Beans for Breakfast

I’m cataloging the books that I picked up yesterday, working on a university press book about race and the justice system. It’s marked with a yellow “Used” sticker from a college bookstore. I flip through the pages and notice some highlighting — Damn, I wouldn’t have picked it up if I’d noticed that. A closer inspection finds that the highlighting is isolated to the first nine pages — the introduction. The corner of the ninth page is bent over as a page marker. The 290 pages that follow appear to be unread — a dropped class. I finish cataloging the book. Now bored of data entry, I refresh Bloglines and click through to a couple of sites. Then I write this blog entry; and just as I’m finishing the sentence that’s three sentences back — “…a dropped class” — one of the bulbs in my desk-side lamp burns out. It flashes blue-white and then the room is dark.