Eulogy to Mr. Paperback

A Psalm to Reading

I don't want to hear the empty numbers,
To tell me literacy is in decline.
For the mind is dead that slumbers,
And to that death I would not resign.

Here is the decree: Information is free!
Though genocide is not the mission;
Casualties seem to come inevitably-
One cannot unmake that decision.

Not moving pictures, and not the glowing page
Is the book's predestined end.
But to be read through another age
So that each new generation can comprehend.

Creations live beyond those who created,
And our wits though quick and clever
Without exercizing become outdated,
As they cannot be sharpened with the pull of a lever.

In eddification's field of war,
I fear we've lost another battle,
But today's is not the final score-
And the end is not coming with a silent death rattle.

By rushing blindly to the aid of the meme
They failed to predict the obvious consequence.
They must now mourn the passing of a dream-
And observe the result of action with proper cognizance.

Memories of places now gone remind us,
We cannot turn back an unleashed tide.
But we can hold their nostaliga thus,
And going forth take their glory's side-

So that with them their dream fails to end.
Those to come will know reading's pleasure
And though this all ills does not mend;
It's better than such leisure disappearing forever.

Let us then go forth and read.
And though the bookstore now is dead
Let us in our children plant literacy's seed
So they have the wit to forge the road ahead.

Eulogy is in the style of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 'Psalm of Life'.




Mr. Paperback, a bookstore chain that was in operation for over fifty years is closing it's doors for good in the coming months. Unlike Borders Mr. Paperback wasn't driven out of business by poor business practices or bankruptcy but rather the decision to get out of what is turning into a failing business. It's become clear that the bookstore may be a obsolete model but the book itself it still alive and well.

Job Applications? Why bother?

I haven't decided if I am just inordinately lucky or if I have some kind of super-power but I realized when I was telling someone about my new job that not only have five out of my six jobs been great jobs but I've only ever even applied to one of them.

Jobs had:
Movie Theater
Music Theater
Amato's
Data Entry for the University of Maine
Book Store
Automotive

Job: Movie Theater
Acquired: Because my mother was working there when they needed to hire someone new and nepotism is something hicks in small towns do.
Pay: 50-75 cents above the State-mandated minimum wage.
Duties: Cleaning, selling tickets, doing concessions, changing the marquee, cash-up, inventory, answering the phone, talking to people.
Perks: Free movies, free popcorn, free fountain soda, cheap candy, ability to read while getting paid if otherwise not busy, Christmas bonus, time off if/when I needed it.
Downfalls: Customers who did not understand that it was a one-screen, customers who wanted to pay with plastic, customers who wanted to buy tickets in advance, the fact that the theater was sloped and not tiered and any soda spilled ran down hill, seven day weeks in the summer.

Job: Music Theater
Acquired: Because my friend was their regular light-person and he knew I could do lights (I used to for productions at our highschool where I learned by doing).
Pay: A dollar above state-mandated minimum wage at the time.
Duties: Lighting
Perks: Free dinner, free fountain soda, free shows, attractive actors to look at, ability to play Pyramid solataire (because it fit on the counter under the light board better than other versions) while working.
Downfalls: Lighting system occasionally overheated and flipped the breakers which made me have to quickly throw on the spot-lights, turn down the master some, and run and flip the breakers back on, I was not an official employee, I only worked when the regular person was off, and they tended to cancel shows without any warning even to me.

Job: Amato's
Acquired: I knew the manager and she agreed to hire me on the spot.
Pay: A dollar twenty-five above state mandated minimum wage starting out and was given a fifteen cent raise after three months.
Duties: Making food, prepping food, prepping vegetables, washing dishes, washing counters, prepping dough, taking things out of the freezer, lifting heavy things, sweeping, mopping, cash-up.
Perks: None. I didn't even get a discount.
Downfalls: Cameras, not allowed to eat food for free, no discount on anything, worked by myself primarily, did not get breaks because of the previous, was not allowed to sit down, was required to serve customers until nine but it took nearly an hour to close up and corporate got mad if I stayed after I was scheduled, co-workers, hot oven, cooking in a fast-paced situation, the grease that permeated everything, the cement floor, and customers.

Job: Data Entry for the University of Maine Acquired: The scientist my father had worked with on a fishing research project needed someone to turn physical logbooks into spreadsheets.
Pay: There was 1,200 dollars budgeted to pay someone to do the data entry.
Duties: Turn logbooks into spreadsheets.
Perks: Work from my own bedroom, task took a total of eight hours.
Downfalls: I couldn't keep doing it.

Job: Book Store
Acquired: By application.
Pay: State-mandated minimum wage.
Duties: Checking in books, magazines, newspapers and gift items, putting away books, magazines, newspapers and gift items, checking inventory in assigned book and magazine sections, straightening book and magazine sections, writing blog posts, making up displays and windows, helping customers find books, recommending books, checking people out, doing back-stock, some vacuuming and dusting, doing cash-up, and watching the customers.
Perks: Reading free books, discounts on store items, and talking to people who like books.
Downfalls: Dealing with customers who have no concept of reality, living with sometimes annoying coworkers, trying to figure out where to draw the line... for everything.

Job: Automotive
Acquired: Was informed of the job by a regular customer in the bookstore, told what it would involve, and was warned that the owner was very crude. I went in knowing I was capable of meeting the job requirements and confident that crude was something easy enough to deal with after living with a commercial fisherman for nineteen years.
Pay: One dollar and fifty cents above the state-mandated minimum wage.
Duties: Opening mail, using Quickbooks and spreadsheets, answering the phone, doing billing, filing, updating the website, updating the company Facebook, smiling at people.
Perks: Nice pay, relatively easy work, would make a good future work reference, have permission to read when not otherwise occupied.
Downfalls: There are no buses that go past there and I may have to actually get my license. I have yet to work here but I suspect that 'dealing with customers' is probably going to be the biggest downfall.

Those five jobs that I didn't apply for but got anyway compared to the fifteen other jobs I applied to before I was hired at the bookstore and the several other applications I sent places since then that I never even got a call back on... Well, it makes me think that filing out applications might not be worth it.

The Death of Borders

Friends, readers, literates; spare me your thoughts for a moment
I say goodbye to Borders and not heap its praises
the corruption and bad practices of corporations often live after them
the good ideas that they had will be liquidated with their inventory
the devoted employees that worked for them will be the first turned from their doors
so let it be with Borders
in its time- just fifteen years- Borders did many things
with their major competitor was their biggest accomplishment achieved;
the pioneering of the Big Box Bookstore co-created with Barnes & Nobel
to their credit is also responsibility for the graphic novel boom
and they will be remembered for bringing pastries and caffeine to their stores-
a concept which cannot be removed from the heads of their consumers
but despite the veneer Borders suffered from an inner sickness
poor management hobbled them
near-sighted misunderstanding of how the Internet works dealt a grievous wound
relying on the mysterious cure-all of branding over business sped their decline
a business plan that did not make money led to their ultimate failure
they serviced the faceless masses and primarily opened stores in underserved areas
and yet the corporate world has deemed that their customer base isn't worth as much as their inventory
from the way that people speak of Borders while it's still being inhumed-
one would think that three times they would have crowned it-
if only bookstores could wear crowns
yet I doubt if presented that Borders would have three times refused
still- I wish not to praise Borders or to spit on its name-
I wish only to present what important notes about its life as I can
many did love Borders once and it was not without cause that they loved
so why not now grieve for this passed giant?
if you grieve for Borders you may feel your heart is in the ground with it
but please let us pause so it may come back to you
because as surely as Borders is dead there was a reason that you loved it
and that reason is the same reason you must take your heart back
Borders was first and last a bookstore
and any love that lay with them had its heart first and last within books
so surely Borders may be worth mourning
but you would do yourself wrong and books wrong and authors wrong
if in mourning Borders you say this is the death of books
books existed sixteen years ago and forty years ago and, indeed, eight years ago-
eight years ago when Borders was at its peak of thirteen hundred stores
but though Borders will soon be gone books will remain
so after you have grieved for Borders or cursed its name
I invite you to start a new book or begin a new chapter
because the death of Borders cannot and will not be the death of books

Beer is Disgusting

As part of my whole... (here I would like to make some kind of vague hand-gesture but find this difficult to represent in text) I'm going to write more in general. I wanted to start reviewing the books I read again.

I just read I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell and Assholes Finish First, both by Tucker Max.

I'd like to present the books from a two very different viewpoints because I feel conflicted and I don't think I could take one stance.

On one hand they are highly offensive to women and deplorable on many levels. The fact that there are thousands of men (and women) who consider this man their hero and idolize his behavior is disgusting. He behaves as though the world revolves around him. He consumes a great deal of alcohol and has slept with women numbering in the low triple digits. He is not the kind of role model you would want your fourteen-year-old son looking up to.

On the other hand some of his stories are both fantastic (in the sense that they are hard to believe and not in an exclamatory sense) and hilarious. My stomach muscles hurt from laughing so hard at certain points during the books. His writing style is more or less expository. He is writing a story as he (and other first-person accounts) remember it and he mentions that certain things included in the stories he doesn't remember at all. He wraps up the stories with finesse and knows how to set up his jokes for maximum impact. He is also highly intelligent and insults people in ways that are both demeaning as well as intellectual. One quote from a friend of his in a story goes something like: "Are you actually quoting Chinese philosophy at me right now?"

If you're thinking about buying this for yourself I would recommend reading some excerpts first to decide if you like it. If you're thinking about buying one for someone else I would say that you need to not only have already read it but also know your intended audience very well lest you seriously offend them.

Writing

Somewhat stream-of-conscious response to someone asking me about writing and creativity a month or so back.


I wouldn't have the audacity to say seriously that I write for myself. That would be strangely egotistical of me like I was saying that other people weren't good enough for my writing. It's true, of course, that I write for myself. I like writing, it's a beautiful escape into a land that can be anything I like. I like that I can write something I would like to read. But I don't just write for myself. If I were to write only for myself my thoughts might never be recorded in any way. I spend my whole day narrating my real (and imagined) life to myself. You never get to read that stuff. Not how it is initially anyway. But some of the ideas and concepts and lines and thoughts that I have do eventually make it into some kind of record. I'll write it into a story or a poem or a rant or a post somewhere or even a roleplay. I obviously write these things down because I want them to be read. If I were the only one to appreciate them they'd be gone when I died. I write for an audience. I imagine this audience is a bit like myself in some discernible ways but that at the same time the members of the audience can also be markedly different from myself. I want them to appreciate the writing the way it is to- not want to change the format that I chose or correct my supposed grammatical errors because they know that that's part of the writing. I don't want to write for any audience though. I feel confidence I could write for the audience, the mass market. I could write an awful Vampire romance and dress it up in SAT words and fill it full of clichés and become a best seller for a few minutes. I just want to write for an audience, whoever they are.
My writing starts with a thought. Sometimes it can come on demand but at other times I could not come up with a single thought worth committing to paper. I think about things. I never stop thinking. I read and I think and I walk and I think and I write and I think and I talk to people and I think. I have some of the same thoughts that chase through my head in a logical progression again and again. I have a lot of thoughts I prefer not to think. These are my denials. It's easier not to think about things I don't want to think about if I think about other things. Unfortunately I usually run out of good things to think about so I start to make things up. I look around me and try to see things other people miss or things I'd missed before. I could sit in the same room day after day and see something new to inspire me.
Sometimes the thought is about what I'm looking at. I'll look outside and I'll see the trees and I'll see growth and life and beautiful natural things. Sometimes the thought can be much more abstract. I can be looking out into the lobby where I work and see how the different corridors come together and think of the heart of a city, physical and then metaphorical. Sometimes the thoughts in my head will run together, the lyrics of a song will get tangled up with the thread of a thought involving a new scientific theory and something entirely new will emerge.