finished the caretaker by doon arbus. it's about a collector of stuff and his wonder cabinet foundation who dies and the caretaker comes to manage the collection and do tours. i didn't enjoy it much, but it may be the kind of book that slips under the threshold and lingers. it kind of annoyed my brain like an irritant. i couldn't figure what the collector or the collection or the caretaker was really about. something about how things outlive us and have a life of their own and we have to take care of them and then somebody else has to disperse or destroy them. maybe there's some equivalence between this foundation in the midst of rapid development in the city taking over and the way humans collect from and take over earth not really with a coherent plan or anything like preservation or care but just to have and show how we have things to somehow represent us though things just fill the spaces we inhabit before we disappear.

this is not a review. i didn't sleep well and my head is stuffy. this is not an excuse. i'm just making a note here.

also the barbara guest book i complained about being an ex library book was indicated as such so i was wrong and i changed my rating from awful to excellent. now i can savor it slowly cuz it's mine's.

post dat. now i finished the caretaker i feel a kind of release. i see the intent. i see how the caretaker had so many experiences before becoming the caretaker but he only saw them as pragmatic episodes of his life of trying to keep mind and body together until he found a purpose, yet he became the caretaker of a dead collector's objects without a sense of his life. i wonder if he glimpsed what had happened. did he realize? is was like something happened to him, but he chose it, something compelled him but it was not him. now i want to, and we had already planned to, go to my studio apt which is a collection, and take some pictures of how it looks without me and see if i see myself in it, or like the collector in the book am i just the indent in the bed and the fingerprints in the dust and in the indentation.