<Mountainous Heathen!>

man with the green bag

there's an eighty year old man in the public health library who carries with him his whole life in two suitcases. he falls asleep a lot, and my footsteps usually stir him awake. he got up for a drink of water momentarily when i was up there yesterday, and i gave into the curiosity that has been gnawing at me for a long time and i went over to his little desk to see what all the papers were about. now, suffice it to say, i shouldn't read people's thingies when they leave their desks, but it isn't as if reading a friend's diary, it's a stranger,..and he doesn't know me, and i'll never know him, and really if you think about it long and hard, it's not intruding into his life, it's more like taking a sneak peak. erase sneak.

so anyway, i went over to his mass stack of papers and started looking at them. they were oligonucleotide patterns in DNA. and he had pages and pages and pages of sequenced three letter codons. then there was a copy of anna karenina on the bottom of a huge stack. i guess for when he takes breaks. he is almost done.

he came back pretty quickly. and i carried on. it felt like the secret garden of books. i wonder what he's doing, all those days he spends in the most out of the way place in the library. i wonder if he cared to tell anyone.

mountainous heathen!
holly girl jennyman cyrus boyk sina boy robert reich honey jaan Prufrock If Afraid So Today's poem		~ Wednesday, December 08, 2004 man with the green bag there's an eighty year old man in the public health library who carries with him his whole life in two suitcases. he falls asleep a lot, and my footsteps usually stir him awake. he got up for a drink of water momentarily when i was up there yesterday, and i gave into the curiosity that has been gnawing at me for a long time and i went over to his little desk to see what all the papers were about. now, suffice it to say, i shouldn't read people's thingies when they leave their desks, but it isn't as if reading a friend's diary, it's a stranger,..and he doesn't know me, and i'll never know him, and really if you think about it long and hard, it's not intruding into his life, it's more like taking a sneak peak. erase sneak. so anyway, i went over to his mass stack of papers and started looking at them. they were oligonucleotide patterns in DNA. and he had pages and pages and pages of sequenced three letter codons. then there was a copy of anna karenina on the bottom of a huge stack. i guess for when he takes breaks. he is almost done. he came back pretty quickly. and i carried on. it felt like the secret garden of books. i wonder what he's doing, all those days he spends in the most out of the way place in the library. i wonder if he cared to tell anyone. posted by ...me at 1:44 PM