2002-11-02 - 11:57 p.m.
So I decided to kill part of an especially boring Saturday evening by browsing through the local Barnes and Noble. Some observations:
* Small children do not belong in bookstores. Unless it’s before 8 p.m., and they’re confined to the children’s section--where the tables are low, the books are full of pictures and the staff are specially trained to deal with the snotty faces and mewling sense of entitlement of the overprivileged and over-sugared offspring (also known as "demonspawn") of Homo yuppius americanus. Otherwise, keep the no-neck monsters at home. Most people who go to bookstores on Saturday night are there because (1) they don’t have a date, (2) there’s nothing on TV, and (3) they want to be among other people while still having some quiet time. If they wanted to listen to the ear-splitting screams and running feet of someone else’s genetic accidents they’d be hanging out at Wal-Mart, wouldn’t they?
* Who Moved My Cheese? for Teens? That’s just sick and wrong. From a marketing standpoint as well as a moral one. Think about it--wasn’t the first Who Moved My Cheese? book just a single part of the ongoing campaign to turn Americans into a nation of meek and complacent technopeasants? Hasn’t that same campaign also involved gutting our educational system to the point where more and more teenagers are unable to read? So, then, who’s going to buy the book? Oh, right--parents. The same parents who let their younger children run like crazed hyenas up and down the aisles of bookstores. Never mind.
* I haven’t been to this particular B&N in months, and at first I thought the Literature section had shrunk. Then I looked closely and noticed that a whole shelf full of titles had been lumped togather instead under "Women’s Fiction." Flipping through the dust-jacket blurbs for some of them, I decided that the section had been labeled "Women’s Fiction" only because "Incest Memoires" wasn’t euphemistic enough.
* If I see Christopher Reeve’s mummified and shrink-wrapped face gazing beatifically down at me from one more bookstore pyramid display, I swear I’ll have to become the world’s first disabled serial killer just to restore balance to the universe. OK, maybe not a serial killer--how about a serial foot-runner-over? A serial public-urinator? A serial strip-club-frequenter? A serial small-children-traumatizer? Please, God, someone stop Christopher Reeve before he pontificates again.
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