3 Games to play when you've read every chap book, anthology, and book of interesting poetry in your home.
Game 1:
� Hear from a friend in Worcester about a cool book store in Boston.
� Meet your friend who lives in Boston with the intention of going to lunch and a poetry bookstore without knowing the exact address or phone number of the aforementioned friend.
� Find the street that sounds like Clinton, Lipton, or something to do with a ledge protruding from a mountain where there are two blue sided houses directly side by side looking exactly the same.
� Go to the next set of houses meeting that exact description being closer to the closed down Chinese food restaurant.
� Pick one of the houses and ring the bell where upon a Puerto Rican man will answer the door, take one look at you, exclaim "Caraho" and slam it gently.
� Ring all the other bells of all the other apartments at both twin houses and wait for ten minutes while no one answers.
� Call every one you know looking for the aforementioned aforementioned friend's phone number.
� Give up.
� Loose.
Game 2:
� Decide to go into Boston alone and find a bookstore you know nothing about other than it is IN Boston & it sells nothing but poetry.
� Decide to take the T because parking in any city is much too expensive of game to play.
� Use logic to pick a stop at random to begin your search.
� Decide the most possible fun to be derived from this game would be to walk around pretending to know exactly where you are going.
� Give up.
� Start looking for a place to stop and ask for directions.
� Happen to cross the MIT bookstore because while you were pretending to know where you were going and being very logical about it as well, you decided to get off at Kendal square which happens to be the MIT T stop and if anyplace in Boston would logically have a book store of all poetry it would be at MIT & so you walk into that book store and ask the clerk because if anyone would be able to give directions to a bookstore that logically is located in MIT it would be a clerk in a Bookstore at MIT.
� Find out the bookstore is in Harvard square and named Grolier books.
� Get back on the T
� Get back off
� Verify you are going outbound
Sub Game 2a
� Try to write serious poetry on the train while standing
� While an older lady is sitting right next to where you are standing
� While she keeps brushing your ass
� With her face
� Get off at Harvard Square
� Stop & pay a homeless man for directions and a thin newspaper
� Find out only that there are a bunch of bookstores that way, but genuinely thank him anyway
Sub Game 2b
� Save money, encourage entrepreneur-ship & a free market economy by only giving to every third person asking for change unless they are offering you something legal in return, like "Spare Change, The Massachusetts Journal of the Streets" or directions or a kind word or yes, even a story of how they got there.
� They were not always homeless.
� Read this newspaper and discover how little you really know about the human condition.
Sub Game 2c
� Happen by Club Passim's after following the "Down There" directions of a previous directions giver.
� Walk down for Brunch & find every table but one taken by women.
� Seat yourself & wonder if this club is this folk club by night is a Feminist meeting hall by day.
� Quickly prepare your rebuttal for when you are sternly asked to leave by a otherwise normal looking woman who doesn't appear to like men at her meeting exercising her god given right to reverse prejudice.
� Watch a couple of people leave and two tables of men come in while you eat an omelet.
� Quietly call yourself an ignorant idiot while pretending to sip your coffee.
� Find a map of every bookstore in Boston at the wrong bookstore and still not know where you are
� Walk around for 20 more minutes and realize if you turned around when you got off the T stop the first time, you would have seen it.
� Walk up to Grolier books
� Find that it is closed every Sunday
Sub Game 2d
� Look for your book by peering through the Plate Glass Window.
� Give up
� Loose
Game 3:
� Get back on the T
� Go home and write your own poetry
� Finish
� Win
The above is a true story of a day I had back in March of 1999.
