Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Tuesday, August 03, 2004 The Pitch: It's like The Village meets Big Night! Last Thursday night, before E. & I split for the fun-filled hijinks of Humboldt, I saw a very ominous thing in the window of Red Hill Books on Courtland. There were two signs (which, in this context, means pieces of cardboard on which someone had written pertinent info in Sharpie and then taped into the windows) advertising "a big book sale" on a coming weekend in August. "On Saturday, all hardcovers $2.00. All paperbacks $1.00. On Sunday, a bag of books $5.00."My blood ran cold. I like Red Hill Books a lot. Although I haven't bought anything there since scoring those copies of Suttree and Americana, I go in there all the time and browse, hooked as I currently I am in the loop of someone who doesn't need to buy any books and doesn't have a particular book in mind but keep looking on the shelves anyway. And if there's one thing I've learned about bookstores, when they're selling bags of books for a flat rate, it means that they're closing and they don't even want to think about what to do with their inventory. They just want to wash their hands of the whole deal. Of course, I'm a huge paranoid and the sign didn't say, as it sometimes does, "Going Out of Business Sale." Maybe it's just an inventory blow-out. As Edi pointed out later, Red Hill is part of that chain of stores that include Dog-Eared Books over on Valencia and maybe they're just getting rid of a bunch of their old inventory that isn't moving. I went in to the store sadly, wondering what the place would look like jammed with those eager red-faced book-hoarders tearing at the shelves come that Saturday morning--fat-gutted owlish men who keep lists of high-demand items to sell on the Internet for the extra cash needed to fund their squalid hobbies, such as keeping child brides and boasting in bars about their decades of unemployment--and decided to ask if the store was really going to close. The clerk wasn't behind the counter so I poked around the corner of the cental remainder section. Excuse me, I would ask. Are you closing, or am I a paranoid yahoo who fosters complicated guilty relationships with the stores I patronize? The clerk, a tiny indy chick who frequently filled the store with music from Belle & Sebastian or Cat Power, was sitting on a chair talking to an unhappy bearded man with glasses and a baseball cap. "Well, maybe," the girl said falteringly. "I could just stay with you until Jessica gets back from New York?" I did a quick 180 at that, as if remembering that I had left my pornography burning on the stove, and walked out of the store. Nobody needs to have the dissolution of their young indy love relationship interrupted by a guilty cad who hasn't even bought that fetching (but overpriced) Edward Gorey remainder, inquiring as to whether their place of employment is going balls-up. And really, what better confirmation did I need? Sometimes people's lives just crash around them--the job and the relationship go at the same time, and maybe you also find out you have candida too, and there's no reason for it and nothing to be done but stay on your friend's couch, dead-eyed and awake at three a.m., and wonder if all the Belle & Sebastian and Cat Power wasn't in some way either an omen or a cause of all the concurrent heartbreak--and it's better for absolutely everyone to keep all the words of hope and commiseration tucked far away, until they can be expressed by someone far more capable of saying them. posted by Jeff Lester | 10:09 AM | |
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