Don't Read

I have to admit, I'm not a reader anymore.  Reading was not improving my hand skills.  As my mother once told me, you can read many books but don't know how to use a hammer.  And she was right,  how many times had I not banged my thumbs with compressed steel.

But that wasn't the reason I stopped reading.  I stopped reading because I felt detached from real life and it was not helping with my social life.  I was becoming a hermit and was resembling one of those Jesuit priests without the bribing.  But it was in layers.  I first stopped reading theory.  I got tired of the stupid Political Science Theory, then the Urban Planning Theory--Ed Soja and Allen Scott were overrated--ok I didn't read it but I glanced at it.

Then I stopped reading the history books because they all sounded the same.  I was not turned on.  Why teach if you can just read the book.  Too anal, too much Marxism or Proudism, too English American and too righteous.

Then I stopped reading in Spanish.  I had read most of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez stuff but after the third novel, I felt I was reading too much history of Colombia.  But he's lived in Mexico City since the mid 1960's.  What does he really know of Colombia?  Then he focused on those French writers that he interloped was a type of poetry.  I couldn't take it.  Though I have to admit, I liked the whorehouses he wrote about but after a while I thought to myself, I must go but they cost money and are banned in California.  All great books take place in whorehouses but there are none in California.

The other stuff--feminism and lifestyles I could careless.  Another type of personal history like Marquez.

I even read the Chicano Generation but it was too East LA or too Texas which I dispised both and even tried Mexico and Mexico immigrant but that is another type of self history which I also could not relate to.  I don't care for stories on crossing mountains in Mexico to get here.

I got tired and just gave up reading.  I even learned that many whom I taught with also did not read.  And thought, if the leaders aren't reading why would the followers unless it is a phone text.

So I gave up reading.