Fourth and Long

I knew it would happen eventually. Yesterday, while browsing aimlessly in a used book store in the University District near my house, I saw a copy of my novel for sale. I certainly wasn’t looking for it, but its turquoise cover is hard to miss. Of course I took a look at it. It was a copy with a sticker on its front, an independent book publishing award of some kind, which had peeled off a bit and wrinkled. I smoothed it flat. The copy was signed. Had my signature not been apparent, a scribbled “signed copy” next to the price presumably was meant to justify a higher than expected sales price of $8. I laughed at the idea that my autograph would increase the value of anything. If there was any merit to this notion, I would carry a Sharpie with me at all times. I put the book back on the shelf, where presumably it will stay until the End Times. Then I went back outside, wondering what I thought about things.

A little stage setting is in order. Yesterday was a Saturday. I had a couple of morning hours to kill, and a slightly tweaked back, the result of an awkward movement at the gym the day before. (Characteristically, the movement was made not while actually exercising, but in twisting a half-turn out of someone’s way as I returned a loaded barbell to its rack. I tend to do the difficult things okay, but flub the easy ones.) So I walked, first around the local farmers’ market, admiring the groaning piles of organic veggies, the cases of grass-fed meats, the bins of salty oysters and the smattering of prepared food booths. Often I regret that I can’t actually afford the food at the Seattle markets; as much as I’d love to support the local growers, prices two to three (or more) times those at the grocery store have moved the farmers’ market experience solely into the realm of the well-heeled, for whom the “small food” fad has become another social status display. But a stroll around one sure can make me hungry. So in a peckish frame of mind I made my slow way down “The Ave,” with its predictable, comforting mix of take-out kitchens, cluttered cafes, big-screen sports bars, pho shops, used record dealers and “thrift” stores that are fast following the farmers’ market model—vintage chic at Nordstrom prices. (How on earth do students—presumably the target demographic—afford these places?) Just a couple of years ago there were a number of used book stores along the way, but they’ve mostly closed their doors—one long-standing favorite, I noticed, was being transformed into a branch of a major national bank, perhaps answering in part my question about the vintage clothes shoppers. Still, I enjoy a walk down The Ave today every bit as much as I did thirty years ago, when I was hardly older than most of the milling crowds that dart back and forth, cheerfully heedless of traffic and signals, busy about their inscrutable, urgent errands. 


The day was cool and drizzly; the first real Autumn weather we’ve had after a welcome late-August and early-September respite from our spring and summer chill. The sky was close, gray and clammy, offering a kind of damp blanket that seemed to subdue both sounds and moods, as though someone had turned down some knobs somewhere and put our part of the world on mute for a while. But still there was a palpable (if quiet) frisson in the air, due to the impending noonish start of the University of Washington’s third football game of the season, to be played in distant Nebraska. The bars and taverns were full at eleven o’clock, which itself added to the cock-eyed feel of the day. Despite the first two lackluster wins of the season, glorified scrimmages against lesser schools, this was to be a grudge match with a Big-Ten powerhouse that no one—and I mean literally, no one—remotely anticipated that Washington could win. (Even the most rabid boosters prayed merely for a non-embarrassing performance and a minimum of injuries.) So along with the smothering weather and the vaguely tipsy atmosphere, there was sense of impending doom, as though the entire University neighborhood, south to Lake Washington and north to Ravenna, was a jittery, under-sized schoolboy waiting to go out on the recess playground and get his butt kicked by a bully he can’t hope to avoid. (The home squad ultimately would be drubbed soundly, but with no fatalities, so the game was considered something of a victory—such is the psyche of the hapless faithful.) It was through this rather tenuous ambiance that I followed my feet down a side street and into one of the surviving second-hand readeries. I suspect I was looking for comfort.


For a few moments I found it. It was one of those junk and jumble book stores that cry out for aimless browsing, with topics mixed and shouldered incongruously, the sci-fi merging with the self-help above the picture-books about trains. Textbook stalagmites totter at every turn this time of year. The proprietor and his cash machine are invisible behind unsorted piles of new arrivals. I looked about for perhaps ten minutes before spotting my perfect-bound doppelgänger just above eye level in the “literary” section. At least it was filed there, I suppose.


I have no ill feelings about seeing the book for sale. After all, one could order a used copy of it on eBay from an Australian dealer several weeks before it appeared in print. (What is the social equivalent of being remaindered before publication? No, don’t tell me.) I am delighted that someone owned and may even have read my novel before passing it on. Most of my favorite reads get recycled for store credit at places much like this one. And if it hadn’t been read? No hurt feelings. At least it’s “out there.” Kind of.


For therein lies the rub. Yesterday’s sighting was, with the exception of in-store reading displays, the first time I’d seen my novel on a retail shelf. Published as it was by a small (and quite wonderful) independent press based in Seattle, it did not enjoy the traditional bigger-house distribution and placement that used to ensure an almost identical selection in any chain “brick and mortar” bookstore in the country (whose number recently has dwindled to one). Any author my age has dreamed of the day they would stroll with feigned nonchalance past the window of a downtown book emporium and spot his or her new title stacked pyramid-style in the display window, perhaps with a sign announcing an upcoming appearance and chance to “meet the author.” But the book-selling model has changed, as writers are reminded in every imaginable forum in which lettered folk speak of the subject. Agents and “mainstream” publishers are shy of untried authors, untrendy subjects and non-predictable treatments. The fiction-publishing fortress particularly has shuttered its windows and pulled up its drawbridges to the vast majority of scribblers, even those with “credentials” that might once have earned their manuscripts at least a look-see. E-reader sales outstrip hard-copies by a considerable margin. Self-publishing no longer is the refuge of the talentless but determined. Print-on-demand saves trees, shelf space and overstock return fees. And so on. 


So my unexpected sighting put me in mind, for a dreary half-hour or so, of the book marketing conundrum. An author today learns, from peers, schools, players and wags but one central, scared axiom: One must be one’s own PR department. One must charge the cliff, leap the guardrail, dive headfirst into the digital ocean and learn to swim with the sharks and jellyfish, for all other paths lead to obscurity. One must not—and this is said with sarcasm and scorn—imagine that one’s job as a writer simply is to worry about the writing and let someone else think about the selling. Those days have gone the way of the buggy and the Brothers Four. One must market or die. 


At any given moment there are just over thirteen thousand “webinars” in progress teaching the tips and tricks of online promotion for writers—this combined with four thousand how-to market your book books, seventeen thousand how-to e-market your e-book e-books, and, if you live in a city with more than three traffic lights, between two and three dozen classes or workshops each night on web-based marketing for your memoir, cookbook, graphic novel, inspirational quote compendium, pet care guide, confessional or political rant. Or even, maybe, your novel. Each of these well-meaning encouragements (let’s be charitable, here) is doomed to failure and futility, for each misses an even more central, if not sacred, axiom of the Writer’s Dilemma: the Writing Brain (at least in the world of stories, novels and poems) and the Selling Brain (whatever its worlds), can not cohabit the same skull, if either is to thrive and madness to be averted. (Some part of me wants to add, “of course there are exceptions.” But there are none.) Oil and water. Yin and yang. Dumb and dumber. Whatever. Can’t do it.


Please imagine this: A world-class violinist is invited to play with a major orchestra at an international festival. She is young, saucy, vibrant and small of stature. Before taking the stage, the concert producer tells her that she must bench-press two hundred pounds. But why? she pleads. Look at me. That’s ridiculous. Violin playing has nothing to do with weightlifting! The reply is exasperated and self-righteous: It’s the new world. Get used to it. Or: A rookie power hitter leaps from AAA to the Big Show; a gap-to-gap lefty with a quick glove and some wheels to boot. The hottest prospect in last year’s draft. The next Griffey. A marquis superstar. He’s starting in left field, but before he puts his cleats on his manager insists that he translate a couple of pages of Persian poetry. I don’t speak Persian! He protests. And I don’t even like poetry! He will live his life on the bench, he is told—down in single-A—until he becomes proficient at both. An oil-rig roughneck shows up at a new platform in the North Atlantic, and must prove his chops as a hairstylist before he dons his work boots. You get my drift.


Writing fiction—that is, story telling as an art-form—isn’t networking. It isn’t schmoozing. It isn’t Search Engine Optimizing, it isn’t web design, it isn’t branding. Not only isn’t these things, it is pretty much inimical to them in any setting. If you have what it takes to be a story-teller, your head is (or should be) working full-time with a set of tackle that is as useless, and probably foreign, to the marketer as a stone mason’s tools would be to a watchmaker. Oh, you might dabble or experiment with a twelve-pound hammer (or a screwdriver the width of a capillary), but you’re terrifically unlikely to succeed, let alone excel, unless you stick the gifts you’ve got, however paltry.


I know the answer, of course, and some days I almost believe it. It really is as simple as Changing Times, however more grandly it might be phrased: Competence at creating and maintaining a digital presence and identity is now as basic a life-skill as operating a gas range or driving an automobile. It’s no longer esoterica. And internet “marketing,” for better or worse, is effectively synonymous with internet “existence”. You are a brand, and every post is a sales pitch, and all that codswallow. For me to complain about the burden of marketing as a writer, it would be argued, makes as much sense as a truck farmer complaining about having to haul his summer melons all the way to the roadside stand. Sure, yeah, it’s a different skill-set, but it’s no big deal. It’s just the way it is.


I’m not arguing. I’m just squirming. as I was when I left the bookstore and reflected, walking back down the rainy street, on my own dismal marketing efforts vis-à-vis said novel. I had a big release party where people felt obligated to buy it, which was a good (if obvious) strategy, but I also blew far more on the booze, food and entertainment than sales have recouped even to date, after publishing and dealer fees. So, Real World One, Paul Zip, on that score. I thrashed about blindly for a couple of months in the world of book blogs and list-serves, wikis and whatevers. I poked around in Goodreads, paying them some money for publicity, watching my “to read” list grow and grow while, after a few weeks, my readership slowed, choked and froze like a drainage ditch in a cold snap. I used—abused?—the forbearance of Facebook “friends.” I even tried Twitter, but I didn’t (and still don’t) really get it. (Or okay, even a little bit get it.) I did readings, drawing audiences nearly in the teens. I went to book fairs and sat with other writers answering questions, passing out post cards and selling nothing. I naively answered a few emails from book promotion services, all of which trotted out dog-and-pony shows of smash-seller successes (pretty much all get-rich quick guides), and not one of which ever had even attempted to market a work of fiction. I tried without success to get coverage—or hell, a mention—in any of the local papers, or on any public radio station. Even the public library turned down my offer of a book copy. Yep. Couldn’t even give it away. And truth be told, it ain’t such a bad novel ‘tall, and that’s not just me talking.


I stopped imagining that walk-by window with the pyramid of signed copies. After a while I ran out of—Ideas? Oomph? Confidence? All of the above, I fear. I went on to writing other stuff. I stopped checking my “metrics” on-line. I stopped passing out post-cards, or carrying around a few copies of the book in my car just in case. I never was any good at talking it up to people, so that wasn’t hard at all to stop. But after a while I barely mentioned it anymore. I guess, not even eighteen months after publication, that I pretty much stopped thinking about it. So the sighting at the book store not only caught me off-guard, it kind of kicked me in the memory teeth. I wandered back down The Ave., and all of the people I smiled at seemed to look back with disappointment in their eyes. I needed a change of scenery.


Not far from my house is a Catholic Elementary School, where each year in mid-September a Festival named in honor of sausage (“The Wurst Fest,”) is held on the grounds and in the classic old brick building. It’s a charming community event, off-limits to any commercial enterprises, so that all the food booths (as well as the crafts, book sale and so on) are staffed and supplied by parents and other volunteers. There is live music all day, and rides for the kids. Unfortunately they’re not the rickety old carny nightmare rides that delighted the youths and terrified their parents for decades, manned by chain-smoking, cherry-faced, Popeye-like characters whose life on the road was worn into their every facial crevice, unkempt beard and faded tattoo. They were replaced a few years ago by big inflatable contraptions that draw much shorter lines and probably damage fewer spines as well. But it’s still a fun place to spend an hour, and brings back for me a certain nostalgia, for my older son attended school there for six years, and I was often a volunteer and/or performer, even for a few years after he’d moved on. Now I’m just a wurst-chomping neighbor passing through, and after a few perimeter strolls of the concessions, stage and games for the wee ones, I was feeling a little better about the bookstore. I went upstairs to a sort of all-day restaurant and indoor beer garden (the converted “all-purpose” room), to see if I could catch a few minutes of the afore-mentioned Washington game versus Nebraska, which I correctly anticipated would be showing on a giant projection screen in front of the darkened stage. 


I watched the better part of the second quarter. Though outsized, outmatched and outplayed by their opponents, our Husky offense managed some timely and lucky plays, including a Hail Mary touchdown pass by their young, untried quarterback, and the defense performed with almost heartwarming ignorance against their bigger, more seasoned and better-coached rivals, as if they thought that their early, pumped-up, adrenalin-boost hits would carry them through the grinding second half, when adrenalin gives way to sheer brute ballistics. But by hook and crook they left the first half down by just three points. I walked back through the festival to my car in an unexpectedly hopeful mood.


I’m working these days on a redraft of a novel I finished—or thought I had finished—last summer. I rushed it too soon a clamoring agent, long story; we’ve since parted ways. So I’ll be on my own again with this new version, having failed to find a taker for the first go-through. It’s a substantial revision, but nearly done now. And each time I sit down to work on it, I wonder why. My former publisher is on a long, maybe permanent break from the business. I’ll be in the same boat as every other scribe with a manuscript in one hand and a business card in the other, one foot in the old-school swamp of traditional publishing, one in the shoals of the digital sea. I’ll be clueless, wondering which publishing “model” might possibly assure not income, certainly, but any readership at all. I’ll take a deep breath and send queries to over-worked agents deep into career-change counseling. I’ll join the slush piles of University Press editors and clutter contest mail-rooms. I’ll keep one wary eye and one skeptical ear open to the yammering advice I’ll get about digital publishing and self-promotion, in the very same way I’d react to a chorus of strangers insisting that I apply for work as a Chippendale model. In other words, I’ll do my best.


Will I have any success?


Again: It was only three points at the half. Washington went into the game without a prayer. Though the sky was still heavy and my back still hurt, I went home thinking, just for a while (and ignorant of the progress of the second half), that hell, anything is possible. Maybe this novel will spark some tinder that the first one never found dry. Maybe I’ll Twitter my way to readership, or make a virtual splash in the blogosphere. Maybe the local press will take notice. Maybe I’ll strike a nerve. Maybe—aw, shoot I know it’s silly, but maybe, just maybe, I’ll be walking down the street past a downtown bookstore and—nah. Now I’m being silly.


But I’ll go ahead and complete the damned thing. What have I got to lose that I haven’t lost already? If you’re writing fiction in America today, you’re a junior-college second-string squad up against Nebraska on their home field. It’s fourth and long, but you’re only down by a field goal. Punt? Forget it. It’s Hail Mary all the way.

Cool House

I went to the library yesterday, and it got me thinking: A good thing, and just what libraries ought to do best. As usual my thoughts flew around like squirrels, darting in and out of the half-cracked dormers of my drafty attic brain, always within sight of a roosting place but never quite grabbing the confidence to settle down and stop moving. (Someday I’ll nab of few of the little devils, pin their tails to a ceiling beam and have a close, hard, look at them in the glare of an overhead bulb. The little bastards.) After my trip to the library, I had cause—I thought—to stop in a bookstore. That got me thinking too, and wouldn’t you know it with some of the same damned squirrels. 

It has become de rigeur for writers today to bemoan the death of independents bookstores, or, more recently and perversely, any “brick-and-mortar” bookstores, even giant chains like Borders that were perceived as soulless, bad-guy Goliaths scarcely more than a decade ago but mourned now in their messy demise. Breasts are beaten principally, though, over the demise of the “indies” and all they once offered. What is being bemoaned, in many cases, is not the disappearance of the stores themselves (for like anything else they ran, and run, the wide gamut of bemoanability) but the alternative ascendancy of amazon.com—not of all online retailers, mind you, but specifically and spitefully of Jeff Bezos’ Kudzu Frankenstein Emporium, which has come to embody for many the demise not only of Ma & Pa commerce but of writing, reading, reasoned discussion, informed criticism and ultimately of culture itself. 

I’m not completely onboard the Mopey Train on this one. I get an itch to read some pretty weird stuff from time to time, by “weird” meaning far from the mainstream books I would find at any walk-in (as opposed to log-in) purveyor of pages between covers. I’m delighted when some tome I need (yes, need, hush) can be located online, from The Lazy A or elsewhere, and purchased without the necessity of donning trousers. Sure, I love the idea of hanging out in bookstores; browsing and chatting and all that, and I hold a special soul-place for certain modest book shops I’ve haunted over the years. But it’s not as though all or even most of the indie bookstores (at least in Seattle) these days are venues you’d choose first either for small talk or, frankly, shelf-surfing. Too often they are stubborn, fusty dioramas of the past rather than living stages for the future of the palpably written word—a role they must either embrace or die not trying, though I’m as baffled as the next guy about how they might accomplish this. Inevitably they are owned, or at least run, by a man or woman of a certain age plus ten with solidly gray hair, pallid cheeks and a coffee-stained cardigan. Entry into their domain rings an overhead bell, which rouses them from their half-slumber just long enough to present you with a withering glance before the door has shut behind you. You’re only here to browse, says the look;you’ll wander down the aisles pulling books down and putting them back in the wrong spaces, you won’t pet my cat and you won’t buy a thing. If you venture a cheery “good morning!” the response (if any) is halting and weak, less out of unfriendliness than uncertainty, as it likely has been days since they’ve had a customer, and they are ill-used to the forgotten back-and-forth of social discourse. As you move down the closest aisle, already planning your exit, you feel their eyes bore into your back, hostility bubbling back up through their salutatory awkwardness, magnified by their wire rimmed glasses and finding a raw, tender spot in the center of your guilt: Even you find something you want—you can almost hear the venom in their thoughts—you’ll go home and buy it on Amazon… 

(The proliferation of “smart phones” has been a particular cruel development for these stubborn survivors of the Very Old Ways. Imagine watching a putative customer, though in truth simply a passer-through, perusing a special find on the back corner table—then whipping out his phone and with a quick thumb tango online locating and purchasing it—from someone else. Happens all the time. If you see the proprietor reach beneath the counter, make your way back out to the street. These are desperate times.)

Now, I loves me a fusty diorama like a fat boy loves his pie. Shoot, my entire physical universe increasingly is, in effect, a diorama of times and places past. And I’ve never been guilty—yet—of on-site browse-and-buy. (I’ve at least had the decency to take my treachery back out to the street.) I attempt, as frequently as I can manage the time and the scratch, to make real-life purchases from the shocked and sweatered sales folk of the indie domain, keenly aware each time that such purchases increasingly resemble, say, a two-hour trip to the forest to cut one’s own Christmas tree: a nod to the needs and customs of another age, but by no means the most practical (or economic) way to get the tree (or books) I want. Usually I’m not even buying anything for which I have any particular jones; I’m just trying to tinkle the bell on their under-used cash register, if only to mark for an instant the granting somewhere of another pair of angel wings. I have no delusions about keeping the poor places in business. I’ll drop by in a few weeks and the store will be a nail salon, an espresso bar or a tattoo parlor—or more likely just another boarded-up brick-and-mortar anachronism on a street of cracked sidewalks and “for lease” signs. (Soon such streets will be fusty dioramas themselves, of the yesteryear we call today. Field-trip kids will pass them in museums: Abandoned “shopping” district, circa 2010-2020.They’ll feel sort of sorry for us, but their teacher will remind them that we were brave and clever and didn’t know any better.) 

My bookstore trip yesterday was not to an indie, but to one of the “big box” survivors; a Barnes & Noble in the downtown core. I was making a last minute gift purchase of a book published too recently to have trickled its way down to the second-hand shops, and I wanted it even sooner than an online retailer could get it to me without paying extra for quick shipping. As I wandered the aisles on both floors of the store, hoping to squeeze a little random browsing fun out of my errand, I took note of a reality that caught me a wee bit off-guard: the place was dead. Not dying but dead; the cornerstone of one of the newest shopping malls in the center of our busy city, a building barely a decade old, and yet its flagship bookstore has become already an empty, sad anachronism. It remains for the moment a few cobwebs shy of fusty, but it’s unquestionably as lifeless as a pot roast. Many shelves are empty, and those that bear books display only a handful of titles, though in multiple copies, placed cover-forward to maximize their visibility and make the aisles seem a tad less lonesome. Nearly all of the prime display areas, by the door and check-out and along the widest thoroughfares, are occupied not by reading matter but by gewgaws: arty bookmarks, blank journals, gag gifts, pricey pens, funny postcards and so on. There are information kiosks in each department, all advertising prominently the store’s proprietary e-book reader, which has a cutesy name I never can remember, and an actual specimen of which I have never seen outside of these displays themselves. None of the kiosks were staffed. I tried a self-help computer search station on the main floor. It didn’t work. I looked around for help. Even the cash registers were abandoned. I felt a chill. A young security guard, bored and ineffectively officious, stood on a raised landing by the door, yawning as he surveyed the emptiness below him. Our eyes met. He smiled weakly and shrugged; a flicker of befuddled commiseration in his eyes. I could imagine his thoughts, uninformed by any fleshed-out memory of what a viable “bookstore” might once have resembled.Why would anyone steal this shit? What the hell is that guy looking for? Ultimately I didn’t find what I was after. I came home and ordered it from Amazon. I paid extra for shipping.

But back to the library, which had been my first stop of the morning. My goals there were simple: I just needed a place to read, work and wait for the nice folks at the dealership to do a brake job on my car. I didn’t really need a library; I just wanted wireless access, relative quiet and the possibility of nearby coffee should the need arise. I took a chance that the main branch downtown would be open. Its hours have been shortened considerably due to budget cuts n the past few years, and too often I’ve made the trek only to find it shut randomly for a week, an austere omen of darker days to come, surely. I was in luck yesterday. The building not only was open, it was as crowded as I’ve ever seen it. A good thing, surely? I took a look around. 

The Seattle Central Library made something of a splash when it opened seven years ago. Designed by renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. It is a bona fide eye-popper, no doubt about it. Have you ever played the game “Tangents?” It involves the arrangement of simple geometric cut out cards into not-so-simple, quirky little pictograms, speed-matched against an opponent with a different handful of shapes and a different image to represent. Got it? Okay, now imagine the Tangent pieces, which are mostly triangles of various proportions, made 3-D, turned to glass and stacked more or less randomly between two busy streets in a southerly block of Seattle’s downtown business district, and you’ve got the general idea. The building, all strange angles and overhangs, is said to soar, squat, dominate, ruin, enhance, destroy, beautify and/or disgrace its surroundings, depending on one’s architectural aesthetic. Inside, elevators, stairs and escalators are meant to swoop one up, down and around eleven well-lit stories, with all manner of post-modern nooks and vantages intended, somewhat desperately it seems, to distinguish this library from its ho-hum siblings and cousins, with their drab Carnegie facades and old-school functionality. There’s no stodgy gravitas at all about Koolhaas’s design—it is aggressively, ostentatiously futuristic, the sort of building that would make a splash anywhere, yet fit in nowhere. (It projects an unfortunate aesthetic similarity to Paul Allen’s EMP—i.e. “Experience Music Project”—edifice a mile to the north; a patchwork, shapeless trauma of a building, supposedly inspired by an imagined electric guitar being melted in a blast furnace, or something—in any event it’s a butt-ugly eyesore a few tacos short of being quirkily beloved by the gaze-averting masses.) 

I remember the buzz when the Central Library opened its doors. The New York Times ran a big piece on it. Local newspapers (Seattle still had two back then) covered its inaugural festivities with a zealous passion more suited to British tabloids at a royal wedding. I’m too crowd-averse to have attended the ribbon cutting itself, but I was on hand for its second day in business; one of ten thousand wide-eyed gawkers taking in its oddities inside and out, distinguished from my co-gawkers only by the fact that I was casing the joint not as a tourist or proud booster, but as a patron, wondering how the building would serve not just as a photo-op, but as an actual working resource and repository.

It’s old news now, but still unfortunate: the Koolhaas masterpiece may be a cool building, but it fails utterly as a library. It’s been widely rumored in the years since the building opened that its interior layout and workings were conceived of by a distant committee of people who never actually had ever been in, let alone used, a public library. Their notions of practicality and performance, like those of most school administrators and members of Congress, were based entirely on theory; the “wouldn’t it be cool if?” approach to spending public funds. Compounding the tragedy, the interior construction was wildly misconceived, using materials for the walls and floors particularly that became grossly filthy within the first few days of use and apparently cannot be cleaned. Once inside it is nearly impossible to find one’s way around, no matter how often one has been there. Signage is all but nonexistent, and often wrong. Elevators lead up but not down. Staircases are narrow, uncomfortable, hot and seem to be back-ways that ought to be reserved for maintenance crews or fire escapes, but often offer the only passages between floors. The classic Central Library experience is that of locating, after an hour of hunting, the section or shelf one hopes might offer whatever one is looking for, only to realize (often with a sob of despair—you hear them at times) that it’s on the other side of a glass wall of no apparent purpose, or down a half-level, or both, that there is no apparent way to get there and that there is no one to ask for assistance. (Budget cuts, again.) Curiously, the color scheme was designed by a sadist. No other explanation could account for the garish, painful, soul-sucking hues that assault one at every turn. (Another nod to the EMP here—though at least it’s shiny.) On most floors the shelves are as under-stocked as a 7-Eleven after a looting spree. It’s not a happy place.

Then why all the people? I glanced around the first floor for a place to sit. Nothing. Same with the second. Tables full, chairs occupied. Who were they? More importantly, what were they reading? I took a closer look. They weren’t, of course. There were a few students with their books spread out in an area reserved for same, but none of them appeared actually to be doing anything they couldn’t do more easily and comfortably at home—texting, chatting, sleeping and staring into space. The main reading room, replete with torturously uncomfortable chairs set at socially awkward angles in an open, drafty, inhospitable space, was occupied by adults. Few of them were reading either, though a couple had opened newspapers on their laps before dozing off. Indeed, sleeping was the most common activity here—subtly and not so subtly, the almost exclusively male congregation was for the most part copping some serious Zs beneath the Koolhaas glass ceiling. 

I ascended a floor to a room with black walls, floors and ceilings, and row upon row of long tables with computer stations. They all were occupied, and the presence of a couple of dozen folks sharing small benches and milling around suggested that the wait list for them was long and time limits strictly imposed. Another couple of ascents, by stairs this time, took me to the conceptual edge’s of the library’s offerings—journals and newspapers, microfilm, technical books and reference volumes. Tables here, devoid of computers, were not fully occupied, nor were they completely empty. The folks here resembled those on the main floor, with the added bonus of having the tables on which to rest their heads. A couple of fellows had plugged laptops into the abundant outlets around the perimeter. (Both sat snoring in front of blank screens.) An elderly woman was slumped in her seat in a crooked corner, snarling at no one in particular in a harsh, vindictive language I’d never heard before. A pudgy city cop roamed the aisles, head swiveling, dark glasses tipped back on his freckled head, on the hunt for somebody specific. I hoped that he wouldn’t find him, at least not at the moment. I lucked upon an empty perch at a bank of windows overlooking the old Federal Courthouse across the street, and there I spent my morning. 

(Once, many years ago, I climbed a tree adjacent to that selfsame courthouse minutes after its doors were locked on a Thursday afternoon, to pound on a window and get the attention of a janitor, whom I begged in impromptu but apparently effective sign-language to come downstairs and let me in so that I might further talk my way past the weary court clerks on the fourth floor and persuade them to accept some legal papers I was carrying and stamp them as received that calendar day, their filing deadline. I needn’t add that this was long before 9/11. I was a young paralegal, and took pride in my short-lived ability to outwork the system. These days I’d file the damned things online.)

The Library’s ground floor looked about the same on my way out as it had shortly after opening, though a touch more animated, though. Guys were talking, laughing and exchanging greetings across the room. Regulars. I too was a library regular once, at a much younger age, in a small town in central Ohio. (Our library sat on the same Main Street block as little frame house with a historic marker commemorating the birth of the American Prohibition movement. One filters one’s influences even at a tender age.) I read a lot, sure, but also I just liked to be there. Tucked into in an overstuffed chair next to the newspaper rack with its polished wooden bars, in view of the two-ton dictionary on its heavy oak stand, listening to the whispers and stifled giggles of high school kids working on papers at the tables near the door—all of it made me feel a way I didn’t feel anywhere else, and rarely have since. A good way, to be sure. It had something to do with potential, with possibility, and with the deep, healing comfort that can come only thought the magical Vulcan mind-meld of holding someone else’s thoughts, bound in one’s hands. As a middle-schooler, inclined to domestic moping and without a pack of friends to be off busy with, I came to think of our little backwater library as a place made just for me. Someday I hope I find another somewhat like it. It won’t be Seattle Central, certainly—it offers far too precious and strained an environment, made not for people but for photo albums and municipal booster brochures; a place where design lords it over function and damns the consequences. I’m sure Mr. Koolhaas counts it as an achievement—it figures prominently in his digital P.R.—but I’d bet my lunch money he wouldn’t opt to spend time there. 

Yet as I stood on the ground floor watching the lunch-time fellows yuk it up, I felt my disdain slacken some. My cranky personal nostalgia for a well-lit spot with a comfy chair and a Big Thick Book About Anything didn’t play any part in the Kolhaas design, nor ought it have. The empty, soaring floors above me; the grand efforts to downplay the “content”(all those pesky pages) in favor of the “experience” (the wacky geometry, the ooh and ah views, the torturous chairs) nothing here ever was meant to meet my vision. The Library’s users here today have different needs—for the ground floor men it’s a warm place on a cold day, a cool place on a hot one. For the students it’s neutral ground, for they can and will be about their business in the same way no matter what the setting. For the folks upstairs, the black room with its rows of flickering terminals is a vital resource indeed, and not nearly large enough to accommodate them. (Expect renovations soon.) I suppose even the poor soul on the lam with the cop on his heels found the place useful too. I wonder if he’d managed to slip away.

And the unreachable aisles, the staircase to nowhere, the off-and-on hours, the unattended help desks, the bare, aching shelves? They’re exactly what I imagine Koolhaas had secretly in mind: a museum. A fusty diorama, if you will. A nod to a diminishing, stone-dead past, very much like the bookstore to which I’d soon make my lazy way down the bustle of 5th Avenue. (I bet the security guard on the B&N landing wishes he had someone to chase around the aisles, to relieve his tedium) That doesn’t mean that the building is a failure, not by a long shot. The practical purposes of the megalomaniacal fantasy around me are being met just fine, thank you, regardless of any designer’s intent: It’s become a place to chat, to read some email, maybe snag a macchiato. It’s an awfully grand and spendy setting for such tasks, but hey, it’s what we’ve got for now until a new aesthetic wrecking ball comes along, maybe even in my lifetime. For though it’s only a seven-year-old this year, our grand Central Library has become already principally a place of memory: untidy, dusty, and a little shabby in spots, as memory, after all, is wont to be. 

Shop 'til I Drop

Yesterday was a mall day for me. Hold your sniggers, please. We all have them. I don’t care how “green” you are or wish to be, how committed to local products and services, how opposed to mass consumerism, how righteous in your avoidance of Recognizable Brands. Like hangnails and nosebleeds, nobody gets through life without an occasional visit to the mall. Indeed, such visits are closely akin to hangnails and nosebleeds, as follows: 1) they’re not such a goddamned big deal, so quit whining and get over it; 2) still, you have lost some precious part(s) of your corporeal (or spiritual) being, and so can be forgiven for feeling a little blue in the aftermath, and 3) if the hangnails, nosebleeds or visits persist, and/or if worse you find yourself secretly enjoying them, you have the warning signs of a much more serious and perhaps fatal condition for which you ought to seek professional help at the first opportunity. I feel pretty safe on the last score, although damn I remember some epic nosebleeds as a child; scarlet gushers from a busted tap that terrified my parents and delighted my siblings. But not in years, now. I think my cuticles are no worse off than the next guy’s. And my shopping trip really was no fun at all.

I did my mall business in Delaware. I’m here on a family vacation involving in-laws and a beach house. It’s an annual event for me. I believe I’ve had but one summer in which I didn’t go to Delaware since the early 1980s. I’ve walked, jogged and driven all over its freeways and toll roads, its byways and cornfields, its sandy strands and fetid canals, its backwaters and beaches. But until yesterday I hadn’t visited its malls. Do you know much about Delaware? I didn’t think so. Unless you’re a native or denizen of the Chesapeake Bay, there really isn’t much reason to know anything about the state beyond its capital, and that only to impress your trivia buddies. It’s almost entirely rural except for Dover and its airbase, and a few towns sprinkled around like a cheapskate’s chocolate sprinkles on a plain vanilla cookie. They raise chickens here, and grow vegetables and cranberries, and the beaches provide vacation spots for millions of visitors from Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C. and sometimes (though rarely) points beyond. (Seldom as far as Seattle.) That’s about it. But all these activities require the presence of people, and as we all know, an awful lot of people get nosebleeds every day like to shop. Thus, malls.

It’s flat here. The only elevations significantly above sea level are osprey nests, suspension bridges and the upper decks of the tonier “cottages,” if such a word can be—and it is, actually—applied to three thousand square-foot mansions with as many bedrooms as my house has drawers. Most of the state’s perimeter is sea or bay shore, which gives way to countless acres of marshland, much of which was diked, drained and dammed long ago to make way for fields and farms. And malls. Some are crumbling and decrepit, while others are quite new. Whatever their age, they’re big. Very big. We think we’ve got big malls in and around Seattle—Southcenter, Northgate, Alderwood, even Bellisfair up north, and so on. They are but overgrown convenience stores next to the sprawling monsters of mallness one encounters on, say, a drive up or down Route 1. With essentially unlimited room to expand, the malls hereabouts have no need to cluster a bunch of stores around a central court, walkway or other “feature” in the usual risible effort to (re)create an ersatz “village square” environment. They tend instead to the horizontal, with parking lots the size of Midwestern counties. My visit(s) yesterday were by way of an errand, one of those occasional bumps in the Vacation Road that involves a long, uninformed, wandering search for something one could find in ten minutes at home but is maddeningly elusive even with the help of the interwebs; an old-school experience, I guess it would be called, in which one simply must hunt for the object of one’s desires in real time, via car, traveling from likely suspect to likely suspect with no real hope of success yet nothing better to do than sit on the beach and get skin cancer. For what it’s worth my search eventually and to my surprise was successful, though the hunt took the better part of seven hours, door-to-malls-to-door. I had a lot of malls to visit.

Route 1 is a busy highway during the summer months. It’s gridlock on the weekends, as you can imagine, but even mid-week it can be a waking nightmare.

I had it fairly easy for a while until I had to get back onto the highway from a set-back mall complex in the small town of Smyrna. Though most of the coastal malls are visible from the big road, they tend to be recessed a good distance—as much as a quarter mile—from the traffic, with labyrinthine turn lanes and access roads connecting them to the ribbon of tractor trailers and SUVs that speeds by; skinny limbs and capillaries carrying a vital life-force into the retail extremities, but loathe to allow its natural return to the principal veins and arteries. Ninety-eight percent of the mall stores are the usual suspects; the ubiquitous chains and franchises that so completely have doused the last sputtering sparks of creativity, integrity and value in the retail universe. As if (and possibly literally) by fiat there is a Wal-Mart every fifteen miles or so, and a Home Depot, and its make-believe competitor Lowes, and of course a Macys, a Sears, a Costco, a Radio Shack, a Godfather’s Pizza; you know them as well as I—the reigning hangnails and nosebleeds of post-modern commerce. At each mall the large flagship stores bookend an unbroken string of lesser brethren; plate glass forward, dumpsters behind, side-by side like cars on a mile-long train. Once in their asphalt realm, it is very, very difficult to turn back and regain the highway. This road dead-ends at a Burger King dumpster; that one delivers a driver precisely to the very parking lot, even the same space, he or she was trying to escape. I passed a couple of cars yesterday whose occupants, glimpsed fleetingly through tinted windows upon which they beat their sorry heads arhythmically, clearly had been trying for days or even weeks to leave the self-same malls I too was attempting to flee. I made it out and back to the highway, and if the journey involved a couple of bumps over berms and maybe one trip the wrong way down a one-way access road, there’s no reason to tell my mother-in-law, whose borrowed car I was driving.

I worked in a mall once, a long time ago. It was the summer after my senior year in high school. A friend got me the part-time job. He was employed there as well, and thought it would be good fun for us to work side-by-side as early morning janitors in a department store called “Lazarus.” Why, by the way, in our regressive, pop-Christian culture, do we not tap the Bible more often for its rich store of wonderful monikers when it comes time to name our commercial enterprises? The best ones are found in the Old Testament, of course. A hair salon called Esau’s? A butcher’s shop called Cain’s? Perhaps Zipporah, a fabric store? Pest control by Baal-zebub? Maybe Jeroboam, your tax advisors? Who would dare not to shop at a hardware store called Yahweh’s? Alas I digress. Ours was a New Testament employer, in any case; the high-end garment and gewgaw dealer in that part of the state. We were hired not by the store but by a maintenance services contractor, and our job was to have the place spic and span each morning for it’s 9:30 a.m. opening. That meant being at work by 4:30. I would make the coffee and Bill would pick me up in his Dad’s immaculate Oldsmobile. Bill Senior was a union honcho, and the car, which smelled strongly of graft and dirty politics, had a loaded handgun in the glove box. (Having mentioned this, have no fear—this is a blog not a short story, so the gun need not be fired before its end.) The mall was called “Northland.” It was pretty new at the time, and like every other mall in existence back then it claimed to be the first in America, a dubious distinction one would think, but this was a different era. Bill and I arrived at the parking lot in stygian silence, sliding in alongside the pickups and rattletraps of our hapless coworkers. There we would sip our scalding Joe and wait for our boss to arrive. We could not enter the building without his key, and the night crew, which had attended to the heavier and dirtier maintenance tasks—painting, moving and actually fixing things—could not leave. They would stand trapped behind the wide, locked door of the loading dock, beating on the galvanized steel and hollering for release, as many of them had day jobs waiting.

I don’t recall the boss’s actual name, but we referred to him out of earshot as Shithead. He was always late, sometimes by as much as an hour. He’d arrive in his own good time, generally with a buddy in the front seat, from whatever mischief or festivities had kept them up all night. Shithead drove a beat-up Buick as long as a short city block; a car that seemed to creep rather than roll into the lot at last, its headlights dim and dirty, its engine growling in misery. Shithead was a prodigious boozer, and always had a quart bottle of Seagram’s Seven in hand when he arrived. Whether dregs or freshly opened he and his buddy would finish it, taking their own sweet time, passing a fat joint all the while. We’d be out of the car by then, standing on the dock with the other janitors, shouting back and forth with the graveyard shift guys, who by this time would be frantic and furious in their imprisonment. We’d watch the red ember of the doobie pass back and forth between the men behind their filthy windshield, then the bottle, and often we could hear their radio blaring Motown, though their window remained closed even if the night was warm. Eventually Shithead would roll out of the Buick and smash the empty bottle onto the asphalt, then make his way to the dock. He was a pudgy, repulsive toad of a man, staggering, slobbering and mean as a weasel. His fire-red eyes would be narrowed to slits, and he stank so badly that we could smell him the instant that he shoved open his creaky car door. He wouldn’t say a word as he unlocked the metal gate and the prisoners spilled out, silent now as well, for no one ever, ever, ever crossed words with Shithead. I had a sick sense that someone once tried, and whatever ugliness was provoked had become unspoken legend. Everything about the man told you, with no need of speech, that he would not hesitate to maim or kill you for no reason should you be in his vicinity when the urge struck him. Thankfully he would disappear instantly once we were inside. I never knew where he went. His buddy slept in the car until we were done.

Bill’s and my job was vacuuming. The store was big, as department stores must be, and we’d split into crews by floor, wheeling our equipment out of a cramped closet and calculating how much time we had to get finished, depending on how tardy Shithead had been that day, and thus the speed at which we would need to work to make it seem as though we’d done a passable job, though I don’t recall anyone ever assessing our work. The only rule Shithead enforced was one possibly imposed by Lazarus management, though it may simply have been a personal quirk of his. In either case it was hard and fast: Under no circumstances were we to allow the employees of the store to see us at work, or indeed to spy us at all. The place was to be clean by nine o’clock when the floor managers and sales clerks began to arrive, and we were to hustle our vacuum cleaners back to the store room invisibly, whether that meant taking the escalator, the elevator or a back stair case that supposedly served as a fire escape. The only words I recall ever leaving the boss’s gap-toothed mouth were uttered on the rare occasion when a store worker would arrive unexpectedly, threatening detection and whatever dire consequence might follow. Then Shithead, with some weird sixth sense doubtless developed in one or more state penitentiaries, would materialize in front of us, reeking and unsteady, and mutter “les go dis way,” leading us circuitously through racks and behind displays and eventually to a service door where we would vanish from the apprising eyes of the regular employees, stash our gear and go home.

I learned three valuable lessons about work that summer. My only prior experiences as a paid employee had been playing gigs, mowing lawns for neighbors and, occasionally on Saturdays, assembling two-way radios for a friendly uncle who owned an electronics business. He was nice to me, paid me minimum wage and sometimes bought me donuts on the way to the shop. This was a Real Job for Strangers, albeit horrible ones, and I was determined to Make a Good Impression. On my first day, I vacuumed myself into a bit of a panic. I’d been assigned one-half of the first floor, which was Ladies’ Wear. I worked as quickly as I could, dragging my asthmatic machine around by its accordion hose, learning the locations of the most efficient outlets for its thirty-foot power cord. I glanced at a wall clock a couple of hours into the shift and realized that there was no way I could be finished by nine. Just then Bill appeared, checking in on my first day and laughing uproariously at my methods. It seemed I was, um, overdoing it, specifically vacuuming not only around but beneath the display racks of dresses, skirts and underthings. “You’ll never finish like that,” he giggled. Then how--? I didn’t need to ask. Taking the hose from me he proceeded to “show me how it’s done.” This involved his simply moving up and down the aisles at a brisk amble, pushing the vacuum wand before him like a shopping cart. When he came upon floor debris—torn tags, wadded tissues, bits of broken plastic hanger—rather than pick them up as I’d been doing and put them in the plastic bag that hung from the handle of the machine, he’d deftly kick them out of sight under the racks, without breaking stride. In this manner he finished the area on which I’d spent the last two hours in about forty seconds. He handed me the hose. “See?” I saw. And, I learned my First Lesson about the life of the working man, i.e. that far from being frowned upon it is in fact expected that a fellow will do the bare minimum of a semblance of a job in order to keep the boss man off his back, and get through the day with as little sweat as possible. It’s a reality to which I’ve never easily cottoned, often to my derision and detriment. Throughout my wage earning years I have been accused of “going the extra mile” (that’s the nicest characterization), or more often insisting on the “last one percent,” when much less trouble is all that is required to get by—even in myriad circumstances where I believed the officially-sanctioned effort (sometimes by time or budget constraints, more often by the culture of the particular workplace) to be miles shy of I would consider to be bare competence. There are two sharp edges to this sword, as most of my professional life has been spent attempting to repair or undo the misfortunes engendered by half-assed attitudes and sloppily cut corners, thus imparting a sub-lesson, though one harder learned, which is that one perpetuates the work at hand by doing it less than well, another assumption that’s never sat well in my apparently overly-fastidious Catholic schoolboy conscience. But when in Rome, or Lazarus, and so on. By the end of the summer I was marvelously adept at cleaning entire departments—Lingerie, Junior Miss, Formalwear—simply by glancing at them as I passed by, the footsteps of a sales clerk thudding somewhere on the dirty carpet behind me. Les go dis way.

One memorable morning I came face-to-face without warning with what I imagined to be imminent dismissal, followed by pummeling, knifing or whatever other punishment Shitface might see fit to perpetrate upon my sorry high-school self. To my shock and dismay, as I rounded a corner in the Fragrance department, dragging my vacuum behind me, I heard a male voice summon me into a tiny office the door to which theretofore always had been closed and presumably locked. For a moment I stood shell-shocked. It was only a couple of minutes after six a.m., far too soon to be playing cat-and-mouse with the quality. Nervously I peeked around the doorframe, only to see a manager, in early for lord knew what reason (embezzlement? homelessness? an inability to tell time?) standing behind his desk, his face screwed into an unconvincing semblance of imperious authority. “Get these here, boy,” he said to me, pointing to the carpeted office floor, on which were littered thousands of tiny, round, hole-punch “chads”—though the word wouldn’t be common for another twenty-five years—that were the obvious result of his time-passing creation of the crude paper doilies that covered his desk. He held a hole punch in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other. I can see him in my mind’s eye as clearly as though it was yesterday. His hair was black and greasy, swept back off his narrow forehead. The skin around his slack mouth was as pockmarked as a moon. He wore thick glasses, a thin moustache, a pale yellow button-down shirt and maroon, polyester pants with a white, faux-leather belt. (This was 1974 remember. His outfit, tragically, was not all that unusual among mid-management types.) Trying desperately not to make eye contact, so as not to laugh, spit, gag, puke or punch his oily face, all of which seemed reasonable or even necessary reactions, I quickly ran the floor tool over the rug, sucking up the evidence of his idling and exiting the office like Jack out of his box. Thankfully Shithead was nowhere in site as usual, and of course I told no one about my verboten little detour. Thus I learned Lesson Two: You have to do what they tell you to do, no matter what, if you want to get paid.

My next lesson came toward the end of the summer, as the last dog days of August heralded the coming return to school. We were instructed to vacuum the dressing rooms as well as the showroom, though we seldom bothered. This particular day I’d done such a good imitation of Bill with the vacuum that I had a half-hour to kill before our shift ended, so I ventured into the ladies’ dressing rooms in the Comfy ‘n’ Casual section. They were filthy, which of course was largely my fault for having ignored them since June. I tidied up, tossing hangers, boxes, tissue paper and miscellaneous trash into my hanging plastic bag. On a bench in one of the rooms, I picked up a McDonald’s bag that had an unexpected weight. Assuming it to be a discarded Big Mac, I peeked inside on a whim, only to find a large, chocolate-colored human turd. In that instant I was struck by the lightning bolt of Lesson Three: no matter how badly you think your job sucks, just wait until tomorrow, and it likely will be worse.

I’ve been pondering my Lazarus experience, and my subsequent decades of gainful work, quite a bit this summer. I have for some time now, through no design of my own, been effectively unemployed for the first time since graduating from college. I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that as the country and the economy struggle still, two decades nigh, to squirm out from under the jack boot of Reagonomics and all of the misery it has caused, my long-time field of self-employment has morphed beyond recognition from the circumstances that allowed me to pay my mortgage and buy decent beer until fairly recently. The work, in other words, has changed; vanished, dried up and gone generally vamoose, and as something of a tangential player at the best of times, I can be counted among the inevitable casualties of its transformation.

It’s a squirmy predicament in which I find myself. It is axiomatic that an out-of-work Caucasian American man with as much gray hair as I have is approximately as employable as a butterfly is submersible, regardless of, and often because of, his skills and experience. My most trusted peers and coworkers over the years typically have been several years my senior, and thus for the most part are in the process either of winding down their careers or (in too many cases) of dying. Some long-standing clients have simply gone the Bill route with their the career hoses, cruising the aisles with a wink and a whistle, kicking pesky problems out of sight as they go. For a host of reasons, then, the professional relationships I’ve forged are blinking out like fireflies at dawn. Hiring decisions at companies large and small tend increasingly to be made by managers younger than I, often much younger, and the last thing they want lurking the hallways is some old guy who asks hard questions, doesn’t like leaving jobs half-done and might know more about their business than they do. So it’s a weird new world for me. I spend my mornings going through the motions of looking for work—contacting colleagues and acquaintances (thus garnering alarmingly few responses, let alone leads), filling out applications, scouring the on-line classifieds; all the pointless, pro forma busywork of the unemployed. Afternoons I spend emptying savings accounts, dodging creditors and looking around my house for things to sell. Of course I’m not alone. Unemployment is the new black, after all, and things promise to get much worse before they get better, as American economic policy even as I write is being hijacked by home-grown Congressional terrorists bent on punishing the despised electorate indefinitely for having the gall to put a literate man of color in the Oval Office. Meanwhile said man of color swings so far to the right that the Gipper himself seems a socialist by comparison, yet still cannot appease his new chest-thumping bosses, who play him like a squeaky fiddle while Rome burns. One cannot live indefinitely without income of course, so as I wander hat-in-hand past the shuttered windows of my few remaining prospects, I try to imagine what “lifestyle” changes are in store. I cannot imagine them in any detail, which probably is a good thing.

I kind of miss Shithead. I can’t help but think that I went astray in my work ethic way back then, when I quit the janitor business and went off naively in search of education, expansion, enlightenment and all the other anathema of the century towards which I was rushing, eyes wide shut. In the years since I’ve never been a boss, praise god, and indeed seldom even have had one, at least not of the Shithead variety. But there was something plain and simple about the model he presented: he hates you, you hate him, you do your work begrudgingly, he hands you a check even more begrudgingly, and thus the wheels of commerce turn. There’s no turning back the clock, of course. I couldn’t qualify today for the job I had when I was seventeen. I’d be dubbed “overqualified,” and passed over for a younger, more malleable man. But I wonder if there’s not some needle of hope to be found in the haystack of nostalgia for those simpler times. The Northland mall is dead now. I saw it a couple of years ago on one of my rare trips back to Buckeyeland. It sits shuttered and abandoned, a hulking, decaying monument to failure on a busy Columbus road—too big even to tear down it simply sits, the asphalt cracks in its parking lot sprouting small, spindly trees. Facing the road, covered in warping plywood, its letters and logo long-since stripped away but leaving their Cheshire cat image high on its cement front wall, is my old first locus of labor:

And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes…

Nah, I’m not ready to quit, not yet. But I reckon I’m in the market for a miracle.

Maybe a trip to the mall?