Sold an “I Will Keep You Alive” and gave away a “Cheesesteak.” And had a couple brief book-related encounters.
So read on.
The sale was to a definitely-under-40, maybe under-30 – fellow with dark curly hair and dark curly beard. He’s a mathematician – that’s five I’ve now met, for those keeping count – in Berkeley for a just-concluded 10-day conference, on his way to New Mexico where a friend has started an alternative university – or was it an alternative universe?; with New Mexico you can’t be sure. I asked why he had chosen IWKYA since it usually appealed to older readers. Health issues of his own, he said.
Payment became a problem. He did not have cash and I had not hooked Square up to my new bank account. Since he was about to leave town, I offered to give him a copy and trust him to send me a check, and then he remembered he had his check book in his car and went out to get it. It’s on a Bloomington, Indiana bank but my ATM took it.
The gift was to an ex-Philadelphia newspaperman who runs a valuable on-lite site about Philadelphia high school basketball, a research tool I have used on more than once, most recently in connection with a mock epic poem I’d written in 12th grade and was sprucing up. That’s a different story, but it led to a friend putting a question to me, which I put to the site-runner, whose reply led to me sending him my book. Every ex- or current Philadelphian should have one.
In other news…
1.) Conversation (a) was with an engineering student from India, who is working on a non-privacy invasive AI system which could, for example, tell him the average age of everyone in the café, but before he could explain why anyone would need to know this, he had to rush off to class. (You know how engineering students are about classes.) (B) was with a UPS driver, who said he liked to read books and had grandkids who liked to read them; but before I could think which, if any, of my books were grandkid-friendly, he had to rush back to his truck. (You know how UPS is about schedules.) I gave both men my card which, as frequent readers know, is my way of insuring I will never hear from people again.
2.) I received an email from a fellow in Indonesia who had read an article I had published three-years ago in a magazine in New Zealand about a cartoonist from Toronto. This fellow wanted to contact this cartoonist. I replied I would see what I could do – and my computer immediately informed me my message was “Undeliverable.” Since all I had done was hit “Reply” to the email which had come from him, I was mystified. I forwarded his email anyway to the cartoonist and he emailed the fellow without difficulty.
So I don’t know. Is this fellow in Indonesia on some CIA terrorist list making communications to him from America impossible? I asked the cartoonist to let me know if buildings in Toronto started blowing up.
3.) Just as an aside, I noted that my previous “Adventure” received four “Like”s at FB, which is about the median, whereas my latest “Dream” about having sex with Sally Fields and Jane Russell received 18, which leads me to conclude my dream-life is of much more interest to people than my actual one.
Or that people prefer reading about sex to commerce.
ALL OF BOB’S BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE FROM: www.theboblevin.com.
So many Bob Levins on the Internet; I'm the Bob Levin who writes.