The Strange Bookstore
It was unexpected yesterday when I had occasion to go with a new friend to a Christian bookshop to hear a totally unknown Christian musician perform.
Everything about the event was unexpected. Peculiar people ambled about the bookstore – sort of out of Deliverance – the movie - but the female aspect.
There were three women, mainly, two more odd than the owner of the store and one intensely odd. They were snaggle-toothed with long, stringy all over the place of well-rooted facial hair, they smelled and were – at best guess – the byproducts of interfamilial sex acts.
The Christian musician was himself totally not what you would expect in the south – he was an extremely round faced Korean and looked more like those plump Buddhas but he spoke like a true blue American and sang all sweetly about Jesus and he sweat a lot. It was hot and he was nervous. He had this little cuttlefish, purple-ish mouth – just different from the southern crowd - his mouth was small by contrast to his very round face. My new friend is an artist manager and she is beginning to groom him for the arena of showbiz.
The owner of the bookstore was herself rather pleasant but sallow skinned like those repressed cultish religious people. Just not ‘normal’ like you and me (ha!) Strange, unwashed, un-groomed looking people – a bit like that crowd seen recently on TV who believe in having it off with lots of wives.
There I was: with my faithful camera trying to in an instant understand the features of the Korean American - trying not to associate Deliverance with the location. It is hard to 'read' the unknown or unfamiliar and I have been in this strange and detached world collapsing space for the last few days so it became like a bizarre novel and being unable to stop the narrative. The odd worlds all collided – each category of human with thousands of years of history behind each.
My new friend with a life tapestry so complex and stitched with so much painful past all hyped up and professional, the Korean Christian boy with an interesting guitar and ordinary keyboard with his many moons of genetics and lifetime, the weird and smelly people whose stories I actually don’t want to know, a wandering Mexican couple – the girl was so utterly beautiful I was mesmerized by her innocence and unstudied grace - and, of course, me – yours unfaithfully – half insane from a lifetime of not understanding why I am not ‘there’ wherever ‘there’ may be and ageing and so damned foreign and strung tight like Nebuchadnezzar when he was in his seven year mad ass state.
It was unexpected and mighty peculiar. But somehow, it worked in its oddness.
posted by Unknown @ 2:26 AM
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