since childhood and since I first knew that such unglamorous places as libraries exist (well, obviously the masses think places of worship and amusement parks and cinemas and mosh pits are much more attractive as these draw crowds like scavengers to carcasses) ah, but I digress like a man past fifty which is what I am - but, as I was saying, since I first discovered public libraries (I couldn’t afford to buy books once and the books I can afford to buy now are not worth the dollars the booksellers say I should part with) ah, but again I digress…
and as I was saying, all my reading since innocent childhood has been of borrowed books from public libraries which I read and appreciate but in which I dare not write comments; I dare not scribble in the books for I am worried about fines and being labeled ‘delinquent borrower’ and losing my reputation as being an eminent citizen; and so I do not write comments but I have to say something as you can well understand to express my disagreement or approbation; but I cannot write my comments beside the text or at the end of the short story or at the end of the poem or in the margins of utterly un-understandable Einstein and so with no other way and my frustrations building and determining through reason I should not allow my pent-up emotions to explode into expletives and ravings and such implosions and explosions to ***** up my precious emotional and aesthetic life I decided since childhood when I first started reading - I decided, and what else could I do? to explode into expletives and ravings and such implosions and explosions and so unable to write comments on borrowed material on public property I shouted at books (and still do) and uttered expletives (and continue to do so) or went done on my knees before books and made sweet moans, something akin to ****** ecstasy before, say, a poem of Keats or shouted and hollered with joy at a volume of Leaves of Grass or screamed with disapproval at stories turned out with worn out plots and predictable turn of events where every man had his maiden and lived happily for ever well-fed and well-sexed and fatter and happily ever after; and I made faces at writing that were just clichés and poems that waxed lyrical and I scowled before un-creative pieces that waffled with thin sentiments and moans and sighs of love or of poetic philosophical bombast and so my reading career, since childhood - O most cultured gentlemen and most elegant ladies, my reading career has been dogged with explosions of expletives before books I read or books I refused to read and also of course with ecstatic cries before well-written and well-thought out prose or poetry but, tragically, unable to write on spines or margins or between lines on borrowed books this became a habit so deeply ingrained I cannot tear myself off from it and so you understand why even in this age of the internet and cyberspace I find it excruciating to punch in comments because this borrowed-books mindset is fixed and ******* so firm in me; but you can imagine I have knelt before your poems and blogs in near ******-ecstasy or more unkindly I have uttered expletives and shouted obscenities at your blogs and posts and my family have run in to my study happily thinking I was going insane and they could finally confine me in a Hospital for the Insane but I am ready and I just grin with a stolen book of Shakespeare which I keep near for such occasions and I say to my precious wife: Oh, I’m just practicing to direct a modern production of Shakespeare’s plays sometime in the future, soon and disappointed, the family curses and utters profanities
but I digress - so back to the subject at hand; and gentle reader, perhaps we are both one of a kind and you too suffer from this borrowed-books mindset and you give my poems and blogs and my online posts the same treatment I give yours… well, we understand each other and we naturally utter obscenities or kneel with pleasure but leave no comments or scribble because the shame of public library censure has too strong a hold on us… but what is important is, we understand each other