LOVE, LIFE, TIME, POLITICS, HISTORY and other issues in this purgatory of cliche'

Time flies whether you're having fun or not. If you're bored to death due to several activity of nothingness, time still flies and possibly over the cuckoo's nest.

Am I having fun? Do I find what I do, say, blogging, fun?

bwehehe! mwehehe! har har de har!

I think I am. Therefore.

It was a year ago when I went to the Miami International Book Fair and blogged about it. It really seemed like only 7 or 8 months ago and when I saw those banners and posters along US 1 announcing the event, I could not believe it. It seems like my life is just a video game playing before my eyes, where the past is right there, and then the present is right...here...opps, that's the past already, it's the one here...nope again...

Here's a definition of bride (by I forgot whom, I'll mention your name as soon as I recall): somebody who has a bright future behind her.

And so yesterday I went to Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus in downtown Miami for the bookfair - the largest literary event in the nation - to hunt for books that I will have to give away to friends and relatives for the holidays (consequently dictating them to read, which, ironic to my intention, sometimes makes them asiwa, like this acquaintance Y to whom I bequeathed Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities which she did not care for - as I realized later on that her greatest book ever was Tuesdays With Moron, I mean, Morrie.)

Truly, if she was asiwa, I am hanga. I should instead have given her this book from a Spanglish Bookseller entitled Tell Me A Cuento.

I was at the campus at 10:00 am, gasping for breath after being overwhelmed by thousands and thousands of titles screaming for attention. Within an hour of searching, scanning, speed-reading and smelling, I already picked up and paid for the following books (6) and literary journals (3):

The Crystal Frontier - Carlos Fuentes
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
Bono, His Life, Music and Passions - Laura Jackson
Iceland's Bell - Halldor Laxness
Stranger Shores, Literary Essays - J.M. Coetzee
Audubon Guide to the National Wildlife Refuges (Southeast) - D. Gove
SubTropics - Spring/Summer 2006 Issue
Knock - Issue Three One
Backwards City Review - Fall 2006 Issue

Then I went to Chrysler Lane to line up for tickets to Sen. Obama Barack's 6 pm lecture and was surprised to see hundreds of people lining up already, mostly white, mostly senior citizens. I found my spot, stood my ground, put my bag (a giveaway Comcast tote) down, pulled Coetzee's book, and began to read his first essay What Is a Classic?

Along the way of my reading the chapter, I was building up an argument against Coetzee's open q if Bach's music could be categorized as a classic (or an undying music) when, as he noted, it was obscure during his time and came to fame only via Mandelssohn's direction of St. Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829.

When I brought my head up and looked behind me, I was surprised anew by the hundreds and hundreds of people lined up, all happening in 10 minutes after I took my spot. I was thinking, this guy Obama is a phenom, one that possibly Coetzee(?) can analyze and explain to us who were standing there in line, unmoving, hungry and shaking, but never complaining because nobody ever forced us to stand there in the first place - except by a vision that could be rewarding if we ever get to see this guy speak in person.
---

At 7 pm, as I was walking the three blocks away from the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts to the spot where I parked my car, carrying the tote bag which by then became heavier with the addition of Sen. Obama's hardbound copy of The Audacity of Hope (autographed), I was thinking if I just witnessed history being made in the previous one hour for the final obliteration of the color barrier, courtesy of this man who claimed that the highest office in any democratic government should be the Office of Citizen, by his election as the first black President of the United States of America.

There is one more thing worth looking forward to in the future.