TKOG Who needs you to find her secret (which is maybe the same as yours)

NTKOG #135: The kind of sad-eyed whimsy monger who tries to salvage souls in this big impersonal world with the psychological equivalent of a “Lost Puppy!” poster.

I am: always going to be one for casting messages in bottles. I can think of virtually no other reason one would pursue writing.

I am not: even close to convinced that all this message-casting is one hundredth as valuable for the message-catcher as the -caster.

The Scene: The Brookline Booksmith — which is to say, my happy place. During work, I bottled my message: a half-page reflection to a dude who is, like me, at a crossroads. Printed out twenty-two copies, which I signed with scrawled hearts, and folded them, prepared to tuck into books.

First big obstacle: where to put the bally things? In books, obviously, but which ones would be most likely to find the right eyes? Obviously the reader had to be somehow like me, but it wasn’t enough that he be merely intellectual or analytical — he had to be precisely at a crossroads in life. So I chose books that I had personally turned to in times of great pitch and moment; or, conversely, books that had thrust me from complacency into some great writhe for change. Books with potential.

Of course, it took quite a while to come up with twenty-two of the appropriate gems, which led to Problem The Second…

The friggin’ notes didn’t just place themselves. Which, come to think of it, would have been the only thing in the world more suspicious than a raggedy 20something pacing the shelves for an hour, slipping a volume out of line, opening it for just one moment, furtively glancing around, then slamming it shut and reaching back into her pocket. Twenty-two times. In. A. Row.

’cause leaving 22 anonymous pep talks to be discovered as though by magic with the leisure of the years? Charming. Getting caught cramming home-made self-esteem pamphlets in used books? Completely unacceptable.

Okay, okay, not so much a message in a bottle as a print-out in a Wodehouse novel.

Anyway, aside from one close call in the Presidential Biography section, no one found out my dirty little secret. And I guess I’ll never know whether anyone ever does…

The Verdict: Even though PostSecret aficionados swear by this sort of endeavor, I personally find the leaving of secrets and affirmations in public places to be a bit cheesy. The part of this exercise that did wow me, though: taking time to think about what books are most likely to be read by people who are right on the precipice of momentous potential change. And, even more than that, thinking about what I would say to these people, given the chance. I mean, me, a girl the sum total of whose Great Life Wisdom could be written on a post-it in pig latin.

My message actually ended up being a bit too personal to repost, but is a variation on my daily theme: “There is something inside of you that craves to be extraordinary. Feed it.” How about you guys, though? What one message would you cast out to people who just might need to hear it?

Tagged as: bookstore, brookline, brookline booksmith, cheesy, dude if you can correctly guess five or more novels i left notes in i'll hit you up with a book from my wodehouse stash, in retrospect i would also include some instructions for making popcorn because i always fail at it and i'm sure there are others with my severe life issues, inspiration, post secret, schmoopy, secrets, seriously how is this popcorn so bad