Notes from the Editor's Desk -- 12/21/22

Half Price Books in the winter is inescapable. Time spent or killed passing through its familiar layout is an ageless labyrinth, one that seems to draw me continuously inward, albeit never truly deeper, and this I think a hallmark of melancholy, or else idiocy. The weirdos here are my weirdos. I am one of them. Without knowing their reasons for being here, I can divine their purpose. They are no different from me. Q—, this depictions only obvious Ariadne, was with me, as we went first for lunch near the building in Chicago so that I could leave salt and a lockbox with cash in it in the rear lot for the neighborhood shoveler of snow. A storm is meant to pass through soon. Without divining it, staggeringly incognizant of the inevitable, life’s various strains conspired to offer me another chance to wander aimlessly through a place that has become the externalization of an innate characteristic of mine. When a youth, waiting for the movies to start, or having driven here expressly and alone at a moment when I was inclined to feed my habituation of solitude, I found the offerings ripe and bought indiscriminately. These gestures I used as one method of mapping out a life that was sufficiently muscular to shake off the aerosolized waste of airplanes that has long left this area dulled in mind and cancerous in form. Its particulate bottles up inspiration and inspires the flesh to escape all bounds, but where that leaves me is best expressed in the discourse between Faust and the homunculus. In any event, I found that starch harder to shake off than I once assumed. Comic book store clerks, and perhaps a few titles found in the very place, argued successfully for atheism, but growing up below one of O’Hare’s runways remains a question of original sin. We were too early to arrive at my aunt’s for a get-together coinciding with the solstice, but our intention brought us far from home and into this familiar area. 93.9 LITE FM, whose dynamics I could describe endlessly, was playing while we drove. About us, as we left the city, passing a stretch of the Northwest side that is conspicuous due to its rash of independent motels, cars started and stopped abruptly, while the Christmas music endured, and it grew suddenly dark, while though the music of Christmas powerfully endured.