Shit, I can’t sleep.
I do remember dreaming that my sister had written three books, the last of which was a diary with calligraphed pages and on several pages were just the words, “As it was.” I once had an elaborate argument with an ex-boyfriend over whether or not it was possible to read in dreams. It was, and is. Clearly, I win the argument because years later, I still care enough to publish my opinion on a blog.
The store was batshit today (Saturday.) All the weirdos come out of the woodwork to hang out at the used book store on a Saturday afternoon. Or maybe it’s just that when you get a high enough density of lovable eccentrics, they start looking like a mob of weirdos. You know, the guy that asks you where you keep the nonfiction about werewolves. I love that guy. I think, “Should I tell him?…” And a lady asked me why the Bibles weren’t organized Alpha by Author. And then there are people who just want the maximum amount of human contact possible. This sounds charming, but these people are insatiable. A woman today said she wanted a book about Pigeons. I, thinking I am a very clever girl, remember that on some random display we have a book, on sale, called “Pigeons,” that has a giant pigeon on the front and is all about pigeons. I bounce off and return with the book. She flips through it and says, “It hasn’t got any pictures.” Well, no…. “It’s for my son,” she says. She is about a million years old but I say, “Is he a child?” thinking she wants a picture book (and I know just the one to recommend: “Don’t Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late.” Charming.) But she says, no, her son keeps pigeons and he wants to know what kind of pigeons they are. So, ah! You want a field guide! I take her to the field guides and pick up “Birds of North America,” published by the not-wholly-disreputable National Geographic operation. I consult the index and take her to a page chock full of illustrations of the many pigeon and rock dove varieties of North America. “No….” she says right away. “That’s not it.” Now I realize what she really wants. She doesn’t want a book. She wants me to find out, sight unseen, what kind of bird her adult son is raising. I want to sell her this National Geographic field guide, not because I’m preoccupied with the books store’s bottom line but because I want her to go home with it and flip through every page at her leisure, maybe with a nice glass of wine, and figure out her own self what kind of bird her son is raising. What I don’t want to do is flip stand here in the aisle and flip through every page with her.
But that is exactly what we do. I just start going down the index, skipping all around in the book. “Nope, no, that’s not it,” she says THE INSTANT I get a page open, before she’s had a second to even study each of the carefully illustrated pictures. “No, nope…. no….. no, those aren’t it…. those are ducks….” I say, “Are you sure it’s a pigeon?” She says, “Oh yeah, it’s a pigeon.” I say, “How do you know?” She says, “It looks like a pigeon.” I open the book back to the page full of pigeons. “But it doesn’t look like any of these pigeons.” “No, nope…” she says.
At this point, there is no easy way to let her know, “I’ve given up on you. I am not solving your pigeon problem today.” I close the book and put it back on the shelf. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”
She stands there, quietly. It’s awkward. I spot some software about birds and grab it. “You could try this? Do you have a computer?”
“I just worry that it wouldn’t be on there,” she says. She really does sound worried. I put down the software. “Is that because your son is in your head? And the pigeons are imaginary?” I don’t say this. I do apologize again. She sighs. It’s not loud enough to count as one of those obnoxious, manipulative sighs that you don’t have to feel bad about because they’re so obviously intended to make you feel bad. It’s an actual sad little sigh. People come to bookstores believing that with so many books in one place, somewhere, in one of them, is an answer to every niggling question or profound life problem they have. It’s a temple of answers, and we, the bookstore people, are the priests and priestesses, making the whole place comprehensible and navigable and accessible. We connect them with their answers. (They really treat you like miracle workers when you can manifest the exact title, especially when you can pluck it from a section they’ve been frowning at fruitlessly for ten minutes.) And when we give up on them, when we assure them we don’t have what they need, they really are a very particular kind of sad.
But most of the time it’s very satisfying to be the steward of the books. My weird little head has a memory for words (not directions, not colors, just melodies and words) so I have a constantly updated mental catalog of all the sections I groom regularly, which includes magazines, education, writing, classics, poetry, humor, memoirs and drama. When you’re at the front of the store and you can tell someone, without looking, that we have two copies of “The Glass Castle” but no copies of Architectural Digest, they look at you like you’re fucking with them. Usually you need to walk them over and let them paw around so they know you’re not just blowing them off.
Yeah, okay, I like my bookstore job. Although in my bookstore, all chick lit would go in its own section. It would not be shelved with literature. I am so fucking sick of cramming in between Hemingway and Hesse another copy of “Bringing Home the Birkin”. Ladies, you are embarrassing yourselves. I’ve been thinking a lot about chick lit and about Chuck P and all the other alienated Gen-X/Y men who are suffering involuntary sensitivity and education and thus turn to the worst and most unoriginal excesses of their assigned gender (fight club-violence; choke-sex.) It’s basically dude lit. I mean, the spectrum would have Nick Hornby on one side and Chuck P on the other. Men who long to be stupider and more emotionally castrated than they are, men who suffer from contemplation and an attraction to strong women. And chick lit is about the worst excesses of its gender too; utter self-absorption and willful insignificance. I think if you were going to study the trickle-down effects of feminism on this generation, you should look at what people read. Incidentally, in young adult fiction, the Gossip Girls books are huge.
God, I’ve really got to write fewer words but more often. I know I’m frustrating my audience of three. (Hi you guys!) Here’s a coded message for one of my audience of three: I watched Batman Begins the other night and it had Cillian Murphy and I already missed you but he, who wishes he looked even more like you, made me miss you more. I just wish I knew how you were, what’s going on in your life. I think about you all the time.
Okay, not really coded.
Did I tell you about reading “Farewell, My Subaru?” It was rad. Cheesy, but rad. Now I’m reading “The Time Traveler’s Wife” which is what a friend suggested when I said I wondered what a really fantastically written romance novel would look like. And it is soooooo swoony.
Mkay. You know where to find me. Emily dot deprang at gmail dot com.
Night/Morning,
E
