Paperback Novel Envy

On the train between Limoges-Benedictins and Gare du Austerlitz in Paris . . . I’m sitting here making this note, and experiencing serious paperback-novel-envy for the fellow two rows behind us. I know he’s there . . . our seats face backward! (Gotcha!) Anyway, I finished my last English-language paperback before we left Covilhã, and I have been going quietly insane, reading all the real estate brochures in the shop windows, reading menus in bars and restaurants (many a time the same thing), translating street signs and highway maps.
Yes; I -know- I can download a bazillion novels to my electronic body-extensions, but it’s just not the same. The slick plastic or aluminum of the device doesn’t have the china-paper cover feel that my fingers itch for or the tooth of the pulp-paper pages. Nor is there the comforting tank of bleached wood pulp for my nose. Let’s not even talk about the abuse my eyeballs endure as they interface and cycle with the refreshment rate of the screens phosphors. 
I can’t stuff my electronics into my cargo-pants pocket (well, yes; alright; my phone fits, but I can’t even -see- that to read. I don’t have that comforting slap against my thigh as the author reminds me quietly that his protagonist is in a jam . . . or maybe balanced on a jamb, balanced seven floors above a Budapest street . . . and the bad guys are picking the door lock so they won’t alarm the other hotel guests . . . I don’t have that.
All I have is the steady wearing-down of my hip pockets as the train rocks and rolls across France like Hercule Poirot’s Orient Express hurtling across the Alps. Except this is the broad light of a French countryside afternoon, and I have an article to complete.
It’s a burden not all can bear, but somehow we manage.

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