Notes on a bookstore:
The bookstore is a crowded, sordid affair. Everyone/thing looks uninterested and uninteresting. Cell phones carry conversations that one hopes are left at the door (or, left in another, lesser dimension). There is a café – really an a queer, hyper-electronically atavistic study pen – and a lofty (sic) hum moves about in the six feet above all those focused on screens that burn bright opposite the white, floating apples. They are in The Garden and each computer user appears to have taken a bite of the Forbidden [Corporate] Fruit.
Like too many of the café patrons, the books appear groomed, glossy, and forever reprinted; so clean and focused on their respective subject(s), you don’t dare pick one up for fear that merciless instruction has replaced stoic dreaming. I get no sense of wonder when I draw a copy towards me. Spines are newborn. The corners sharp enough to draw blood that would drip across covers so bright and impossibly full of fortune that the language within seems auxiliary, a byproduct, a side effect. I search in vain for Carver and am overrun by Cussler; copy after copy of which is wrapped in foil proclaiming slight variation on the theme (which best I can tell is completely awesome stuff. Seriously). Walking through the cordoned grid of each titled section, I see the categories we’ve arrived at: romance and computer programming, mystery and religion, Kathy Griffin and world history, rock/roll and horse calendars — all the stuff of good fiction presented in this reality.
A legion of men and women swarm the aisles to proceed with some sort of inventory that invokes them to all kinds of motion and noise, a type that is unplanned, momentarily considered, eternally understood. Each holds a small computer that resembles a re-invention of the calculator – the only visible buttons, labeled 0-9, are arranged in a grid like those on a cash register or old computer keyboard – and all tap incessantly and carefully at the keypad like archeologists exposing a dig with their really tiny hammers. Many don’t know exactly what is expected so there is a general air of bluster and amusement – an elementary feeling regarding those days of ‘substitute teacher’. I can hear (and see) one older woman, who, because of her age or her apparent confidence or her [rimless, stainless [steel] glasses, or possibly a combination of all three, repeat to a half dozen others, not collectively but individually, how to turn their handheld counting devices “ON.” They then begin to swarm saurian over the shelves, breaking that modest sense of focus Person X – completely average shopper – might reasonably hope to find in a corporate, cubist, book-selling box such as this one. All swarmers appear somewhat nattily dressed in generic, forgotten-logo-over-the-left-chest-emblazoned-maroon polo t-shirts and khakis that run the styling gamut from tapered leg/pleated, pleated/straight leg, straight leg/cuffed, cuffed/pleated, pleated/straight leg etc., etc., including slight color variations due to washing, time in service, brand, fabric type used by said brand; also some inner, lower leg seams are slightly frayed – those sitting bunched and crown-like above the crest of the shoe and that rub the opposite pant leg when the wearer is walking and/or running, although why one would be running in khakis, except in some sort of emergency or in an intoxicated state, possibly the very state that caused the emergency proper, is a question I’ll leave altogether unanswered, for now – from use, as are certain pant bottom cuffs that have been drug across numerous carpeted floors as the wearer schleps them room to room, having not had the foresight, possibly the means, to take them off while not at work to preserve their appearance of being relatively new, neat and kept, paying them no more mind than if they were a discreet woodland tic or foster child, OK, maybe not your foster child, but a foster child. Ostensibly these maroon and khaki workers have never been in a bookstore, their body languages and bawdy dialog more akin to electronic retail or wait staff, although possibly, since we’ve taken to creating general atmospheres of, arguably, disrespectful bigness regarding choice in store and product, and extreme impersonality also regarding store and product, they are simply mimicking the faux-mercurial, completely indestructible, predictable, experience of consumption today, that rounded emotion of ‘I guess so’ that crops up when, and if, we chance to consider ourselves in relation to our market actions and their significance, and how though we may believe choice as a consumer is dead, choices made as a consumer affect larger markets which in turn affect still larger markets etc. etc.
There is an angst and bustle that begins to ever-so-slightly rise towards climax – think the second of the fives parts of a story: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement. There is a sense of general helplessness and good humor among shoppers — something like ‘Oh well, what you can do with people you’ve selectively hired to perform an immediate and specific function regarding the well being of our store and, ostensibly, our customers.’