Barnes & Noble

I recently had the pleasure to visit Barnes & Noble.

Some shopping districts have a strict codec on what light-up fonts you can use for your store label, but in this parking lot center the Barnes & Noble had an especially fat typeface, to which I had but a little worry the ampersand would fall on me passing under. Unfortunately it didn’t.

But my spirits picked up immediately upon clear view of the store’s entrance. Somehow, someone, an employee maybe, or just some customer who felt “this was the right way to do things, a courteous matter surely”… the door was propped wide open. You’d probably want to interrupt and say, well, only the outer door right? Maybe it’s one of those intermediary halls of two doors, no more than two meter wide, to block the mid-afternoon microwaved smog. And alas, you’d be right.

But it was both doors. Both doors were propped wide open, peak afternoon haze, and the employees waddled around indifferently ahead because, of course, it’s not your A/C bill. And, after all, it’s the right thing to do. These doors are a little heavy, and now I don’t have to lift a finger! It was at this point I knew this was going to be a great visit. I was already smitten.

Barnes & Noble was a place to go growing up, particularly for its magazine sections. But honestly, even as a toddler, I never had a strong love for it, beyond the occasional confectionary from the store-within-a-store that some business models do. Sugar cookies, or those with the streaks of green, reddish pink and yellow: sugar cookie plus. It was in the mixture of fragrant mocha and sterile tile, holding such cookie de la creme that, some days, indeed, Barnes & Noble wasn’t so bad after all.

Fast forward to today, with an unkempt appearance under a baseball cap so I am reminded: it seems all of my childhood was provided by corporations waiting to die, or from Japan, now also vaguely melancholic due to Netflix and Airbnb or just the fact that, indeed, after all, I am from America, so why did all of the three letter agencies assign Japan to provide all the entertainment? Anyway, this property of neu-america post ~1950s is precisely why I feel a mild repulsion thinking about the past instead of nostalgia for anything. But, in a way, I’m almost somewhat thankful for it.

Moving forward, one item on my visiting to-do list was to look for the reputed stacks of smut most Barnes & Nobles patrons pine after. And, I must admit, it’s difficult to notice right-out. Perhaps I miscategorized the tablestack, but nevertheless I guess they use the subterfuge labelling of “fantasy” or “thriller” to insert their debauch paragraph between every fifty in homage to Fifty Shades of Grey. The one stack I’m certain was smut was more toward the back, and with an air exhaled chuckle I crossed it off the list.

The next agenda item was to peruse the rest of the stock, perhaps looking for inspiration or a new novel to procrastinate the other novels I queued up and inject direction into my aimlessness. As I sauntered around, hands clasped behind my back, a methodical sway from left to right to slow-pause along the lined shelves, so I felt at least mildly confident I could find something. One book held the biography (indeed, the best biography, one of the reviews on the cover said so) of one of the founding fathers, and a whole shelf brimmed with Lonely Planet, a publisher known for its extensive research per location. Perhaps world class… Western Australia caught my eye, and I flipped toward the middle to read about their cuisine preferences before moving on.

And after dodging eight racks of “Religion” and another eight racks of “Self-improvement”, along with around ~12 racks dedicated to manga, few racks more toward more Fiction’s fiction, often labeled as Classics, so I found myself flipping through Emma because I don’t think I ever bothered to read Jane Austen and after a few more flips I put the book down, knowing now I probably never will.

I should have looked for Mein Kampf so I could’ve stared down the cashier while purchasing it, but the thought escaped me. I doubt they even carry it. Instead I looked over all of these books and felt oddly sequestered to be a philistine for the rest of my life.

As though you can only read while you’re young enough long enough, and I just felt strongly that whatever book I picked out of here feels no different than watching another episode of slop, but in a more “sophisticated” way and perhaps a few mild benefits, maybe to the tune of your expression or how some of the nuances carry itself through, absorbing the 1800s mannerisms while I snivel around, crouched, angry, rebuking the Whigs for ever supposing we ought to be centrists until death. Perhaps it’s more like, Serious Literature targeted toward men is on life support, and roaming this bookstore with whole shelves of Legos and Coloring books wouldn’t allow me, under any delusion, to think I was On The Brink of Discovery. Of course you could easily bend it: I just was too stupid to know what to read. Why so serious?

In my drooling I felt certain: none of these books have answers for me. I couldn’t even entertain the thought of being entertained while I was there. That there are things I could read but not compelled to. I don’t even know what questions to ask anymore. Can’t even bother to read philosophy because it all feels like bullshit. All my blogposts are crypto-bullshit, in a way; in other words, I already produce enough bullshit, preventing me from collecting more.

Or maybe there’s always this veneer in most “academic pastimes” or “academically inclined influential circles” trying to say a whole lot of nothing. Where are the angry authors? Where is my modern Sermon on the Mount? Just this inertness to writing, a “oh well isn’t this a little curious”, a little recollection to some retreat in Kuala Lumpur, some inertness and kowtowing to the Current State of Things and it does not invigorate me, necessarily. But, again, you could ascribe this to my stupidity and my unjustified need for authors to rile me up on this particular day.

And you’d be right to admonish me, as truth of the matter is some of the classics they had there, or history books left unread, would’ve been a great thing to jot down and read later, someday, eventually. But I’m too masochistic. I’d rather work and then loaf about. A self-hating illiterati.

Toward the end of my visit I felt like I was in a graveyard, adjusting a new phantom form. Of a place provided for those who could have a weekly epiphany behind every critically acclaimed self-help novel; what could’ve been me, but instead I source it elsewhere nowadays. Young adults skipped happily past me, holding hands in the bloom of their perfect relationship, as though some slight to my invisible transformation and older woman strolled across and, I swear, side-eyed something smug knowing I will die alone. In this vertigo onset I couldn’t think of any amusements left; in order to fight off the despair, I scuttled to the music section and only found album covers of artists and their slack jaw faces, and I mean you could choose any image in the world and you choose an image of you staring absently, eerily, so I hurried over to the board game catalog across the way. Looking at the grossly cartoonish coverbox art of Ticket To Ride made me wonder what, exactly, was the target demographic. Probably a happy family.

Looking at all the other customers delightfully perusing I knew it was time to leave.

Maybe next year.