i collect old papers. receipts, letters, matchbooks, ephemera. today i bought a stack of old gas receipts from the 1960s, noticing at first that these must have belonged to a trucker, for the amounts of money paid for a tank of gas were in the $45-$50 range at a time when I think gas was well below $1/gallon. i opened the bag to look through them all (a couple of hundred) and I had to stuff them back in the bag, immediately, for the stench of cigarette and musty stink threatened to fill the apartment, so strong was the absorption of aromas in this pile of old papers. the smoky and liquor-filled world of the trucker rose out of that bag, out of the receipts, so abruptly that i had to put the receipts back in the back they came in and i had to put them in another ziplock bag as well just to be sure the reek stayed in the bag. the same thing happened last year when i bought a boxful of old slides from a wisconsin estate. god, those slides stunk, i wore a surgeon‘s mask while handling them, and i stored them in multiple ziplock bags and a plastic cabinet which i fear opening for the storm of skunkiness that may blossom. i invested in a pile of those surgeon‘s masks after that and i‘ve used them once in a while whilst dealing with the old magazines, some of which either smell like assholes half-wiped with ashtrays or disintegrated to a point where the particles of paper and their ephemerally accumulated admixtures are but smoky pollution in the air.
i feel almost normal again. i woke up today feeling like i was out of this, this annoying flu made doubly annoying for arriving one month after getting my first flu shot in 15 years.
ok, friends here, gotta be social
