2001-10-27 - 11:30 p.m.

Lost and Found

I really hate losing things.

The other day, I think it was Sunday, I was carrying around two books with me as I was making my rounds, and now I can't find them.

Why was I carrying two books around with me? Because I was almost done with one of them. Like, duh!

Like duh. That's how I feel, because I can't remember where I might have left them. In fact, at this point I'm having a hard time remembering where I might have been on Sunday. At least I THINK it was Sunday when I saw them last.

This is doubly annoying, because not only does it mean that I'm a forgetful boob who is losing control of his possessions, but I'm a stumbling zombie who can't even remember what he was doing a couple of days ago.

The two books were: Black Notice by Patricia Cornwall and Choice of Evil by Andrew Vachss. I'm only about 10 pages from the end of the first, and I'm only about 40 pages into the latter.

I read a lot of detective novels, it's a habit I got into when I got out of college. Both of these books could roughly be classed in that genre, but it would hard to find two more dissimilar people than the protagonists of these books: Vachss' Burke and Cornwall's Kay Scarpetta.

Sometimes I have to question my choice of reading material. I like to read while I eat my lunch, and Cornwall's Kay Scarpetta is the head coroner of the state of Virgina. Cornwall herself held that job, coincidence? Maybe it is, and maybe it is.

So I'll be sitting in the sub shop and I'll be reading a very graphic description of some horrible autopsy of a body that's been dead for two weeks and I'll look up and think to myself: what the hell am I doing?????

So, like the detectives in these gritty books I try to put the pieces together, reassemble the facts. I make a short list of the places I might have visited, and go to each of them. I've done this before, I know the routine. At the supermarket, I go to the Customer Service counter, I don't bother asking the cashiers.

It's humiliating in a trivial sort of way. I have to tell all these strangers that I am a forgetful goofball.

"Has anyone turned in a couple of paperback books in the last couple of days?"

I seldom recover anything this way. I've been told that at fast food places they have no Lost and Found: everything they find they just throw out. We want bland food produced quickly, and keeping random items in a box in the manager's office somehow interferes with that.

It's their way of keeping us mindful: if you leave it here it's gone forever!

Of course if we REALLY were mindful, we wouldn't eat there at all!

I make the tour of the four or five places that I might have left my books, and I strike out. Well, at least I made a through job of it, I left no stone unturned.

I have a vague memory of putting something in the car, and putting the books on the roof of the car while I did that. I have no memory of putting them in the car again. Is that how the books got lost?

Now I have to ask myself - do I want to buy either of the books again, or do I just let it go?

Well, actually that decision was made for me. I thought that I'd thoroughly searched the apartment, but this evening some non-verbal part of my brain made me go over to the blue chair. Next to it is an upended comic box that is serving as an impromptu end-table. I pick up the papers on it, and there are the two missing books. They were there all along.

When you look for things, why are they always in the last place you look?

Because after you find them, you stop looking!