Tracing Gould - ooo

Let's take it back to zero.

This fixation, the Tracy thing, started with my great-grandfather.  Right?

Andrew.  Andrew Edward Patty, senior.  First of the Patty line to be born in the united states.  I saw a picture of him on a log cabin porch, from when he was about four or five, along with a half dozen other gray fuzzy faces, all repressing the urge to pick nits or give the finger because it took near a damned hour to get a picture taken.  We paddies took the first fuckin' name they gave us, coming off the boat--  we coulda been McCrackens, or Williamsons, but no, no, we opted for the three-leaf clover of fuckin' names, PADDY, Patty, an absolute cowpie in the face for self-respect, roit?  Fuckin' hell.

Andrew had a high mechanical aptitude, and he was co-founder of the first major garage in Anne's Town, recently re-named Anniston, on the maps.  He earned enough to buy a few modest parcels of land, and we worked them as gentleman farmers, making just enough produce & fruit to be able to say we weren't speculators.  We never really did much with any of it, as my grandfather's generation would be the largest our little clan ever grew, really.  Andrew and Elizabeth, his wife--  about whom not much is said, for she was a very religious and generally joyless woman; she developed stomach cancer in her forties and stopped eating; as family lore phrased it, "She turned toward the wall," and starved herself to death  --A.E. & Elizabeth had two children, A.E. Junior and Edwina.  Edwina would never show any interest in men, beyond taking care of her father, the widow, who retired comfortably and was, as far as anyone can recollect, a very kind, gentle, god-fearing man.

Who loved Dick Tracy comix.

And, lest this whole episode get too teary-eyed, also taught me the N-word.

We'll circle back to that, don't you fret.

So A.E. Junior meets and woos and marries Mary, and they have David Edward and Mark Edwin.  David Edward meets Patricia Shea Williams, marries, and they begat my ass.  Mark meets Jean, they marry, ten years later Jean realizes she's a lesbian and Mark moves back in with his parents, for a minute.  And that's about as big as the family ever gets, right there.  By the time I've entered the scene, the numbers start whittling back down.  Paw-Paw, as Andrew comes to be known, dies in 1988 or 1989.  I run away in 1994.  My mother leaves, later that year.  Edwina dies, like her mother, of stomach cancer & self-determination.  When I come back--  theoretically to see Edwina, before she passes, but she dies as I'm on the road to return, in mid-'03  --I find there's not much left of the various family legacies.  Mark's new wife has picked all the things of Edwina's she wants.  I'm curious about Paw-Paw's things, but I find they're not really around anymore, Edwina having purged the house of memories in the decade following my midnight disappearance.

Because I disappeared in the middle of the night.  No note.

Have I ever mentioned that?

Well.  There's a lot I haven't mentioned.  But let's stick to the stuff that matters.  Namely, what was that shit about sweet kind jesus-loving Paw-Paw teaching his stupid great-grandson america's #1 racial slur?

Andrew and Elizabeth were gentlemen farmers, you'll recall.  Lace curtain Irish, basically, though we'd not have called ourselves such.  But we were.  We were doing our level best to pass for American.  So Andrew did what americans did, to get a leg up in the community:  he became a joiner.  He joined local organizations.  He joined the Freemasons.  He also had black housekeepers.

And, when I squint at the silver nitrate memory of child Andrew on some ancestor's knee, him being barely big enough to pick out of a family portrait, I wonder how old he was when he joined the Klan.

Because that's a big fat missing piece of this whole Tracy thing I've not been talking about, in this hailstorm of amer-arcana and dropped names, and that's the racial politics of the strip.

They're not terrible.  For the era.  They're not wonderful, either.  Dick Tracy Junior's father has a black housekeeper, who nearly gets framed up into a murder attempt; and of course she dies and there's a deathbed speech, and it's all uncomfortable as hell because the housekeeper is a Mammy caricature.  She was a kind of stereotype, but she wasn't a villainous character.  The Dick Tracy strip seems to avoid that, overall--  there aren't evil black people.  They're just too credulous, generally.  When injustice occurs, the black characters that one encounters in the 30s and 40s are its victims.  Victims of the cartooning as much as anything...

And there's all kinds of racism, of course.  So it's not like we should focus on strictly the aspects which haunt me.  My banshee's a pipsqueak, comparatively speaking.  My great-grandfather wasn't klan by the time he had kids.  From what I know, his membership was never a point of pride; it was compulsory, expected, by the time & environment.  I have no idea what he did when he was with them.  

I will be honest and say that I do my best not to speculate.

Paw-paw tried to ensure his children were wiser, and kinder.  Perhaps we were.  But perhaps we were also stupid, prideful, self-deluding potato-eaters.

I say this about myself, because my grandfather taught me the N-word casually-- and curiously.

Do you know what woolly bear caterpillars are?  They were a plague on our family's pecan trees.  Paw-paw had trimmed the afflicted branches and we had turned them into a pyre.  As the fire spit and the raspy webs became soot, Paw-paw remarked, "Watch those _______ burn."  He must have been 75, or 76, by the time he said that to me.  I thought he would live to be 100.

In any event.  This is the subject I zeroed in on, today.  I'd meant to dig into it, weeks ago, but I needed to read a little deeper into the comic strip's run before I drew any conclusions.

There's a whole raft of racial issues we can dig into as this series runs on.  The stuff with the hillbilly comedy relief should definitely be a focus.  Because whitefolk, man.

We're nought if not neurotic as sin.

tiny epiphany

My biggest fault as a human, prob'ly, is an inability to hate cranks.  I try to understand them.

Related to why I have retained so few friends from my (not inconsiderable) past?  Why, not at all.

not having had any family but of my own choosing

--i do miss the people i left behind.  the people who abused me, who made me a little crazy, who gifted me these curious scars i call my creativity, i miss them.  i miss those places, the padded smell of cloverfields, sundried kudzu flaking like papyrus, the endless red clay afternoons.  it should be impossible to miss alabama: but people die, and places are erased, whether by lightning or buyout, and all the dread that went alongside winter spring summer and fall's glory, that stuff is as dead as my grandparents.  filed in amber, suspended in the fine comb of slowed time--  because what is memory but increments of spacetime re-encoded in an impermanent neurochemical matrix  --locked precious in a bone vault where light neither penetrates nor is generated.  i miss them though all they were is with me now; i miss them because i lost them and i am losing them again, as time & experience & wear weathers these memories into so many insensible scales of driftglass.  as my memory decays and their faces-- which i kept no photos of --are made strange to me.  if i were to see my father today, or my mother, would i recognize them?  the last times i saw either were in 2004 & 2012, respectively.  two weeks ago i walked out of a public restroom, having locked my bike up outside not two minutes previously, and when i looked around i did not see it and panicked, thinking it stolen, briefly-- but no, i had only locked it up in a place i'd never used before, out of my immediate field of vision.  still, that tiny taste of fear is a preview of what i probably have waiting for me.  one day i will not remember them, and i will be afraid, and i'm not quite sure what to make of that, because i wanted to be rid of them and all the hell that went with growing up there.  so.  yeah

dream - o52525: gift from out of time

A day trip back home.  The old homestead has been bulldozed, dust still settling.  None of the libraries have survived.  My grandparents' house, altogether gone.  The tiny pond, filled in; the towering magnolias in the front yard, vanished, the bases of their stumps scorched out of the earth.  Back at the campo sancto, the family land, there's some vestiges of the past-- the quonset hut I helped my parents erect remains due to the concrete foundations, but the wooden ends of the vast, corrugated steel drum have been burnt out.

Despite these minor erasures, the land itself is rich, verdant, flowering.  I note the freshly turned clay at the edges of our old dirt roads, the evidence that the bulldozers have been here, too.  The barn still stands, but it's completely vacant & coalblack within.  The clean, subtle sweet scent of dogwood, clustered by the rotted pens to either side, their bleached paper blossoms with punched-tab leaves trembling in the breeze.  The land has never seemed so vacant, nor at ease.

In what remains of the trailer, some piles of old books.  The front porch remains level, but the interior of the trailer is as buckled by collapse as the last time I saw it, fetid with the scent of black mold, my mother's collection of vinyl fallen forward into the pit in the floor, every gatefold sleeve sick with mildew.  I remain on the porch, at the threshold, uncertain.  Turning to the Bally 'Old Chicago' pinball machine to the left of the washer & dryer, I thumb through the books stacked on the glass.  The top volume is a collection of E.C. Segar's non-Popeye cartooning, something I've never seen before.  Tucking it underneath my arm, I step off the porch...

Tempus fugit, and I'm seating myself at a table with Rob James, mom's best friend from Anniston high school.  His Lennon frames glint as he nods hi, and he peers with interest at the threadbare canvas cover of the Segar book as I slide it over.  A forgotten part of mom's collection, it seems.  We both appreciate the clean bubbly arcs of Segar's pen, the pages upon pages of warmup sketches & practice lines, and I ask him if he likes it.  He says he does, so I say, "Merry Christmas."  Rob looks good, not the slightest indication of M.S.; no tremors, no hesitancy in his hands; and he smiles with genuine affection, the radiance of his appreciation sweeping in an upward arc from the art on the page to my adult stranger's face, like a sunset in reverse.  "Thank you," he says.

I do not tell him he's welcome, for the dead are always welcome here.

dream - o2o425: my face is a television where i don't have the remote

There's not too much to the dream.  It's full of strangers.  Strangers in a strange house-- okay, it was my grandparents' house --having a strange party. (Okay, maybe the party wasn't that strange; maybe it was a birthday.  But I don't celebrate my birthday.  Haven't for decades.)  Okay, maybe they weren't all strangers--  I recognized Jayme Reynolds, I think  --but in terms of being people from my lived life, they weren't part of me.

They're watching something.  It's probably Severance season 2.  That's what I watched last night before bed.  The idea of someone loving you so much they'd seek you out, even if you couldn't remember them anymore, it sticks in my throat.  And then someone started saying something nice.  Maybe to do with my birthday.  I don't really remember, because the crying jag hits.  With brimming eyes I split the scene.

The not-a-dream parts of this really outweigh the dream itself.  Because my husband was trying to say something nice to me, yesterday, while we were having a shower, and suddenly my face is a television where I don't have the remote, and someone else is flipping through thoughts & emotions, and it's all on my face, and my husband's watching as I lose control, trying to keep from crying.

Faster than he can say, "Are you okay?" I'm turned away and saying "I'm okay," and trying to reassure him.  "What's wrong?"  And all I have to offer is, "I'm crazy," with a dead man's laugh.  And then we're drying off for bed, and I'm struggling to keep it stowed.  Then the jag hits again, a wave taller than all my breakers, and it's back to being a sobbing mess again.

Because I've never felt this specifically isolated in all my adult life.

When we were in the shower, the crying began because I remembered Siegfried holding my hand when I was in the hospital.  Which made me remember every time I went to the hospital for a member of my family.  Which made me remember the last time I saw my grandfather, and the last time I held his hand.  Which leads to me also remembering the first time my grandfather held my hand, as an infant.  Because that's something I remember.

I don't know how many people actually possess pre-verbal memories of infancy & access them.  Is it a common phenomena?  I can't say.  But I remember.  Maybe because I'm me, and my brain is fundamentally, biologically different from the majority of people.  This planet is hard on brains.  And nervous systems.  And consciousnesses.  Anyway, which crying jag was I on?

The second, while in bed, straining to isolate & articulate the specific "trigger" for the sob-shit I was taking all over myself.  Because the emotional blocks I keep in place to function around people, and the world, it's about as effective as putting a cork in one's ass to stop diarrhea.  I have emotions, but I don't vent them the way(s) I used to.  And a great many of these emotions regard how I feel about humanity.

As the problem(s) with my operating system cause my thought processes to flicker & stutter like fluorescents working with a bad ballast, I asked Sig, "Am I different?  I mean, since the accident?"  Because in the three years since, it feels like I've grown very distant from other people.  Like, I find them fascinating.  I love listening to them.  But because I'm me, there isn't much common ground.

Sig held my hand, and said, "No.  You're still yourself.  But I think you... turned a corner.  Like you found a reason to live?  Not like you didn't have one before.  But times were difficult..."  Which is an understatement.  The last few years have been a strain.  I should probably have a shrink.  But I don't.  I have this little box I type on, and this window on a diminished & darkening internet.

Anyway.  After a bit, the sob-shits stopped, and I went to sleep for a little.  Had some dreams.  Had crying jag #3.  Then woke at 4am, as usual, to the solitude of another day grinding at a physically exhausting job I do not like nor have any interest in, amongst people I don't relate to, speaking as little as may be managed.  Maybe before work I'll make a stop at the Wind Phone.

There's a li'l red british phone box in the middle of a field, a few blocks from my workplace.  Like I told Sig last night, I've stopped there twice before.  Once, to apologize to my grandparents for not being there when they passed away.  They were old, I had been hospitalized anyway, and covid was a brush fire in a parched landscape.  I didn't know they were dying.  It's hard to not feel guilty.

The second stop at the Evanston Wind Phone--  do you even know what a Wind Phone is?  I didn't, but my husband did  --I dialed Sam, an old friend from the Auburn years.  I called him to say sorry for re-purposing his death in one of my books.  The guy in my book bore little resemblance, but I knew what I had done, so: I apologized for the possible disrespect.  And for not knowing him better.

Dunno.  Maybe those talks helped.  Certainly seems more helpful than keeping a dream journal.

on alcohol

I'm capable of not drinking.  A lot of the world isn't.  I have enjoyed alcohol, within limits.  Most of the world cannot limit itself.  But in the longview?  Alcohol is a waste of money, and it can leave a body & mind feeling wormeaten, AND it's a convenient means of self-deception for most of mankind.

I haven't had a drink in over three years.  It's good.  I haven't had a single craving for one since the accident.  That's baller.  No hangovers, no dumb social obligations that require self-medicating to tolerate, no bouts of doubt or anxiety or fuzzy memories.  No hassles, is what I am saying.

Of course there's a downside.  Friends who don't understand sobriety don't want to hang.  New people who don't understand me react to my sobriety as though I'm in A.A.  Since most of north american society uses alcohol in one form or another I feel less welcome-- in fact I feel like avoiding booze, and people who partake of it, altogether, because alcohol's a convenient excuse for bad & imbalanced behavior.

Ever listen to a couple of drunks discover a punchline?  One person says something, the other rejoins, everybody busts out laughing, then the punchline gets repeated and the laughter redoubles.  Which is great!  Laughter is balm.  But then...  The punchline becomes a slurred mantra as the laughter becomes soggier, and after a few more iterations of The Funny Thing it's like listening to five year olds juked on sugar repeating knock-knock jokes as they improvise percussion instruments from cookware.

All of which makes me sound like an unfun, judgy fuck.  I'll allow it.  I'm not fun at parties anymore.  I probably wasn't to begin with.  But so what?  Most parties aren't that great, and people-- don't get me started on people.  About the sole benefit alcohol has for me, now, aside from sterilizing wounds, is providing an easy read on who & who won't be a good friend.  If someone insists on showing you around a new town and their idea of taking you on a tour of the city is a barcrawl, well...  It's revealing.

There are good drugs & there are bad drugs & there are drugs that aren't for me.  And booze is two out of three where I'm concerned.  If I have any regrets about ever partaking, it's that I wasted time & misled myself.  Most friendships turned out to be acquaintances once alcohol was subtracted from them.  So it goes.

Self-control was the only way someone with my history could survive as a bar employee for a solid decade.  I learned how to become a better artist over those years, owing to the fact that I was the token gay sober man on staff.  Of course I was also closeted and privately miserable and endlessly crusing midtown and never acting on any of it.  So there's self-control & then there's mental illness.  Either way, I would go 3 years at a stretch without having a drink.

I also was the token non-smoker.  Which is a whole other subject-- but then it isn't, either, because what I'm talking about is addiction, and the EASE of suborning oneself to an addictive pattern of behavior.  Smoking was (is) a ritual, for me, as an artist; smoking had become part of my creative process.

The trick, if there is one, is at the outset I told myself the day I stopped enjoying it, I would drop it.  I smoked from 17 (first cigarette) to 26.  In the last three years I had discovered the addiction and was wrestling to quit.  Moderation was not a thing I did.  I had survived murder attempts and near-fatal accidents and backwoods surgery and being a gay teen runaway, so I was smoking and drinking like I had something to prove to death.  I was at two packs of unfiltered Lucky Strikes a day on bad days.  And there I was, making myself walk five plus blocks in hothouse weather to buy a pack of not-inexpensive, somewhat difficult to find smokes, only to light one, take a drag, stub it out, then throw the pack over a random fence on the way home.  To make myself quit.

You might infer from the previous paragraph that I was an alcoholic during that time period.  No.  I was simply given to excess.  I didn't have my first hangover until some red box wine at 23.  First blackout, gin, 23, sealed the deal.  None of any of that, I said to myself.  And the idiots in my life who couldn't make that decision, I became less forgiving of.

If you're going to let the drugs make the choices for you you're not "out of control":  You're abdicating control.  You're making excuses.  I became as unsympathetic to myself on this subject as I did towards others.  I did not want to become a deadass loser.  So the bad habits weren't allowed to take up residence.  I became my own project; I wanted to be less angry.  I wanted to feel relief from stress.  So I began to excise the problems from my diet altogether:  cutting out alcohol, caffeine, nicotine...

One day, despairing at the possibility I might not have the willpower to quit cigarettes, I discovered I did.  I'm going to say something maddening, now.  Some made-up wannabe zazen gibberish, but it's 100% true:

I stopped Wanting To Quit.

& the desire vanished.

Lo, I was quit.  If I was feeling stress, I would dream about relapsing, and my response would be "Well shit now I have to quit all over".  Of course I'd say fuck it and smoke the dream fag anyhow.  But it was a decade between cigarettes, and when I did smoke, it was to see if the desire was still there, because covid-19 had made landfall.  Why the fuck not?

Of course I found a substitute.  We are talking about addiction, after all.

Smoking was hardest to walk away from because of the ritual.  The ritual of smoking pot replaced cigarettes & briefly became more cost-effective a form of stress and pain management than anything I'd heretofore known in my life.  But the difficulty of access to marijuana, the furtive illegality of it, the frustrating parade of dealers & hustlers & slow motion losers, made weed less desirable.  Being around weed also meant being around drunks, and by this point in our little jeremiad you may have inferred I was sick of my job babysitting drunks and telling people to take their drinks off the felt and fucko bazoo me boyo by the time I finally turned in my two weeks notice I was DONE being around alcohol.

But that's like hating guns, in America, isn't it?  One cannot live utterly shut of it.  It's a thing that's always going to be in society.  It's in every grocery store on every block in Chi.  Catholics like a drink!  And so does everybody else.  It's on every billboard train and magazine.  It's as American as applejack.  It's also bone stupid boring and gross despite being (don't get me wrong) a terribly fascinating SUBJECT in terms of its history & utility & the endless innovations Alcohol has resulted in.  The science?  Magnificent stuff.

But fuckoff with booze.

No-where in here have I mentioned my father's part in my mental math on the subject of alcohol.  Not really.  So, a closing anecdote.

My father was not an alcoholic.  Not initially. He was, however, the first male on his side of the family to develop a taste for the stuff, after I ran away.  He was not a drinker when he was beating or strangling or drowning me.  But he was a drinker by the time he got to beating his wife, and a for sure alcoholic after his son & wife had both abandoned him.  He'd built a chicken wire enclosure with a circumference of twelve feet out back of the greenhouse so when he was done downing a can of cheap beer by the stove, he could just chuck it out the back door.  By the time I returned home, in 2007, that fenced-in circle was a literal mountain of beer cans taller than I am.

My mother needed a divorce so she could move on with her life.  The only way that could happen was if I lied through my teeth to my former abuser and tell him I loved him & forgave him.  So I lied, and I helped him clean up the farm some.  I helped him bag up & relocate the mountain of beer cans, and at the bottom of the pile, beneath it all, we discovered the misplaced front bumper of the bus that was rusting in the pasture by the surplus military command center rigs he'd bought...

(You know, those wheel sets they attach to a cargo container so it can be towed like a mobile home? Yeah. He'd just bought some on a whim, to go along with the bulldozers and the machine lathe and all the other toys.)

"So that's where the bumper went," he harrumphed as I bagged up several year's worth of stale-ass beer cans, contemplating how this white trash mad scientist had filled our ancestral barn with rotting electronics.  How he had turned from the 70smonster who deformed my childhood into a pathetic old broken-down horder with an affinity for shitty watered-down american lager.

My diminished monster told me he was planning to build a new house out of bud light cans and old tires, maybe, one day.

That was my thanksgiving, in 2007.

This year?  This year was pretty good.

Happy holidays!

dream - 11o124: eternal exit

Back at my aunt's house, my great-grandfather's house, the house I can't seem to escape dreaming of.  The house I used to run to, despite the pervasive basement chill hinting at lonesome futility.  The home away from the home that abused me.  In the dream I'm even aware that refuge is why I preferred being here.  Because at least this sorrowful christian estate, with its dust-laden recesses of mystery, wasn't where I was being raised in fear.  It was near to fear but it wasn't living there.

Sig is with me, trying to help me leave.  I'm not being helpful in the exit.  Because I'm aware that this is where it starts & ends, in my internal eternity.  Sig's trying to shove my bike in the back seat of the car, having one hell of a time.  The cushioning is snagged and the bike seat has broken in two halves.  I'm sure it's cut him, but he's exhausted and not receptive to my ministrations.  He just wants to get away from this place that isn't a place.  He needs me to escape its gravity.

I take over maneuvering the bike and he climbs into the front seat, casting impatient looks at the old home with its peeling paint, forest green sunbleached to faded jade.  Sig's phone keeps pinging with fresh notices from friends.  My phone, the old broken one I use strictly as an mp3 player, is playing some pod about Grant Morrison.  Even on the level of our appliances & crutches, we're disconnected and in unrelated states psychologically.

I climb back in front.  Maybe we will leave this time.

dream - 1o2o24: old enemies

Return to "Backwoods Electronics," the original incarnation of ACE Electronics.  With Victor Cypert, organizing & rearranging all the electronic corpses in the old shop.  Shelf upon shelf, wall upon wall.  We seem to be attempting some sort of reconciliation.  Dad is cleaning up his personal life, apparently.  Sober now?  Vic seems to know something about it-- but he also knows how sparked on cocaine my father was, at one point.  Whatever.  Vic always has an angle.  He and I shuffle & re-shuffle several shelves worth of equipment to get to his old television, which still needs a bullet hole in the front chassis patched.

Then I'm left alone with dad, essentially hemmed in.  Shelves have to be shifted so I can even step back onto the main path in the shop, piled floor-to-ceiling as it is with all this junk...

dream - 1oo424: involuted auteurs

The story within the dream is that we all work in paper-- the whole family is here (they're not my family) and the occasion is one of unknotting history (this knot is not my history).  I've arranged for everyone to meet at the shop (this isn't our business) so that the surviving members can each read a chapter & compare notes, whereby they may Figure Shit Out For Themselves.  That's the hope, anyroad.

All five employees of the comic shop are confounded and not a little irritated, being summoned this way and presented with such a byzantine emotional undertaking.  I don't want to tell my family how fucked they are, seems to be the point, and tearfully I leave them to it, wandering out into the night and walking the tumultuous, chunked blacktop streets.

I pass punk acquaintances of old: weepy loud soggy breakups, shouty infidelities, and pass shaking my head at all of it.  Dessicated trees sloughing bark sag against the wind as crickets tune up for their nightly concerto, tall brown grasses whispering in the breeze.

The Whole Story my (adopted?) fam seem to've been left with is one wherein a generation or so ago my great-grandfather gifted a stolen inheritance to his kids so he could fuck off with another lover, leaving his former wife and children living on a patch of cursed earth, in a house once reserved for slaves.  'Not exactly subtle, subba-conscious,' I think, and carefully climb down an embankment built from old railroad ties.

When I eventually return to the shop I enter Another Dream: now that I don't know any of these people and the shop has changed hands, the entire stock is in a process of being reshuffled and reshelved.  The staff has pared down to two people, neither of whom resembles anyone from my dream family. 

Intently I browse, searching for comix I had reserved, but cannot find anything but proxies for the art I'm after: ugly, scratchy, elongated parodies of other styles, all of it by Dave Sim, seemingly, though I know he couldn't have drawn any of it.  The style is best described as Reid Fleming's Bacchus by Steve Bissette, and the colouring is disgusting, all CG browntown besotted with smears of green and violet.

The shop has been trying to close for hours-- ever since the Previous Dream (it wasn't my dream) the crew has been saddled with restructuring & sorting stock (these weren't my interests).  Nobody seems mad at me for taking so long to find my erstwhile purchases (whose books are these, anyway?) and the staff is actually fairly helpful.  I eventually ask how on earth Dave Sim recouped enough of an audience to be in demand for all these fuckin' variant covers, and the clerks answer, "Good damned question."

The nicest clerk, who I have pegged as trans, happens to point me directly to the book I'm after.  I'm prepared to use what little cash I have left on some lesser pamphlets of interest, about to ask them to hold onto the big b&w hardback of RFBbSB--  thank christ! it isn't coloured --when they offer it at a tremendous markdown.  I take it, as grateful for the boon as they are to be rid of it, and depart.