I am just a bull in a china shop. My parents should have named me “Hulk” because I don’t know my own strength. I break things all the time, a lot like a toddler. When I see something shiny (and okay, it doesn’t have to be shiny) I need to touch it and pick it up. I can’t just look with my eyes. The word delicate doesn’t register in my brain until I’ve smashed something into 1,000 little pieces. Not only do I have these butter-fingers, but I’m also a bit accident prone; I fall walking up and down the stairs. I walk into things and knock them down. I step on people’s feet, I kick things when I walk by and a lot of times I’ll fall over onto something and break it. Never sit across from me at the table because, chances are, if I have a glass of water I’m going to spill it onto your lap.

Knowing this I should have massive amounts of bubble wrap around me at all times to reduce the hazard for other people/objects. That got tiring after a while. Not to mention expensive. Of course the day I didn’t get all wrapped up in plastic I screwed up at work and broke a part of the computer. I apparently kicked a wire that connects the keyboard to the hard drive. Normally, this would not be a problem as I could just reattach the little sucker. Alas, the wiring leading into the circuit board was yanked a few too many times and this was Howard’s 9th life. (I like to name things. My iPod’s name is Doris. I digress…)

I try not to think about my incredible ability to break things and the incredible power I hold as a walking-accident. This is why I spent the afternoon perusing a little used book store in Chelsea, looking through a $500 copy of Virginia Woolf’s “Jacob’s Room.” The man behind the counter was in no mood for conversation. I though he’d be interested in my prized Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations. He didn’t care. I don’t even think he knows of W.S. Landor. That is a sad thing. It seemed to me, as we conversed for an entire 94 seconds, that he didn’t give a toss for literature, only those vintage collectables which bring in money. Quite sad, no? Perhaps he sensed I could at any moment drop the $500 book and detach the pages from the spine. That would be an acceptable excuse for his coolness this afternoon. It is terribly disheartening to go to a place like that, surrounded in great thoughts and beauty that is a vintage book, only to find it is tainted with dollar signs. Other than the grumpy-greedy clerk, the store is quite lovely. I have my eye on a more fairly priced copy of Virginia Woolf’s “Waves.”