1857 Root Of All Evil.

I like the smell of books. I wonder if it’s just because I like the smell, or I like books and I associate that smell with books and that’s why I like them. I think it’s that I just like the smell because I remember liking it before I could read. When I was little my mother took me with her when she researched genealogy and stuff. My sister & I spent a long time in libraries & cemeteries. I think my sister is the only person in the world who read the entire children’s section of the Kinsley, Kansas public library. That particular library was really weird in retrospect. Or maybe it was just unique in my experience with libraries. It had planters that I vaguely remember the soil looking odd in. It was also mostly tiled, which is uncommon. Carpet muffles sound so that’s the norm, but the Kinsley library had those big 50s style white tiles with purposely smudged colors mixed in. Except in the kid’s section. It had this weird ass carpet that felt like it was made of plastic and had a gaudy pattern. Sometimes I think about going back there to see if they ever gutted it or if it’s the same as it was, but then I’m like “meh”. That’s a long drive for virtually no payoff. I don’t remember much good about Kinsley & I expect that hasn’t changed in the decades since I left.

Fun fact: the Kinsley sports teams are called the coyotes, but they pronounce it Kai-yotes instead of Kai-yo-tees.

This isn’t important but I just remembered this weird thing about Kinsley’s school. The gradeschools are in Kinsley, but the middleschools are in Oferle I don’t know if I spelled that correctly, but fuck Oferle anyway. It’s pronounced Oh-fer-lee. Anyway once you get to, like, 6th grade you get bussed nine miles, or something, every day, to Oferle from 5th through, like, whatever grade the line between gradeschool & high school is. I never went to the Kinsley High School. We moved the year before I would have. It was a good thing too because as much as I hated high school I would have hated it in Kinsely a lot more than I did in Garden, which is really saying something because I super hated high school there. Small towns were, at that time at least, terrible for alcoholism & drug abuse because there’s nothing to do. So basically, as someone actually strong enough to withstand peer pressure, I would have spent all those years in isolation while the rest of the people my age dabbled themselves into oblivion, or whatever. At least in Garden there was a small selection of squares to be boring with. Oh, I got off track with my bitter remembrances. What I’m now wondering is why the hell was the school system set up in such a dumb way? Was it to make Oferle relevant enough to remain a city? Was it some kind of graft? Was it laziness? I wonder if anyone knows or cares. I know I don’t care enough to research it, and it’s unlikely I’m going to get an answer from anyone from that area as I have kept in contact with none of them, including people I’m related to.

It’s a shame Alex isn’t real though. She could find out this mystery quick smart on the double & I could know this utterly useless bit of information for a couple of days.