Book Dumb

I'm ashamed to say this, but I've stopped reading books. I hope it's temporary, having to do with being busy and the warm weather. But I'm worried it's not, that this state of inertia might relate to how the internet decimated my attention span and the endless scroll, scroll, scroll. Also, maybe, how I write and read all day for work and so by the time I get to bedtime—the dominion of book reading for me—my eyes are very tired from computer screens and my brain is cold spaghetti and all I want to do is lay my head on the pillow and be told a nice story by my iPod.

In my life, I've always taken everything as it comes. But the idea of never again reading a novel start to finish seems impossible—dangerous even.

I've started on poems, though. To keep me going. They're digestible—a little peek into a person, place, or time. Like Pluma, by Gerald Stern, which I loved this morning because it took me quickly into the tropical heat and also taught me a new word—"euchered": cheated or robbed.

Pluma, By Gerald Stern

Once, when there were no riches, somewhere in southern Mexico I lost my only pen in the middle of one of my dark and flashy moments and euchered the desk clerk of my small hotel out of his only piece of bright equipment in an extravagance of double-dealing, nor can I explain the joy in that and how I wrote for my life, though unacknowledged, and clearly it was unimportant and I had the money and all I had to do was look up the Spanish and I was not for a second constrained and there was no glory, not for a second, it had nothing to do with the price of the room, for example, it only made writing what it should be and the life we led more rare than what we thought and tested the art of giving back, and some place near me, as if there had to be a celebration to balance out the act of chicanery, a dog had started to bark and lights were burning.