I
Read Odd Books

Today marks the second anniversary of the date when I lost the most remarkable animal I have ever known. Note that I did not say the best cat ever, or that he was a good boy, or anything praising his virtue. Adolph was a terrible cat at times, so bad we called him El Gato Muy Malo, among other things. But goddamn he was remarkable. He was our nasty roommate who refused to learn English and get a job. I am not one to anthropomorphize my animals. But Adolph was different.

I cannot describe him well anymore. I fear so much time has passed since I spent time with him that I would not be able to find the words to tell you how intelligent, friendly, disgusting, valiant, nasty and wonderful Adolph was. Even if he had been a perfectly ordinary cat, he looked like Hitler and lost a leg. That alone is worth remembering.

But even though I no longer really know what to say, I needed to commemorate this day. I posted his eulogy on this site, but I also wrote about him in a cat community. I was surprised at how many people felt similarly about him in just the informal post I made right after he died. I gave him a lengthy eulogy that he likely felt was the least I could do, and it was. Last year I also remembered his passing. Perhaps next year the day that he died will pass without me immediately realizing the significance of the date. I tend to doubt it, but I also used to doubt that a single day would pass without me thinking of him, and that has happened.

Until then, I’m just remembering the most epic cat who ever lived.

Feel free to tell me about the epic animals you have known and I’ll return to odd books on Monday or Tuesday, I swear.

I’ve been a bit busy lately. I know, that sounds weird to read because it is well known that I am the least busy person on the planet. If I run an errand, I need a nap and a diet soda upon waking. But since about December I’ve had a lot of energy. Lots of hobbies, errands, cooking, interacting with Mr. Oddbooks, and absolutely neurotic levels of cleaning have been going on. This burst of energy means my backlog of books to discuss is about to become not so backed or logged.

And it means I want to write here more, even when I don’t have book-related content. I will have book content Monday – a discussion of Wrath James White’s Population Zero – but until I post it, I want to discuss the music/noises I have been obsessed with lately. I’ve been resurrecting old writing of mine, looking at it and seeing if it is worth salvaging. Some of it is and one of the pieces I want to work on is deeply disturbing. When I work on disturbing stories, I cannot listen to my usual music. I find myself listening the most discordant, horrible sounds because my usual tastes may cause me to think of old friends, old activities and I end up reminiscing more than working. I need things that jangle my brain in an anonymous way.

Nothing I share below is new, though some of it is new to me. I’m sharing it anyway because I feel like sharing, dammit. And it’s not like this site is devoted to the latest in media anyway.

I’ve always been very interested in numbers stations. There’s just something very creepy and intense knowing that you may be listening to a coded order for a spy to kill an enemy agent or to take the cyanide pill. Yeah, none of that probably happened, but it’s still unnerving to listen to a form of communication and know you cannot now and will never know what was being communicated. So I’ve been listening to numbers stations recordings.

When that gets tiring, I listen to the Siberian Sounds of Hell. Anyone who has ever listened to Art Bell knows of them. Utter bunk, but distressing noise is distressing noise. I most often listen to a 20 minute loop of this I have on my computer, but this little video gives the “origin story” of these sounds.

And if you were an Art Bell junkie for any length of time, you probably already know of the call Art Bell got from a supposed frantic man who claimed to have worked at Area 51. Tool turned the call into a song called “Faaip De Oiad.” There’s something about this one that sort of messes with me if I listen to it long enough. I have absolutely no idea why.

Then there is this little gem. I found this one several pages back on a Google search for “horrible noise.” I’m not really into noise rock so that may explain why this has been out for two years and I never heard of it until recently. I play this one in a loop for hours as I think. And again, for whatever reason, there is something about this noise that is troubling to me. Much of the this song is distressing, especially the line, “Our bones won’t grow in the dirt.” That was enough on its own to be unsettling, but then I looked up the band and found this video. Now I associate all of the noise surges with screaming and the line about bones has a more sinister meaning. And then there’s the whole story in the video. Is the victim a girl or a boy? How long was he or she held in captivity, because the smeared make-up and dirty socks convey the idea of a lengthy abduction. The madman is in his underwear. Did the victim thwart a sexual attack and flee? Is the camera pan comparing the legs of the running victim and the madman telling us something? How about the manner in which the victim knew the exact place to hit the femoral artery? What does that tell us? Anything? Nothing? In a way this video encapsulates all that is amazing in story-telling – giving enough information to draw us in and leaving out enough so that we are forced to think. This one is gory as hell so if you are easily freaked out by such things, don’t watch.

I never really liked Aphex Twin but this was part of my background noise when writing long before I saw the video.

And then there is the always horrifying “Frankie Teardrop” by Suicide. The screaming, oh the screaming. The relentless drum machine. This is madness in the form of a song.

There’s more but six videos for one entry is more than enough, I think. Please share with me the music that helps you work, the music that terrifies you or the music that fills you with nauseated dread.

Because I am at times an indiscriminate consumer of books, it’s not unusual for me to purchase duplicate copies. Actually, this happens a lot more than I likely know because you don’t even want to know how many books I have yet to catalog. But anyway, I have the following duplicates and my lovely readers here can have them if they want them.

If anything sounds good to you, leave a comment claiming the book(s). Then send me an e-mail at anita at ireadoddbooks dot com with your address. For the love of all that is sane, do not leave your address in the comments. Just claim the book and send me the e-mail and it’s yours.

Here are the books I want to unload on y’all:

Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food by Eric Schlosser CLAIMED

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto by Chuck Klosterman CLAIMED

Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays by David Sedaris CLAIMED

The Almost Moon: A Novel by Alice Sebold CLAIMED

13 Steps Down by Ruth Rendell CLAIMED

All are either new or so close to new that it sort of doesn’t matter.

I’d like to say this will not happen again but we all know it will. Thanks for taking them off my hands.

I had planned to have Part Three from 2083, wherein I begin to discuss Anders Behring Breivik, online on Tuesday but it just isn’t going to happen. I will definitely have it finished and online on Wednesday, with Part Four likely to come on Monday. Sorry about that. You’d think discussing a mentally aberrant mass murderer drenched in conspiracy theory and narcissism would come very easily to me. Life is strange…

Until then, if you have ever wondered what one of my extremely long discussions would look like translated into Norwegian, it’s your lucky day.

Check back with me Wednesday and until then, I appreciate all the comments, positive and not-so-positive. I am flattered and humbled that my opinions on this manifesto resonate and have meaning for others.

The last two weeks totally didn’t happen, right? My days have melted into a sort of gelatinous yet dusty place where time has been rendered meaningless.

But I swear I have two discussions that will be online soon, with more to come. I want to do some more themed weeks but until I am able to adapt to this here Earth time, I don’t think I should try.

I did loot a used book store that is closing (and let us not speak of Borders lest I begin to cry and write another eulogy to the stupid corporate chain that stole and then broke my heart). I should write up the list of the books I purchased. Some were so old and so “collectible” they triggered my mold allergy. Good times.

Anyway, I am alive but useless in ways that words fail to convey to the non-useless. But book discussions are a-comin’ and they will be fun. God gets eaten by dogs, followed by junkie vampire teenagers in the Pacific Northwest who may not be vampires but I don’t know because I had to stop reading the book. Yes, I am going to review a book I couldn’t finish yet was so striking it demands a discussion. Strange days, indeed.

So tune in or check your blog readers from time to time because I totally swear I will be productive soon.

Last September I reviewed a book from a writer called Michael R. Brown, aka fuguewriter, aka writerspleasure. We knew each other beforehand, did not much care for each other, and in the review you can see why I discussed the book and that I did my best to be evenhanded. A person who has experienced Brown online left me a comment in May, I responded, and a month later Brown became aware of it.

When I saw I had a comment from him, I sighed, figuring it would be more of his strange evasions (the man runs his online life like he is Jigsaw and we must all struggle to decipher the clues he lays out about himself – it is tiresome). I expected to be called a liar, which he calls me with pneumatic regularity when I relate any of my experiences with him online. I expected to read and read and read as he postulated on this, that, and the other as he insulted me, insisted his book was misunderstood and assumed the posture of a man so far above me that he could barely deign to write thousands of words to put me in my place but just had to because of his innate largesse. He has to explain things to me because, you know, I am so dumb.

However, I did not expect him to demean me because I suffer from mental and physical illnesses. Not even from him did I expect such bullshit. These are some of the things he had to say here and at an online snark community where he continued to show his ass.

He demeaned this site and all sites that discuss books as snark sites. He met me on a snark site in 2007 and as a result thinks I sit on snark sites on LiveJournal and do nothing but discuss him and men like him and that my site is nothing more but an extension of the same.   Why he has this opinion is something only he can explain, but he can’t explain it here because we finally banned him because he was insulting other commenters, and because why give him another forum when I don’t have to? But because he met me in a site devoted to mocking bad behavior, he has the idea that all I do all day long is snipe at people online. This is important to know because this picture he has of me has caused him to make a remarkable leap in his mind that since all I do is snark people, I must be dwelling in a state of negativity.

And here’s where it gets really stupid and really nasty. Brown asserts that the reason I have an auto-immune condition that affects my skin and joints and mental illness is because I have made myself ill because I do negative things:

Wake up, Anita. There’s a reason you’re as depressed and pain-ridden as you are. Get out of the negativity, before it’s all you can do.

and

Your negativity reinforces your depression and pain. Yes, yes, I’m so cruel and hateful for shaking you up about your negativity.

These are just two of the things he said. It is stupid because thoughts do not cause illness. Full stop. Let me state it again in all caps: THOUGHTS DO NOT CAUSE ILLNESS! It is ridiculous pseudoscience.

There are a couple of reasons what he said is nasty. It is victim-blaming to tell a sick person that he or she is responsible for their illness. This bit of pseudoscience is used in many ways to encourage people who are very ill to be positive, but there is not a bit of sound scientific research that proves people with sunny dispositions don’t get sick  or recover better when they do get sick than morose people. It is also nasty because it is predicated on Brown’s very shaky understanding of who I am and what I do. I spend the bulk of my time reading and writing about books. There is nothing inherently negative about discussing books.

But it is mostly nasty because my illnesses had nothing to do with the topics at hand: Brown’s book and his questionable behaviors online. He invoked it to shame me and worse, he cloaked his need to shame me in some really hilarious concern trolling.

He called my husband an enabler for not doing the right thing and intervening and, presumably, removing me from the internet:

Anita’s compounding her very real life-difficulties with submersion in pervasive Internet negativity, confabulation, etc. You’d do better to assist than enable, but I’m not surprised you’re enmeshed as well.

My very real life-difficulties? Of course he doesn’t mean when fatuous asshats interrupt my day with such nonsense but it is, in fact, a difficulty I face with Brown.  But it didn’t stop there. Before he got banned from sf_drama for TOS violations over at LiveJournal, Brown shifted his “concern” focus away from my physical health to my mental health and used deliberately loaded language to create an unsettling conclusion, or it would have been unsettling if anyone believed a word this man has to say:

let me tell you something, right from me to you: my pointing out her self-harming made her, her husband, and you SCREAM with discomfort is my favorite thing in this whole exercise. it really is. because it tells me i hit a nerve, and the only way things get better with stubborn mutually-enabling negativizers like you’all is going against your defense mechanisms, over and over and over. and i’m the one to do it. and in this, if you detect some arrogant pride, you’re right on the mark. i dare because i can, and because i’m right. and none of the rest of you gives a rat’s ass about it.

Emphasis mine. Of course, those who read his long comments about me in the review entry might understand he means I am harming myself by making myself sick with all this negativity. Really, “self-harm” is synonymous with “self-injury” and I have no doubt that was his point. I have so much empathy for those who self-harm but I am not one of them. Brown’s filter for mental illness is so deranged that he likely thought trying to make me sound like a cutter would reduce me in the eyes of others as so mentally fragile steps must be taken asap to secure my well-being. Then he goes on to imply, in the most self-important concern trolling ever, that my friends online and my husband are only defending me because they are complicit in my self-harm and that he is the only person who truly cares about my well-being.

Lovely, isn’t it.

I am writing this entry for a number of reasons. One is that I want this to stand so that if anyone ever Googles this fine specimen of humanity, they will see this entry and know that Brown is so low that he will invoke a foe’s physical and mental health in an attempt to bring focus off of his own nauseating behavior and give his own bad motives a sheen of “concern.”

I want him shamed. Michael R. Brown is only one of millions of people online who do this sort of thing. They do it because it’s easy. They do it because the internet has made everyone a goddamn expert.  Despite the fact that science disproves it, many people think they are responsible for the brain chemistry they are born with. Despite the fact that we know full well the limitations of our bodies, we have strangers telling us that we are our own limitation.   We have strangers giving us advice that could harm us and are offended when we politely refuse because we know our capabilities and the science behind our illnesses.  People accuse us of  being “negative” when we refuse the latest snail oil supplement or refuse to endorse the power of positive thinking. We have people who use sickness to make us less than human in something as petty as an online argument. And it’s bullshit. I can’t make an example out of every person who does this sort of thing maliciously but I sure can make an example of the one who did it to me.

People who are well physically and mentally do not understand the shame that comes from being sick. It is bad enough to be covered in scars, as I am. It is bad enough to creak when you walk – if you can walk. It is bad enough to see parts of your life drilling down into a smaller and smaller focus until you know that things will never be the same. A long walk, even with sunscreen, could make my next Sweet’s Syndrome flare-up worse, meaning more time on drugs that make me sick and anxious, more scars so that strangers stare at me. Little things like taking an evening walk with my husband have all kinds of hidden dangers beyond the sun. If I get scratched by a branch, if a happy dog leaps up on me and a claw scrapes my skin, if I encounter something I am allergic to, I could develop an outbreak of plaques on my arms. My last flare up also involved my joints, so now I am in interminable testing to see what else is happening to me. Some mornings I feel like I need a cane but I work through it. One day there will be no working through it, I fear.

My brain has been messy since the day I was born. I have been diagnosed and misdiagnosed but the best way to describe my condition is cyclical depression. I just finished with a bout. When it happens my days are dark and now you know why I may go several weeks between discussions. Trying to manage my atypical brain has caused me to become an addict, an alcoholic, and nearly cost me my life when a misdiagnosis landed me in a mental hospital when prescription drugs made me psychotic. I am sober now, but I have zero control over what happens to my brain.  Even prescription drugs only go so far with my brain chemistry. I could fall into a depression at Disneyland (and probably would, actually). I could fall into one reading my favorite book. I could fall into one cuddling kittens. My brain and what it does is beyond me simply thinking happy thoughts.

So now you know this about me. So let me tell you what these things mean, in the hard, cold, day-to-day world. They mean people look at my arms and hands because I have purple, circular scars left from the plaques. They fade a bit over time but they never disappear and the faded ones become flanked by new, livid discolorations from time to time. I feel strange that in the blistering heat of Texas I wear long sleeves. I feel out of place a lot. I worry a lot about what is happening to my joints and from time to time, I am utterly disgusted with myself. I was once a pretty girl. I am now scarred, pale, often bloated from steroids. Sometimes I feel like my confidence is sapped and I feel ashamed to be in this body. Then sometimes I feel fine, like the world and I will be okay.

My mental illness has caused me more shame than anything else because my physical issues are only hard on me. My brain makes things hard for others, like my husband. I have self-medicated when I knew it was counter-productive. I have said and done things in the course of trying to make a dark time end that I cringe when I remember it all. To be unable to regulate my emotions makes me feel ashamed because it deprives me of being able to do that which others do effortlessly. I cannot eat properly, sleep becomes impossible, even showering seems beyond me. The shame that comes from not even knowing if one has the physical and emotional resources to engage in the most basic elements of self-care, like eating and showering, humbles you and diminishes you. It also makes me full of dread because many sunny days are clouded by the fact that I know a dark day will come again. It’s hard. But again, I work through it. Some days are horrible. Some days are wonderful.

I explain these things about me so that there can be no mistake in anyone’s mind that my body or my head can be used against me.  That which I was open about in other places I am being open about here.  Putting things down into words of my own hopefully will make it clear though I feel shame from time to time, I really don’t think I have anything to be ashamed of.

So now that you know that I am sick mentally and physically and how it affects me, ask yourselves this: What the fuck does any of this have to do with me running a book blog?

Anyone?

The answer is: Not a fucking thing.

The fact is this: Michael R. Brown tried to shame me for being ill. He can’t. It’s not just that his initial premise that I spend my entire day in negativity is wrong. It’s not because I know he is a choad for whom I have zero respect. It’s not any of that.

It’s that I knew immediately what he was trying to do.  One of the benefits of having gray hair is that I finally know when a loser is throwing shit with both hands to see what will stick because he can’t win an argument any other way. That is what Brown was doing. He was trying to distract me into discussing my health with him, he was using my health to distract from his essential cravenness as a human being, and he was trying to shame me by dragging my health into a discussion of a book review.

If you suffer from any sort of illness, never permit anyone to do this. When it happens, recognize it for what it is: an attempt to distract and an attempt to shame you.  If you can confront, do it, but if you can’t confront, do not accept this attempt to diminish you.  Reject it and the mentality behind it.  Sick people often internalize the near-constant onslaught of bullshit that comes their way. Don’t ever lose sight of the fact that when anyone brings your health into a situation where it has no place, they are misguided at best (like most family members), or at worst they are foul and cruel.  Reject any idea other than that you deserve respect at all times.  Even if you can’t speak out, just knowing it helps.

And if you are lucky enough to be wholly sound in mind and body, you need to understand a few things:
–If you don’t know me well enough to know my cats’ names, you don’t know me well enough to bring up my illnesses in an online conversation. Extrapolate this to everyone you know or encounter. Do you know the last name of that woman with lupus who pissed you off on a message board? Do you know if that guy in the next office at work, the one who has a limp, has kids? If you don’t have access to a level of intimacy with a person to know basic facts about his or her life, you do not know them well enough to bring up their illnesses. Ever. Especially not in a book review, an online disagreement, or during petty internet bullshit.
–If you do bring up a person’s illnesses in a manner like Brown did with me, in a faux-display of concern to cover your viciousness, no matter how much you justify it to yourself (“Oh, I didn’t want her to get worked up, poor thing!” or similar), you are a Bad Person. Stop doing it and you won’t be a Bad Person anymore, at least not in this regard.
–Don’t engage in what many call ‘splaining (you know, “mansplaining” and “whitesplaining” and such) when you see someone like me nail a bigot like Brown to the wall. Don’t tell me I am overreacting when someone uses elements of my life beyond my control to shame me and I respond. How you decide to respond to such things is up to you but don’t tell me that I cannot fight back against someone who wants to take my dignity from me.

This has been an interesting couple of days. Brown has the honor of being the first person banned here, and after this entry and responding to any replies anyone has about him or this whole incident, I am going to assume he doesn’t exist because I never plan to read another word he writes. Much contrary to Brown’s opinion of my life and how I spend my time, I am mostly healthy, spend my days reading books and have here and other places built a network of people who love books, love cats, and like me. I like them, too. I have a pretty positive life, peopled with interesting bibliophiles and beautiful freaks of all description. To spend another moment on this topic deprives me of real joy.

Oh, screw that treacly ending I had up there.  Ending righteous anger with protestations that “Hey, I’m HAPPY and having ever so much fun!” is a rhetorical device that still dies hard.  Instead, let’s conclude this with the lovely tale of the time Sarah Proud and Tall and Gloria Vanderbilt vanquished the proto-Randian, as it were.

Then let us try to go as long without mentioning the name of Michael R. Brown as we do Ayn Rand and it really will be like the time when the evil queen died and all the forest creatures frolicked and danced in the meadow.

Yep. Death. And no matter how much the Borders corporate offices try to spin that the company is regrouping, doing this, that and the other and it will all be okay, you should know Borders is dying and in five years or less will be completely gone from the book-purchasing landscape in the United States. There are a bunch of reasons for his and they have been hashed and rehashed since Borders announced they were closing a ton of stores, but I’m past that stage of grief, the anger stage when you assign blame and demand answers. At the moment, I am hovering between depression and acceptance.

Does this sound melodramatic, mourning the loss of a bookstore? It might be to some people. There is a sense that mourning should be kept special for humans or animals, but as a person whose life revolves around books – the reading of books, the procurement of books, the handling of books, the visual appeal of books – losing a book store that has been a part of my life for over a decade affects me deeply.

I read electronic books and dead tree books but have a definite preference for the latter and I buy them everywhere. Thrift stores, big box stores, publisher sites, Amazon, and, of course, book stores, independent and corporate. I don’t dislike Barnes and Noble, but Borders was always my favorite corporate book store. It’s as tenuous to explain this as it is to explain why you like only one of two very similar people. Border’s just visually appealed to me more. Its arrangement appealed to my sense of logic. The book selection, though similar between the two, was just a little more focused on my interests. It is hard to explain, sort of ephemeral, but Borders was a comforting place to me. I never used the store as a place to write, or hang out, or drink coffee. It was a place where I went to have a book-absorbing experience.

Mr Oddbooks and I discussed whether we wanted to go to Borders one last time, sort of visiting a dying a friend before the inevitable death, or just remember the store the way we loved it. We decided not to go back, but one evening while we were out, I just decided to go. But it wasn’t seeing a dying friend.

The friend was dead, its body picked over, bones exposed.

So, my friend is already dead. Let me eulogize my dead friend.

Mr Oddbooks and I are not drinking sorts of people, nor are we the sorts who like posh restaurants, so during times of celebrations, we went to Borders. I am not kidding one little bit. During times of great happiness, we went to Borders and dumped a couple to a few hundred dollars.

I would wander the fiction sections and pick up any book whose cover appealed to me. I bought my first David Foster Wallace book at this Borders the day Mr Oddbooks landed his current gig after two years of instability. I remember that evening very clearly. He bought some of those expensive computer magazines that cost more than a hardcover book and I decided to buy books I had never heard of before or writers I had been hesitant to read. Wallace, whose face I had seen in a dream a month before, called to me. I got Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I’ve read the latter and don’t know if he’s my cup of tea or not but had I not been standing in front of the books with a deep will to purchase a book, any book, I would never have read him. Amazon serves me well when I know what I want, but not so well where impulses are concerned. I also bought a book based solely on the fact that there was a Stephen Fry blurb recommending it on the cover. Most importantly, I purchased Fay Weldon’s Chalcot Crescent. Fay Weldon is one of my favorite writers, full stop, yet finding copies of her recent releases in book stores can often be difficult. I am currently reading it and it is eerie how it seems to foretell what happened to Borders, what will happen to other business, and what is happening to governments all over the world. I think I was meant to buy that book when I did. Books can carry a lot of fate between their covers.

We frequently went to Borders during times of happiness, but for some reason, happiness doesn’t cut into my memory the way sadness does.

I had a job at an educational publishing company and I hated it. I had been sold a bill of goods about what I was going to be doing and the only reason I didn’t walk off the job two weeks after I started was because Mr Oddbooks also worked there and I was only given the job out of deference to him (I found out later two other women had, in fact, quit less than a month after accepting the position that eventually tricked down to me so I probably could have left and no one would have thought much of it). But I did the job poorly and it was clear I hated every moment I was there. But the company got sold, I was losing my job (though I quit before that happened), and even Mr Oddbooks’ job was threatened. I was in my cube one day, listening to NPR, and heard about a book called Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee. It sounded much like what I was experiencing, aside from the Korean cultural influences, and I wanted a copy. I worked just up the road from this Borders so I popped in and tried to find the book.

I couldn’t, so I went to the counter and asked the clerk to help me as the computers said they had it and it was in Literature. Suddenly, behind me, a woman who was from corporate tried to help me find it and took me back to the area where I had already looked, declared they were out and sent me back to the front counter so a clerk could get my information so they could order a copy. Then she went back to conferring with the other corporate drones, keeping an eye on the clerk who was helping me. A small Asian man, he said, very quietly, “I know where the book is. If you wait for ten minutes, I’m off the register and can get it for you.” The woman kept an eagle eye on him during all of this so, as a former retail clerk, I knew he was both trying to help me while not drawing attention to something that could potentially mean trouble. So I wandered off and checked out the sale books and sure enough, ten minutes later, he came up to me with the book. “I don’t know why it keeps ending up in Romance…” he trailed off. It was a strange moment but showed me a lot about the kid who helped me find the book. He knew that store inside and out, he didn’t want to get his coworkers who moved books to inappropriate locations in trouble, and he knew corporate was not to be trusted. Smart kid. I put the book under all the others I was purchasing so the corporate drone wouldn’t see it and I started reading Free Food for Millionaires the moment I got home. Not since Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth has a book spoken to me so clearly in a moment of dread-filled crisis.

In June of 2008, right when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was in the middle of outsourcing all our jobs to India and Ireland, Mr Oddbooks and I also lost our precious cat, Daisy. Daisy was the feline embodiment of joy, and after we had to put her to sleep, we came back home, wandered around in a grief haze, then decided we had to get out of the house. We went to Borders. I remember standing in front of this table. Where that book with the eyeball peeking through the keyhole is now stood Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World. I started to cry and an employee in a wheelchair noticed me. He didn’t ask me what was wrong. He just offered me a coupon for a free coffee upstairs. I didn’t use it. I still have it, in fact. In a box full of memorabilia that I had hoped I would do something meaningful with but probably never will.

The employees were always the reason to shop there. As we checked out our last time, I told the very young man who was ringing us up that I was sorry the store was closing and I hoped he had a good, new job lined up. He said he was a personal trainer on the side but was going back to school to get his nursing degree. The clerk next to him, who is a teacher in Austin, spoke up that it looked like he was going to lose his teaching job, too. He was going back to grad school because it would give him time to recover and determine what he wanted to do next. We all commented that at the moment, not even education was the failsafe it used to be. Teachers were secure in their positions, Harcourt used to be a stable educational publisher, grad school ensured you got a job. None of that is true anymore. The man going back to grad school sighed and said that at least in grad school he got a deferment on his student loans.

Borders is a microcosm of all that is beginning to suck heartily in this country. That which should be secure can be destroyed by a handful of megalomaniacs who think they have all the answers. And those at the bottom are left wondering where the hell they can go next. Good people who want me to have a book but don’t want to narc out a coworker, a man who sees a crying woman and silently offers her a free coffee – these are people who should never worry about where their next job should come from.

I felt a strange resentment toward the people who shopped with me, but I had to remember this was not their fault. This store was destroyed by men in suits who had no fucking idea what they were doing but were able to trick people into thinking they did. I shop on Amazon. I like to pay as little as I can for books. Everyone has to be conscious with their money and it is not the consumer’s fault that Borders’ management screwed things up so royally. I know I am not alone. I know I am not the only person who spent thousands of dollars every year at that Borders. Even if all those shoppers beside me were only there to pick the bones of the retailer, the fact is that vultures help clean things up. They are important in the real world as well as the retail world. Having nothing on the shelves cannot be more depressing than what this picture depicts – a maelstrom of mismanagement and depressed people forced to move on as the world ostensibly moves on around them.

There was nothing left upstairs but fixtures to purchase. I used to love to comb through the Young Adult and Kids’ Books. I got there too late to see those sections still assembled. That’s probably for the best, because in my wandering mind books for children can too easily become children themselves and nothing is sadder than the death of a child.

It was surprising that in those stripped shelves and chaotic messes that I managed to find some good books. For the love of sanity, I could so seldom find Christopher Fowler’s books on the shelves of any retailer but I found two that last night. I had heard a lot of good things about The Madonnas of Echo Park and I had wondered about Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein and why not give it a try at 60% off. Ruth Rendell is one of my favorite authors, and I wasn’t aware the Margaret Atwood book even existed until I saw it. The others just caught my eye.

Just out of sheer perversity, I looked all of these books up on Amazon and with two exceptions, I still could get new copies cheaper when I take into account that I pay no taxes on Amazon. I don’t know what to think about how the economy works and I may well be part of a larger problem, but really I think the economy is changing and retailers who don’t take that into account will die, pure and simple. But no matter how cut and dried it is, death always hurts people in various ways. Things move on but it sucks mightily when you are in the middle of that change.

So if the Borders in your town managed to stay in business, shop there as much as you can because I sense it will not be there long. O the times, O the customs.