Last night, I was sitting with a group of friends (full disclosure: watching Lost) and there was some wine. Also good cheese and a cornucopia of rice crackers–like four years’ supply of the little cheesy kind–but that’s a story for another day.

Somehow the topic of “grimmest book ever” came up. Sean asserted that the grimmest book he’d ever read was The Kite Runner. I tend to disagree, but realize that I can’t come up with a good alternative for the prize.

The first book that leaps to my mind is Blindness by Jose Saramago. It involves humans getting eaten by dogs. Squalor and rape. Et cetera. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is not exactly sweetness and light, either. But both of those books are so good that they have their own sort of redemption.

Come to think of it, I had some potent misery and quivering nights reading Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. In fact, I’m going to stop here: that was the harshest book I read in the past year or so. Oh, wait, Andres Dubus’ House of Sand and Fog. That, too. But different.

You?

Tags: Books, depressing, reading, sad

Due to complications of schedule, it was necessary for me to accompany Mr. Pencil yesterday to Hillsboro, where he needed to go into work and give a presentation about something important and technical. It’s not really possible for me to hang around in the giant, tomblike buildings of the Very Large Corporation He Works For quietly sucking wireless and getting work done, so I had him drop me off at a coffee shop I knew of. The only coffee shop out there, as far as I know. The only free wireless around there, as far as I know. I know of this place because of that year-and-a-quarter I somehow magically deactivated various parts of my psyche and also worked for the selfsame very large corporation.

Yesterday was a pearl-grey, blowsy, hard-scrabble, mid-November chiller. It was simply inauspicious. David dropped me off at the coffee shop, which is peculiarly located, alone, amidst lonely, hulking light industrial complexes.

Things went kind of badly from the start. Perhaps I was testy from the beginning. Ordering a hot chocolate took inordinately long. The wireless connection didn’t really work. I could get to Google, but almost everything else just timed out. I needed to get work done. Four children were chasing each other and shrieking.

Frowning and stiffly grumpified, I was finally starting to work on something offline when I looked up and saw the place had cleared out. I stared around and realized I could see the hours printed on the door, albeit backwards because I was looking at the glass door from the inside. Then I saw that they closed at 3:30. Oh, crap. I looked at the time. 3:27. Shit.

Outside, still grey, still hard, still ugly. Mr. Pencil wouldn’t be done for another 45 minutes at best. So I packed up my crap and started trekking. Trying to walk all the way to where he worked was futile: it is probably a good 4 miles away, and I was carrying: a laptop, a 3-ring binder, a textbook, a few other books, an umbrella, a satsuma mandarin, bitterness, various cables and bits and iPods and wallets and phones and you get the picture. And you have to understand: there was nowhere, nowhere to go. Isolated. Marooned.

Stomping up Evergreen Boulevard in Darkest Hillsboro is no treat. Each building takes about seven minutes to pass because they are so enormous. Parking lots mostly empty. A lot of cars on the four-lane road, not a human in sight. Ten minutes spent passing an immense isolated field of dead thistle, dead tree, and blackberry bramble. Leaves blown against verges. Rusted fire hydrants. I began to wonder when, if ever, anyone else had last walked here.

Alternating buildings, then tattered remnant of farmland, with huddled Canada Geese. Grim, well-kept landscaping.

And then this sadness began to seep in. I walk every day near my house, proudly and happily, running little local errands or just wandering around. But here, I realized, slowly, I felt embarrassed. As if homeless, as if shameful. I started to worry that one of the people in the millions of cars that passed would recognize me. This feeling intensified when the sidewalk ended west of the immense “SolarWorld” complex and I had to walk in a careful mince-step at the edge of the shoulder in a 55mph zone.

By the time Mr. Pencil picked me up, I felt like I’d been scarred for life.

Tags: depressing, hillsboro, walking