not falling down

The cool indie bookstore chain in town got bought out by Borders. The hell! This really sucks. Any bookstore in a storm, but a big nasty chain store is way down the ladder from anything locally based. I mean, Borders is the store on which Robot Stories - True Tales of Retail Hell is based. There’s not much good to say about that.

Well, actually there could be. Joseph-Beth, dude, the incumbent’s down for the count. Your move!

I hated “Too Little Too Late” for a long time. After he picked up the album at Sam Goody in what, September?, Jon left it in his stereo most days; since it doubled as an alarm clock, we’d both wake up to that raucous opening riff every morning, puffy and tired and grouchy. I really resented that guitar, and even though I loved the album, I had to skip the first track to listen to it.

That was the Autumn of Sleepovers, when everyone in our little accidental clique ended up in bed together in some kind of combination. It was all very innocent, except when it wasn’t. And it was all very intimate, and a little desperate, in ways we couldn’t see at the time.

We never had any intention of becoming as self-involved as we did, but that’s the way structures function in small, overeducated, post-adolescent Western society. It tightened until it snapped, and after that we were both more free and more disparate.

I never had any intention of going through an experience like that, either, but I did. I learned a lot when I didn’t think I had much left to learn. I came out the other side still angsty, of course, but I’d grown; I’d also learned how to express myself in cartoons and small sentences. A year later I started this journal, in the small warm shelter of a dorm room shared with Jon and Amanda and sometimes Ken, and the urge to write had some of its origin in the fall of 2000.

I listened to Maroon for the first time in months today, which maybe wasn’t the wisest idea. I’m still at the office, and it’s all very vivid now: nostalgia, unfulfillment and ache.

Amanda, Tara, Lauren, Alison, Rachel, Darren, Ken, and most of all Jon: Forgive me this outburst. I miss you. Come back.

Heard in front of the elevators, on the way to lunch:

“He was getting sued for calling that woman ‘Nappy Roots,’ remember?” (laughter)

“Man, I want somebody to say something derogatory to me, so I can sue.”

“I say things to you all the time.”

“Yeah, but you don’t count. I want [the CEO]!”

I learned something today. I learned that you can be an extremely nice, friendly Turkish guy at my job named Sevket (SHEV-ket), with almost girlishly pretty eyes and lips, a teddy-bear figure and a very normal haircut. Then, you can go on vacation for a week, get a tan, shave your head and grow a goatee, and turn into Kaiser fucking Soze.

Man, I wish I had a camera. He’s still nice, there’s just all this terror overlaid on it now. I was coming back from the break room with a bag of Doritos, and Sevket passed me and said “Hey, Brendan. Early lunch? Late breakfast?” Then he smiled, and I had to make a conscious effort not to dive for the nearest cube and pray for it to be over.

Hey, I found another reason cell phones suck!