellers that uses the amazon.com interface to hock their wares.) This has been a two-fold boon for my friends and I: he has a paying job to keep a roof over his head, and we all get to rummage through his "Free Books" box every time they have a party.

I managed to walk out of a party with Libra by Don DeLillo, a cool '60's edition of The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells, and the Autumn 1972 issue of a really crazy academic journal called Horizon, which includes essays on "How Man Invented Cities," Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'avventura," and the life of Machiavelli.

Which worked out great for me; normally I leave a party feeling like I've lost something.

(P.S. If anyone's parents were academics and had a subscription to Horizon - or just happened to collect them in the '60's and '70's - I would very much be interested in working out a trade for back issues. Please and thank you.)