152.42

Walking down the Russian Literature section makes me feel like a sinner, insensitive. Dostoyevsky and the other jawbreakers, you know, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Turgenev, Dumbledore, every one of them. Keeping their sadness, in their beards. Epic, masculine sellers of a people's despair, overflowing onto bland, black, suits. The weight of generations, raised on vodka and potatoes and cold statues. Just flipping the pages, I can coughs of tuberculosis and pneumonia, the click of malnourished bones. Sure, we're generalizing here but every volume comes off the shelf like a tombstone, but also like an anvil, because the grief is that heavy, and also because the central party ran out of tombstones years ago. You can stack all of the Russian literature together, and have enough height to change a lightbulb, and enough sadness to create a black hole. So please, please, don't stack all the Russian literature together. Sometimes one sentence, carries more sadness, than simple plans hold discography, and weighs as much as the entire Oxford Dictionary of English, which is a lot of weight for a bookshelf, or even for a human being. But sadness is like smoke, and sometimes you just need to open a window, let it diffuse into the greater air, get swallowed up. So let's open a window; let's open a window and grab the Oxford dictionary of English and bench press that baby, get swoll, like Arnold, but really like Ryan Gosling. Hey babe, read me those 17 syllable words. Let me soak in their sound, defenestration, some [?], sesquipedalian, let me luxuriate in language. Now teach me Russian. Teach me Greek. Let's read about the implementation of elementary Russian into primary schools. Hold the calloused covers like our grandparent's hands when we were children. The spine flying between them like a rope bridge. Our feet walking, on air. What a joy to be alive! To breath. To hold a book another man held in the spring of 1984. Maybe a woman. How old? How did he or she feel about lilacs? About the Cold War? About macroeconomics? So many opinions, held beneath the skin and bones that held this book up against the rudimentary physical forces acting upon it in the spring of 1984. And also acting upon it now. That makes us colleagues, compatriots, we've at least one thing in common. There is a person who hand-drew the typeface to this book. I bet Russian people have different fonts like we do. Vani and Helvetica and Times New Roman and Cyrillic and different and wonderful. My friend Jonah, promises me that anything's interesting, if you hold it under a microscope. And my friend Jonah's soul is a big, big microscope. He tells me of the homeless people who come to his bank to deposit catholic charities checks for seven dollars and 25 cents and tell him about their cats. Homeless people have bank accounts, and cats. I found one once, climbing the fire escape out of an abandoned rehabilitation center for youth in downtown Lynchburg. I found the white and orange cat's brand new food bowl and water dish sitting new and terrifying, and out of place beneath a weed growing from the building so long that it had a half inch stalk, and leaves the size of decorative 17th century serving plates. Homeless people, are people. The Oxford English dictionary tells me there are lost words. But sometimes I think we just lose each other in our words. People lost like trees in the forest of our phrases and labels. The US tax code was 73,594 pages long in 2013, and I use 500 pages of computer paper, every semester, sometimes more, and I've never read the tax code. Depending on how you calculate, just me and the tax code are anywhere between 3–9 trees, and my page count alone could be enough to start losing people. Pray over me in Chinese, there are scores of Chinese dialects and Jesus speaks every one of them. Jesus, doesn't lose people. Pray over me in Danish too, and Swahili why don't you. Jesus knows all the languages. Let's sing the national anthems of other countries — they have them too you know. There are 150 countries. That's 150 histories all bumping their geopolitical chests and trading their minimals and dollar store toys and their oil and their literature like Pokémon cards. Earth is the [?] at recess and we are all hiding. Passing Charizards for cargo ships and coconut oil and tanks.
Speaking of, tanks have tow trucks. Tanks have tow trucks and those tow trucks for tanks have turrets on top because tow trucks for tanks sometimes need turrets. A friend of a friend had a concussion in one so bad that it split the two hemispheres of his brain like a heart tow truck for tanks hit a Jersey wall trying to turn around because sometimes tow trucks for tanks need to turn around too. My friend of a friend got his concussion, each brain hemisphere deciding on a mutual trial separation at the behest of the bolt and ceiling that cracked his helmet. And [?] divorced his ability to build things got forgotten, bounced about between the parents but now their feeling at home. My friend of a friend is currently building a barn somewhere in southern Connecticut painfully, slowly. Trying to relearn how to build again. To coax his talent from out from under the stairs, to come home. Let's rewind.
They have Jersey walls in Iraq. They have people in Iraq.