I made the mistake of going for a walk on Friday down to the bookstore, which is only about three miles there and back. A month or two ago it would have been nothing to do that walk but it completely destroyed me, not just my legs but also my left arm because I was reading as I walked… It’s very disheartening how much worse my health has gotten even in the last month. I’m not talking about difficult to quantify things like pain or neurological damage, but strength and function issues that I can measure much more objectively. There is an awful lot more that I want to do, and I have a great deal of passion and curiosity about the future, but it feels harder and harder to even fight to make it to next week.
That said, I did find the strength to get tattooed yesterday, and Shane started filling in the background of my leg sleeve. In addition to mapping it out, yesterday he tattooed the castle, the moon, a bunch of UFOs, and assorted mountainous background. I’m thrilled with the effect it’s having, pulling everything together and making the lighting more dramatic. I apologize (to both readers and to Shane) for the blurry pictures but here is what was done. You can (and must) click to zoom in.
Anyway, speaking of the bookstore, I was thinking about one of my pet peeve annoyances, which is senior citizens who treat bookstores as a library and spend the entire day sitting there reading, rarely buying anything (and for context, there is an actual library two blocks away from this bookstore). If I was a bookstore owner I probably would get rid of all the chairs.
What I don’t understand is, under the modern model of “information is property”, how is this not theft? I mean, in a world where you can be sued for dramatic amounts of money for downloading and sharing music online, to say nothing of criminal charges, it seems to me that this falls into the same category. Not that I support prosecuting file-sharers, but I do find the old lumps that glare at me for browsing the shelves around their private libraries a lot more annoying than Kimble and Megaupload… Arrest them instead please. Better yet, don’t arrest anyone.
Now I think it’s time to go lie down and rest until Caitlin gets back from her weekend vacation…
