Just because I don’t know what to disappear into doesn’t mean I stop. There are still concerts to draw at. Sometimes there doesn’t need to be any larger aim behind putting pen to paper. Not to say that it’s an exercise but whatever underlying meaning there might be to catching a couple musicians doing their thing with a few marks isn’t very obvious. The sketchbook in which this drawing is just a couple pages may add up to something when it’s filled. Then this fifteen minute sketch will become part of a bigger whole.

But none of that is in my head while it’s happening. I’m just trying to listen.

In the past couple months we’ve processed about a hundred and fifty boxes of books at the store. Many have been sitting waiting for two years since we moved from next door. Roughly a third went back out the door to a bottom-feeder who takes the books we don’t need. The second third was priced and shelved. The third went back into boxes scrawled with ‘TBPU’ on top and sides and stacked in the newly-emptied back closet. This area, formed by walls on two sides and the backs of bookcases on the other two, with a narrow opening on its northwest tip, had been inaccessible since our move.

The ‘To Be Put Up’ boxes are full of books to be photographed, described, and put up for sale on eBay. We don’t have enough display cases in the store to sell expensive books here. Even if we did, I doubt our clientele would fork over $50 or $200 or more for some rare or out-of-print volume. It’s not that kind of store. Not yet anyhow.

As I carted the sixty ‘TBPU’ boxes to the back, I thought of Sisyphus and of the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I wondered not for the first time if all the efforts I’ve expended here add up to anything except marking time.

At least there are occasionally weird castoffs like a set of oversized US president portraits that I can take home and ‘improve.’

Most Fridays K poses for a drawing or painting. It’s become part of our routine. I look forward to it and I think she does too. There are nearly thirty of these now. About a dozen will go up on the walls of the Rainbo Club in September.

I’ve started writing out the fragments I’ve gathered about the bookstore over the past five years in an old ledger I found in one of those dusty boxes. There were a couple notations about expenses circa 1981 but otherwise the pages are clean. I want to fill it with my scrawl, editing and adding here and there as I go, to see if it can become a book.

I’m not all the way convinced yet but it beats staring at a wall or watching TV or whatever else I would do if I wasn’t doing this.

I talked to Sam Bodrojan about her writing, movies, the internet, and more. Juliet Escoria interviewed me and Mallory about our Maudlin Classics project and then I recorded the book-release at Tangible Books.