I'm sweating dust

My attic used to be a bedroom. Most rooms in my house actually used to be bedrooms and as a result we used to have a ton of bathrooms too. There's one in the attic, it's currently full of black plastic bags. Somewhere in there are my parents' typewriters and my mum's wedding dress that I tried on once and made my dad look uncomfortable. There's my toy train that pumped out real smoke as it went round and the first laptop I learned to type on and a ton of books. It was the books I was after tonight. I dived into three boxes and took anything that I might be interested in. The last box came up to my chest and I couldn't reach the bottom. I nearly fell in twice. I didn't find everything I wanted and I nearly screamed a couple of a times when I thought certain things were spiders but you know I got it together and I salvaged what I could. Turns out my dad read a lot of detective stories. He's in a huff right now because although his book list contains 5 or 6 Raymond Chandler books The Big Sleep is not one of them. He suspects all his good stuff was stolen by his middle brother, the English student. I could only find 2 of them anyway. Others I found were the Black Dahlia and I, Robot and a Rousseau book. My dad has Rousseau and he laughs at my philosophy leanings. We could not locate a certain I can't remember if it's still banned in this country so I'm not going to name it book but I did find The official KGB handbook that gives instructions on how to spy on and maybe murder 'enemies of the people'. Brilliant says I. I'm now in the position that I have far too many books to read. It is fucking fantastic. It all came about because I asked if other Kerouac books were worth reading after On the Road. His response was 'maybe a couple but most are shit' and when pressed further he said 'something about a tree? That one's terrible.' I then asked if he'd read Hemingway because I never have and I feel I should. He said he'd 'read one, don't have it. S'allright'. My dad is very much not the English student. Although I did find How to Write Crime Novels and a wealth of Journalism handbook style things. If I get very bored I'm going to try my hand at shorthand again. Still no typewriter though. How am I supposed to write a tragic romantic masterpiece, smoking and sighing and possibly being French with no bleeding typewriter to clack on! I knew I should never have let it be tidied away again.

There was also a cubby hole stuffed with books, one of which was signed by the author (Terkel) and quoted some song I did not recognise which I'm assuming is from when my dad was in Chicago (where he bought books in an illegal bookstore and went to a ton of jazz clubs and I've always been insanely jealous about that trip since I was old enough to appreciate how cool it must have been), and a shoe box stuffed full of letters helpfully labeled 'letters'. If I had a week to myself I'd set up in that attic and read everything, find some secrets and treasures but my dinner was burning downstairs and Julie was fighting with my mum and my dad was being generally clueless about everything so I dumped what I could carry onto my couch (having checked thoroughly for bees) and collapsed in the one room with a breeze through the window.

Oh and I watched American Psycho today. It was pretty good although I probably shouldn't have watched it so soon after Batman. Made it too funny. Well in a sort of HAHA BATMAN KILLED A GIRL! way. You know, hilarious.