My Shed.

I've written before about Dwight Garner and his practice of continual reading and alongside that collecting really superior quotations from the books he reads. 

Garner keeps a note book of words and phrases he likes. Every-so-often, he'll publish one. People like me buy them and have it never more than an axe-length away from their typing fingers. Garner, because he is idiosyncratic, is infinitely more fun, if not as compendious as Bartlett. And as to online quotation hunting, he is the Louvre compared to an airport newsstand.

Here are three randomly selected pages from the book above. If you are a kindlenista, you can download Garner's book for less change than you'll find hiding in your sofa cushions.

Up here on the Gingham Coast, many people do something I've never really seen before, and will never understand. Their houses, garages, lives and backyard sheds are filled with so much stuff, a lot of people park their cars on their front lawns, or beside their one-third-too-large homes. 

They either love their SUVs so much that they're showing them off, or more likely, they have too much stuff and since the neighborhood our house is in doesn't allow street parking, there's no place else for their Grendel-size vehicles.

Grendel was large enough to have been an offensive lineman at D3 college.

Even with the cute-little one-room-school-house-looking sheds everyone has "out back," they have no room in their garages for their cars. (I joke, I'll someday get fined for stowing my 1966 Simca 1500 in its proper place after it's done with it's transportation ministrations.)

But, to be honest, I also keep a shed.

I think most writers do. 

At least writers of my generation. Who have cultivated the skill of memory. (Memory gets stronger with practice. Many people have allowed google to atrophy their power of recollection. That is a mistake and representative of self-harm. It's cutting of a different ilk.)

We keep shards of lines, like Dwight Garner, above. We keep phrases we like. We store information despite the bullshit that we have access to all the world's information at our finger-tips at all time. (The problem we face isn't one of access to information, btw, it's actually finding that information when we need it. Locating what you need is near impossible. Because the organization of all that information has been sold to the highest bidder who's not interested in what you need but in what they have to sell.)

I got an email from a client last night.

I thought for a moment about how I got the client. She's way off in Maine.

Oh, now I remember.

She helps run a coastal nature preserve and asked me to write a manifesto for her site. Friend of a friend connection.

I remembered a line written by Heraclitus almost 3000 years ago that I kept, amid the cobwebs, in my upstairs shed. I found it in a book I read and I kept it where I could find it again.

"The Soul wants to be wet," Heraclitus wrote.

Once I sat down to manifesto-ize, I re-found that line. 

I might have had to move a crate of old Archie comic books to get to it, or YouTube videos of Joe Louis knocking opponents down. Or Joe Frazier assaulting Oscar Bonavena, charging ahead like a runaway train crossed with a herd of bison. But I tracked the line down in two-shakes of a tracked-change.

Once I found it, I knew the manifesto was writ.

I then put the Heraclitus back in its place in my upstairs shed.

I might use it again someday.

He won't mind.

--

BTW, as New York's greatest hailer of cabs, regardless of time of day, gloom of night, weather, or even if there's a leggy model needing one one block ahead of me, anyone who really knows me knows I resemble this remark.