Too many books

Today, I started to pack for the big move next weekend. I have already filled up five large produce boxes with books. Why do I have all of these books?

Obviously I enjoy reading. However, I think that the bigger issue is that I have an insane fear of forgetting stuff. I'm not sure whether I'm going to be walking down the street one day and just start forgetting trivial shit. Supposedly having these books around will allow me to look up anything that I potentially forget.

If I ever got Alzheimer's Disease, I swear that I would probably kill myself. I used to have an Uncle Pat who slowly went through a dementia that would keep him up at nights crying because he couldn't remember who his third grade music teacher was (mine, BTW, was Mrs. Azeile (Ay-zeal-ay) ... I don't know how to spell her name). Apparently, he would start calling people at like 2 am asking, begging, them for the answer.

Nine times out of ten, they couldn't help him and they would either tell him to go to bed or they'd lie. But Pat was lucid enough that he would know that they were lying to him and that would make him cry even more. The strange thing was this guy wasn't crazy or anything. His memory started going and it literally drove him insane, and as the days melted into years, he completely lost it.

My mom told me about this when I was younger (he was actually my great uncle) and it became sort of a joke around our house when we couldn't remember stuff, "Who are you Uncle Pat?" But it seems that it made a huge subliminal impact on me, mainly because I can actually picture him in his bed thrashing around, trying desperately to search his brain for a name that will never come. I couldn't handle that. No way in hell.

Aside from packing up some stuff, not much is really going on. I plan to start my fourth cartoon after I get done with this entry, then Aly and I are going out to dinner with the Connollys and Reddish. I'm looking forward to this because I haven't seen those three guys in a long time ... more than six weeks for Reddish and it's been at least two months since we were at Jim and Sara's house.

They're all coming down to Aly's place and we're going to have a few drinks there before we go to the Village Smokehouse. After that we'll end up at Matt Murphy's for a few beers. We ended up there on Tuesday night for dinner with two of Aly's friends, Brian and Karen. I ended up having the Sheppard's pie, which wasn't as good a the Burren's, but it wasn't too bad.

Last night, we did nothing except go to Franklin to dog sit. By the time we got down there we grabbed some grub at the Rome (which is a kick-ass restaurant) and watched most of "Goodfellas". I love that movie, though I haven't seen it in a while.

I forgot to tell you about this, Aly got me a kick-ass Valentine's Gift, the book: "Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend" by Stephen Davis, who also wrote the Led Zeppelin tome: "Hammer of the Gods". That's one of my favorite rock biographies. I started reading it yesterday and so far, so good.

Thursday I finished another Manasso gift. This one was from Aly's brother John and it was "Fall River Dreams" by Bill Reynolds. This was a tremendous book, probably one of the better sports books that I've ever read. Basically, Reynolds spends an entire year with the Durfee High School (which is in Fall River) basketball team during the 1993-94 season.

The star of the team is a young (he was a junior) Chris Herren who ended up playing for Boston College before moving over to Fresno State. From there he went to the NBA, but because of bad choices (drugs, mostly) he was washed out within three years. However, this books paints a picture of Herren before all of his troubles began.

Reynolds does a great job of tying the fortunes of the basketball team to the pride that this depressed city has. When the team is doing well, despite the abject poverty most of its citizens face, the city is alive. Even though the book is set 10 years ago, the way that the city comes to the games and supports the boys remind me of "Hoosiers" or the high school stories that older people talk about from when they were kids.

It's almost as if the town stops for two hours while the game happens. Reynolds could've taken the easy way out and simply have written about the team and the players, but there is a lot of Fall River (and Lizzie Borden) history interwoven through out the tome. Another interesting thing is that one of the main characters, Jeff Caron, went to Merrimack and played on the hoop team during my Senior year. When I read his name I thought to myself that the name sounded familiar. In the epilogue it revealed what happened to the stars and that's when my suspicions were confirmed.

The one negative part of the book was that the editing wasn't very good. Misspellings, grammar syntax errors pop up through the book. It's not Reynolds' fault, but it was a tad annoying. I would give it four Mayor McCheeses.