I was out trying to kill time yesterday, and I decided I wanted to browse the one lousy bookstore the Black Hole has to offer, only to find it had disappeared. I can't say I wasn't slightly peeved. Over the years, I've watched the bookstores leave town one-by-one (not that there were tons of them to begin with). When I left last summer, we were down to the long, skinny Waldenbooks in the mall. It wasn't a good bookstore, but at least it was something. Now, we're left with two Christian bookstores - because a town of 35,000 people needs two of those to support the 100+ churches in the city limits alone. I know that real books made out of paper are an evaporating market right now anyway, but I still believe this all says something about the character of the town. I'm not saying that the people here are uneducated or illiterate, they aren't by any means. I'm just saying their priorities are probably slightly different from mine. Then again, I am an academic.
The life I'm leading at the moment is pretty lonely. I only have one really close friend left in the area, and she's been in Haiti the entire time I've been here. However, I'm keeping myself busy with reading and writing. In most respects, my life hasn't changed from when I was an English major in school. I'm still reading three books at a time, and I'm writing everyday. Difference is: I'm reading those books without chewing on a pencil, and I'm writing things I want to write. In other words, I'm reading some guilty-pleasure books instead of uppity symbolic British literature and writing really shitty stories instead of really shitty analytical essays. And despite the loneliness and occasional homesickness for a home that doesn't exist anymore - I'm really quite enjoying my intellectual nomadic lifestyle.
I start my first house-sitting job tonight. This is how I usually make a living when I come back to the Black Hole. I started the business the summer after my freshman year of college. Basically, all my parents' old friends pay me to take care of their pets and live in their houses while they go on vacation. Sometimes, my key chain looks like a set of janitor keys because I'm watching so many houses. I love every minute of it.
You can tell a lot about people by living in their house when they're not there. I'm not nosy; in fact, I'm extremely respectful of privacy. Despite the temptation, I don't go digging through drawers or closets, usually not even the refrigerator. I'm just saying, these people are expecting me to have a routine similar or identical to theirs while they're away. In a way, they want time to stop at home while they're away, and I'm supposed to be the magical fairy that makes that happen. In reality, it's home-sitting, not house-sitting. Some demand I let their dogs out at 6 in the morning and feed them at 7; some don't care what I do as long as the dogs are still alive when they get home. Some people want their plants watered every other day, some have sprinklers who do the watering for me, and some don't have plants at all. It doesn't take a nosy person to figure out a family's personality; it just takes following someone else's schedule for a few days. In a lot of ways, it's like living somebody else's life for a while, and that is the dream of every writer. I always want to get inside somebody else's head - even for just five minutes - and write as much about their thoughts and emotions as I possibly can. House-sitting is the closest I can get to that.
(blog post title comes from the lyrics of "Hobo Blues" by Ray LaMontagne)
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