Since Neil Himself is traveling around the country promoting the tenth birthday (er . . . anniversary) of American Gods and I’m going to be in the same room with him in just over a week . . . I purchased another copy. Deciding to sip my overly priced latte at a B&N in Burbank, I opened the novel and started re-reading. Haven’t picked this one up in a long time, so it’s almost a virgin read.
Reading in a public space is weird. Sometimes I can drown everything out and focus on the words, but yesterday focusing was a bit harder (impossible really). Shadow is on the phone with his wife, feeling the coming storm but heartened by the feeling of love for his wife. Meanwhile I can’t help but notice:
A man. A woman. Sitting in a cafe in a bookstore. Sitting with coffee but no books or magazines on the table between them. Sitting not talking to each other. They are staring past each other; trying what? not to be together? Trying to be together in comfortable silence? Only it doesn’t look comfortable from the outside. It looks decidedly uncomfortable. Like the guy outside trying to make a U-turn in his too large SUV – he can’t crank the wheel enough and almost plows into the large-assed pedestrian waiting to cross at the light. I feel bad for thinking about this woman’s ass, but her upper body is so much smaller and her ass is so large in comparison it’s hard not to think of her as large-assed. I can’t see her face, so . . . she’s just a behind.
Clearly, reading in public yesterday was more people watching disguised as reading. As I realized this I decided to get up and leave so that I could watch more of Farscape on Netflix (which seems to be offline today – crazy).
I’d like to tell you I have a point to all this, I don’t.
Read American Gods if you haven’t. Follow @neilhimself on Twitter if you have an account. And . . . People watching is fun, but kind of creepy too.