By the Book

Do it by the book.
Because that's what it says to do, in the book.
Or do it the way your neighbor does it,
assuming you like your neighbor, that is.
Of course you like your neighbor.
Because that's what it says to do, in the book.

Now don't get me wrong,
I've got nothing at all against reading.
Books are great.
You find all sorts of good things in books.
I found a twenty dollar bill in a book, once.
It was mine. (The bill, not the book.)

And I don't even have anything against neighbors,
as long as they keep the lawn mowed
and don't expect me to bake them pumpkin bread every Christmas...
But what was I talking about?
Doing it by the book, is that it?
I think that's it.

Funny thing about books, is the way
they break up thought into linear little chunks.
I mean, you'll always have your fancy "avant-garde"
going on about streams of consciousness,
but if you're honest with yourself,
that stuff's easy to write, and pretty uninspired too.

And then you get into doing things by the book,
and that's where you start running into trouble.
Because nothing that can be written down
makes anything like the slightest bit of sense.
It's just that we've agreed to pretend it makes sense,
and that's good enough for most of us most of the time.

Because people go around with this idea in their heads
that words are here for communication. That's silly.
You might as well say TV is for showing moving pictures,
or automobiles are for getting you from one place to another.
On one level, yes, it's true enough.
But when you look into it, it's a gross oversimplification.

Is a house just for shelter against the cold?
At first, yes. It's an immediate solution for an immediate problem.
But things get more complicated after a couple thousand years.
It's not just shelter, now. Now it's a place for storing junk,
or forgetting to change that light bulb,
or keeping a dozen little secrets.

So when you do it by the book,
it's easy to think it makes perfect sense
or that it makes no sense whatsoever.
And both of them are sort of true,
and both of them are sort of not true,
when you do it by the book.

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(Photo credit: "Books" from Christopher on flickr)