I did it again. Last night. I don't know what compels me; I don't know what keeps me from listening to the sane half of my brain, but last night I thought, 'I'm already over in the U-District, so why not try Barnes and Noble?' After all, there's no shipping charge, there's no week-long wait, it's late at night and summer break, so I can get a parking space in the same zip code - and you never know, there might be something I want there...
Now, the last time I gave in to a late-night fit of ill-founded book-buying optimism was so traumatic I had to leave the store hastily and vent my frustrations here. This time: likewise - and I can only hope that there will be no next time.
The basis, such as it is, of my sporadic B & N Happy Thoughts is that once, years ago, I walked in and they had the Annemarie Schimmel I wanted. That's pretty great, right? Who cares about Annemarie Schimmel, right? She's not exactly Deepak Chopra, Oprah, Rachael Ray or the Idiot's Guide to anything. So, my reasoning goes, if they could have her, they might then have ___________ (insert something equally unpopular).
In all likelihood, the Schimmel was probably someone's special order the person never picked up. And I twisted my one-time good fortune into a fatuous Cause for Hope.
Bad move, because it's painful going in there. Those two times I've gone in there in the last few years the music nearly induced an existential crisis. The first time it was one of those baby-voiced girl singers; this time it was Billy Joel or Elton John. I can't tell the difference, I don't want to tell the difference, and it made me want to seek out The Idiot's Guide to Inducing Spontaneous Deafness over in the self-help section. Moreover, at Barnes and Noble, they don't 'shuffle.' They play entire albums. If you don't like it, you will keep not liking it. Song after cloying song after cloying song, as you search the racks fruitlessly, remembering that the essential truth about Barnes and Noble is that, although they have many, many books on many long and tall racks, the one book they always don't have is the book you came in to buy. Nor even one like it, one on the same subject, one by the same author, one related by school of thought or era or even the vaguest of pedigrees.
Suffice it to say I not only didn't find what I was after, I didn't find anything close. I broadened my parameters to 'anything by him,' then 'anything on him,' then anything by anyone on the same topic as what I had come there to find. Even that failed. Then to restore my hope I thought maybe I'd just buy a Schimmel book I've lost somehow, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, which is a tremendous book and an absorbing read and I think what happened was I spilled honey on my old one and chucked it out.
But you can guess how that chapter of the story ended, too. I left the store cranky, my hair no longer perfect and a cloud of bees inside my head. I stopped at the Jack in the Box on the way home, bought some of their (delicious! deep-fat-fried!) 'French Toast Sticks,' and drowned my sorrows in a Diet Coke.
5 comments:
So what was the book, you wingnut?
If I said what it was, I'd sound even stupider than I am. There was no excuse for even thinking in the fingernail of my pinky finger that it would be at Barnes and Noble. You cannot possibly harass me to the point of telling you. I am an idiot, and I make free with that information whenever possible. --But there's a limit as to how much of hte specifics I wish to divulge in support of that position. Otherwise I'd lose myself as an audience and advocate, and I can't afford that at the moment, prices of everything having gone up as they have in the last year...
Advocates are very costly these days, my dear.
If listening to Billy Joel or Elton John makes you wish you were deaf, and if you hate everything, as you say, then why not just put yourself out of your misery and end it all ? Or at least shut up.
Hmmm. I guess I'd respond with A) which is that, if you read that posting within the context of the blog as a whole, I think it is fairly apparent that I do *not* in fact hate everything. I think most people would see a bit of hyperbole in that posting, as in most others. Additionally, the cat macro is meant sarcastically as a comment on the patently exaggerated 'I hate everything' tone of that entry.
As to B) well, it's my blog, and the purpose of a blog is basically that of *not* shutting up, so I don't quite get the logic. As to the suicide suggestion prior to the shutting-up one, again, a cursory look through even the parts of my life made visible through the blog would suggest that I have rather a lot of things I care about greatly in life, so suicide would seem, among other things, kind of stupid, at a minimum. You are, however, free not to read this blog, just as you are likewise free to attempt to read it with the willingness to see exaggeration where it exists, and just as I am free to dislike certain things in life without needing recourse to suicide.
Okay, I also think that you can get a fair idea of the level of overall gravitas I'm aiming for and the standards to which I aspire on here by noting the silly photo in the header and the nonsensical rotating 'blog descriptions' across it. Moreover, were you to contrast the diction in the B & N piece with that of the one on homelessness that preceded it, you might well come to several useful inferences. Lastly, I do think you are a bit exceptional in taking a LOLcat, in any context, to be a serious and genuine articulation of an individual's personal philosophy. No offense, but you have to admit that seems a bit of a leap.
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