#142

"Dude, I heard you been reading in the office. You gotta cut that out. Can't have you doing that."

"Joe, man, if ___ comes to me again with a book of yours he found under the damn counter, this is gonna stop being funny to me, dude. I'm serious."

"You cannot read behind the counter, Joseph. What if customer come in? Plus you sitting down, people look inside, people not know we open. They not come in. You cannot do that."

"That is not a classroom text, mister Lidd. Put it away. I am tired of having to tell you."

"Is that a book? I am teaching. Give that to me immediately and see me after class."

"No reading in class. See me after."

"No, Joseph, you cannot stay in the classroom and read during recess. That is outside time, okay? Don't you want to play with your friends?"

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Very, very boring stuff.

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Could type for hours, quoting the ways I have been yelled at or criticized for reading at the table. 

Some stuff you just absolutely cannot for the life of you be obedient about, not even for your own mother. I would forget. After having had my ear off about it for the ten hundredth time. Literally forget. And when she said not to, it's like, I could hear her, remember that this was something I had been told a thousand times ten times over, and understand that it was serious, but I just cannot process that command. It is not a real part of the physical universe as far as my brain is concerned, so it was a war I was bound to win in attrition, since obeying a compulsion does not register as effort and defiance is immutable when protecting basal functions. Never did I say to myself "hell with mom and her feelings, I'm gonna bring this book to the table just to rub it right in her face". Rarely would I even think of anything at all. I would bring the book I was reading to the table because I was reading the book. I would grab a book to read at the table because I want to read while at table, a drive wholly undiluted by experience and untouched by any consideration or premeditation. Barely a conscious process. Nine meals out of ten, I have a book at the table. That's just how it is. She gave it up with reasonably good grace, after more than fourteen years of campaigning.

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I read books in restaurants (though the ratio is three meals out of five), in lines, on buses and planes. Alleyways behind the restaurants where I have worked are a favorite, as is while standing up smoking a cigarette. I read The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis on a walk home, years ago. When I went to bars, I read books there. At sporting events, weddings, graduations, assemblies; on camping trips and other vacations; figured out places to hide during recess; and there is a list longer than I am tall of random places I have had to wait and happened to have a book or two on my person, plus another longer than my arm of planned waits I was ready for and places I have had to wait at on a regular basis and was thus usually equipped, such as bus stops, or stairways, or creaky old bleachers at the edge of a scrubby, cleat-torn field.

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Life is fucking hilarious. What a dweeb. Also I have been a real jerk to my mother in this lifetime. Very poor form. 

--JL