Bookworms
Reading has always been something I have enjoyed. I read my first book at the age of three; “Nana upstairs, Nana Downstairs”. I read my first novel at 10. It was “Zodiac” by Robert Graysmith, and it told the story of the Zodiac Killer’s reign of terror in San Francisco in the 60's and 70's.
Reading is a way to escape the mundane everyday life we live and the uselessness we all suffer from time to time. We bookworms are a different breed than the rest of humanity. If you know one, if you talk to one, or if you are one, you have probably noticed that we have an air about us that exudes arrogance, cynicism and sarcasm. This is because we are better than you. We are smarter, generally self-educated, and pissed off that we are not a character in our favorite fiction book - or just pissed off that we are wasting away, doing nothing, while someone like Bernard Kerik has done all kinds of shit.
If you are anything like me, you don’t “read” the book as much as you get sucked into the story itself. I am an observer. Reading to me is akin to watching a movie. But unlike a movie, the only time I know when to stop is when someone gets my attention, or my eyeballs start to lose focus. Us bookworms will read just about anything, and absorb it. We are not the ones who cannot remember IF we ever read that book, it is rather WHEN, or how many times, that is our problem.
Most of us see regular folk as filler people, like extras in a movie. We laugh at people when they hurt themselves, we have tongues that drips venom, and snobbish tastes in any form of entertainment. We are divided into two camps when it comes to music though:
Beethoven, because A: The anger and sorrow that can be felt through his music - and B: He was not a pleasant man.
The other is of course Mozart, because A: His life was pretty much how all ours are, empty and financially poor - and B: If you know anything about his life, you know that some of his shit is morbid as hell.
The fact that most bookworms fancy themselves writers should not surprise you if you know one. We are convinced that we can write THAT story, but very few of us can actually do it, and have it make sense to anyone else. Or when we do write that story, we read it and find it so crappy that we just throw it away in disgust. Most of us write for ourselves, and that’s it. But when we do punch it out, 50% of us are good at it, and the other 50 recognize that they suck. I am in the half that sucks. I could not write a readable story to save my life. I am better at other things, like being a critic.
Sometimes we will look at folks that don’t read, generally fucking morons, and wonder what it must be like, living in eternal bliss and ignorance. Reading is not a hobby for us, it is an addiction. We are always looking for that next fix, that great novel that will kick the shit out of us and make us read it again and again. A lot of us bookworms plan ahead on our reading, knowing what we are going to read two or three books in advance.
Always plan ahead.
Get that fix.
