Getting all the meat off the bones, then going for the marrow…

I’d meant to write this about a month ago; so while the timeliness of the post isn’t exactly optimal,  at least this is an exercise in following through.

The sign read “everything up to 70% off”, and they weren’t kidding; even the fixtures were marked down to a price point that tempted me to buy, and I don’t fucking need 15′ of commercial bookshelves.  That was just a few steps into the store.

Within minutes I had in my hands six books, including Solzhenitsyn’s tales from the Soviet gulag,  one on how Kennedy’s wiz kids borked up Vietnam, and a mangled Calvin and Hobbes compilation.

The mob now occupying our local Borders was vastly different than the cast of characters that could be seen here just a year ago.  Then, you’d have just swam with a fairly typical slice of “book people”; the creepy, middle-aged manga fan, the self help guide collector, or the recovering goth chick.  But now, it was as if these players were replaced with the cast of “Desperation: The Movie”.  People who clearly hadn’t been into a bookstore in years if ever, were now streaming into the building with the same ferocity Read the rest of this entry »