So I’m looking for books on Goodreads when I notice myself hovering slowly over some book. I’m sitting with the screen a bit far from my arms because it’s late and I’m a bit high, and I’ve been looking at real estate and wondering if I will ever have enough money to afford anything, and so I haven’t yet noticed what the exact book is, but I’m sensing that my brain has, that it just hasn’t reached my conscious mind but that something my brain has already checked and processed and cross-referenced has me lingering like that embarassed seal meme on Reddit, like a bashful B-52 bomber high above a city it does not want to bomb back into the stone age.

Oh, please don’t make me do it…

Let me explain here a bit the way things were going up to this point: I was looking for a good book to read, the best things (*and the worst things, my editor is keen for me to remind you) being found in social media. So I’m looking through this list of ‘Classics You Must Read Before You Die’, because I’m lazy and I want someone else to tell me what to read— because that’s really been working out for me for the better lately— and yet today it’s all the same stale best 100, best 500, best twenty-five-thousand-and-one books you must read before your brief time in this amazing bubble of consciousness called Life expires, and yet you still want me to find the time to read your rag?

Of course, I was still going down this list, and every once in a while I would check off a book here, a book there, which I had read, my logic being that Goodreads is not for me to prove to my friends how many books I have read, but that it is there, instead, to bookmark those things I would like to read in the future. Some other place besides Amazon. With the occasional few, I click and give a quick coupla stars, at best a few blunt sentences. I rarely rate the low performers if they were assigned to me in school. Nor do I bother to rate anything but the best of the best from the old days, for the most part. Lord of the Flies, this time, got the check.

So I’m going down, skipping the Secret Garden, skipping Hamlet — why wouldn’t I want people to know I read Hamlet? Or Jules Verne, for that matter?

I can tell you why, my brain says to my ego. Because it doesn’t fucking matter. Because nobody needs to be told who Jules Verne is. Now, Julio Cortezar? Yeah, perhaps, he’s a better candidate to spread the word about.

And here I was, for some reason, hovering over some book that was just now coming into focus. I saw the WPA architecture, I saw the shining light, the golden statue. The bombing reticule cleared and I saw that it was Atlas Shrugged before me.

It was like coming upon a former high-school girlfriend on a porno website.

I did not tick her box. I din’t even give her the single-star hate-fucking that I should have. I stopped in fact to write this blog post, after I discovered it was longer than 140 characters.

And then I went to bed.

But not before I bookmarked Lolita: ‘to-Read’.