2003-09-11 - 1:29 a.m.

Gadzooks ...

... I'm tired.

But I think it's in a good way, for once. As you might be aware, I recently picked up a job at Barnes and Noble, America's favorite pseudo-swanky book emporium. I started working three weeks ago.

And much to my surprise, I'm finding that I enjoy it immensely. I've always had something of a ... "fondness"? No, that's not the right word. Hmmm ... let's call it an "unholy flaming lust" for books. Being around them all day is soothing. And as anyone who has shared a living space with me long enough to see my obsession with my media can grumblingly inform you, I am fastidious about alphabetization and categorization. And I've been assigned to the zone maintenance crew, which means I get to spend almost the whole day sorting and alphabetizing books and using a little *bwa-leep*ing tricorder to check which section they're meant to be shelved in. I alternate this responsibility with spates at the "cashwrap", our snazzy word for what more plebian bookselling establishments might call a "register", and doing time at the information desk, which is like being assigned to walk a beat in Metropolis on a week when the JLA has been teleported 3,000 years into the past.

I pass the time up there by reading comic books.

The information desk can be fun for a while, because we're obliged to walk the customer to the book they want, which means either steering them back to the bestseller shelf they walked by when they came in, or putting on our pith helmets and strapping on our bookbinder's cleaves to forage into the jungles of the unmaintenanced bays in search of a single elusive copy of "You Can Teach Yourself Mandolin". On the other hand, most people look for very inane books, and if I have to sell one more copy of Ann Coulter's Treason to a dumpy middle-aged Republican cow, I'm going to smash someone's head in with disInformation's Abuse Your Illusions.

The cashwrap is usually just as bad, as people parade by endlessly with a string of terrible books, but occasionally you get an earnest student with a handful of philosophers he's only read footnotes about before, or a young radical with Steal This Book and a wry grin, or one of our Noble regulars, with a well-worn discount card and $100 worth of 50% hardbacks from the discount cart in the back of the store near Photographic Technique.

I've so far made two important discoveries:

A. Something about the bookstore makes it impossible to leave of your own free will. You have to wait until some bold souls, usually a pair with their own purchases, have come up in tandem, and then a herd of book-toting customers, some haggard from weeks of wandering, rush the cash line and babble incoherently about Tom Clancy being tastier than Jocelyn Elders. If by chance a single customer does escape the tremendous inertial force, they are immediately drawn back in after making their purchase and become one more of the burdened wanderers, this time carrying a receipt to memorialize their brush with freedom, waiting for a signal for exodus.

B. Bookstores everywhere would be perfect, flawless models of learning and culture, a haven from the rush of the mad world, if we could remove one single glaring flaw in our business plan. Customers. The bastards stagger in off the streets, dripping filth and saliva, and paw all through our nice clean shelves, taking books all over the damned place and dropping them in huge, sweat-stained heaps like jockstraps in a locker room any place it damn well pleases them to do so. I found a copy of Kennedy's Profiles in Courage in the bathroom. Now, I can understand, while shuddering in revulsion, the gentlemen who take MuscleMag's sizzling lingerie issue or The Whole Lesbian Sex Book into the stall with them for whatever unpleasant reason their ape-like minds have come up with, but who takes Kennedy into the john? Scum, that's who. Sick, twisted, appalling, half-human, mindless scum.

By the way, come on in. We've got 30% discounts on all bestsellers, including the excellent DaVinci Code and Al Franken's seminal Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.

Oh, and certain people might callously try to sway you to embrace the foolish notion that discount cards aren't worth it, implying that it's difficult to buy $250 worth of books and thus get actual value out of the card. These people clearly need to read (by which I mean buy) more books, and to remember that the card also applies to café purchases and music, as well as putting a 5% discount towards purchases off our dowdy sister company, bn.com. So you have to get $250 worth of in-store books, Get Fuzzy calendars, cookbook stands, Tazo chai, lemoncello tarts, Chieftains CDs, Avenger DVDs, and overnight shipped copies of the large-print Goblet of Fire. See? Easy as pie. Chocolate chiffon pie, on $4.95 a slice.

Tell them Elvis sent you.

Oh, mama.

- \/\/heel was a book-drivin' man.

*****

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