No Love Lost

• The heavily medicated man who, unblinking, started counting out the 423 pennies he needed for his Richard North Patterson pocketbook, excavating lint-covered handfuls from the torn inner lining of his coat. Then the phone rang somewhere in the low 100s, breaking his concentration, and he started all over again.

• Gladhanding sharpie book scout with endless trunks of marginal material (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Detective magazine, & etc.) and Rolls-Royce taste. Actually asked how many paperbacks he'd need for the hardcover Kerouac 1st in the showcase. Variation: your mom, with stacks of Anita Shreve, Gail Anderson-Dargatz, & etc. That is, until the trade slip is written, at which point, instant morph into SBS. "That Kerouac in the showcase..."

• "What I really like about this place is that I never have to buy anything, I can just come in and read whenever I want." (verbatum; ejected)

• Foreign exchange student who stood for an hour opposite the desk, going through the wall of Taschen erotica page by page, his tongue making slow orbits of his lips.

• The new parents with the $400 stroller and the Jack Russell terrier, whose baby shrieked for 45 minutes while mom and dad built a little tower of kids' books on the floor, and the high-strung dog nipped a customer.

• "I'm looking for this book. There's this guy who's mining on the asteroids, only he's a robot, and, uh, I think it has a blue cover. I read it years ago. Man, what a great book!"

Variation 1:

"So, where's your books with robots?"

"The science fiction section's down there."

"I know that. I mean, where's the books with robots?"

Variation 2:

"...so he goes to the asteroids, see, in a little red spaceship. And what's realistic is that there's no oxygen on the spaceship, because, being a robot, he doesn't need oxygen, which humans need to breathe, but he doesn't know he's a robot, so of course he wonders, hey, where's all the oxygen..."

(Much-needed) day off tomorrow, far from people!

- posted by cjb @ 8:03 PM