Well, new to me at least … driving through a friend’s neighborhood last week I saw a huge garage sale outside a rather nice looking house. I’m a sucker for garage sales because I always end up with armfuls of books, and this one was no exception … I scored an excellent quality hardcover set of the Tales of the City series by Armistead Maupin.

Not familiar with them? Well, it has been quite a while since they were published, so I’m not completely surprised that they’re not well-known now, but they’re a must-read. I’ll return to them in a future post I think, since I have more to say about them.

The sale was a double whammy for me, since the books were piled on a rather nice desk chair. I assumed it was just a convenient place to display the books since it seemed to be in excellent shape, but the woman whose sale it was explained that the chair was available too. It seems that after a recent divorce she was redoing her house, and planned to change her ex-husband’s office into an exercise room.

She offered me an excellent price on this burgundy leather-covered chair, and even made my day by glancing at me and saying “This should be pretty comfortable for you … you’re a well-built guy like my ex, and he said it was the best chair he ever had!”

I’m sitting in my new purchase as I type now, and I can already feel my writing improving, my use of metaphor sharpening … well, even if I don’t really feel any of that, my back is aching much less since I put my trusty old stool away. Score!

Well, yes, I suppose there are a few things, some of which aren’t really appropriate for a family audience, but assuming that I’m not going to get a booty call from Kate Winslet anytime soon and Publisher’s Clearing House didn’t just park their van around the corner, I ask again … is there anything more pleasant than an afternoon nap?

There’s a delicious sense of guilty pleasure in taking time that I could be using for something important, something productive, and spending it instead drifting off to sleep with the soporific tones of NPR wafting me away to unconsciousness. After all, I could be writing the next great American novel, or working out, or volunteering in a soup kitchen, or learning to become a sushi maven … but instead I’m asleep. And I’m OK with that.

It’s been a long week; I put in a dozen or more hours of overtime at the store because we’ve had a couple of staff quit lately. Nothing cataclysmic … one moved out of town, and a part-timer found a full-time job now that she’s finished with school … but it’s left us shorthanded, at least temporarily.

The back room, where we receive the books, process them into our system, and handle the returns to publishers, was beginning to look a little like Santa’s workshop on December 24, so I spent the better part of a week burrowed away in there trying to scale Mount Literature. It’s a quite pleasant place to work occasionally, because it’s removed from customers. I can play music that isn’t quite going to work for the sales floor, dress down, and just hammer out some productive work.

And as a payoff, I can take an afternoon nap without regret or guilt. Doesn’t get better than that. Well, unless Kate calls.

Most of my serious reading is confined to current affairs and religion, and I’m particularly interested in the stories of real people’s encounters with those two areas. One book I read recently, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down was a great example of the sort of non-fiction I enjoy. It’s about a Hmong family in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota who have a child who is epileptic.

Within their culture, epilepsy isn’t necessarily seen as solely an illness; it can also be seen as a blessing. A child with epilepsy is considered to have special gifts, and is regarded with respect and a certain amount of awe. The way in which these beliefs intersect with a health and social service system that sees things differently made for a fascinating look into a culture about which I know very little.

When it comes to fiction, I really don’t read anything of any weight anymore. I like to read mysteries and thrillers, preferably series with a recurring character. Although he’s been around for a while, I only recently discovered Michael Connelly, whose books about Detective Harry Bosch are my constant companion right now. I don’t usually have the patience for police procedurals, but these are an exception … he’s a pretty compelling character.

I went to buy a chair today. Nothing special, just a desk chair so that I’d have something a little more comfortable to use while I sit at my desk & write. I’ve been sitting on an old stool, so pretty much anything has to be more comfortable that that, correct?

Off I head to my local “Office Mega Box”, and start wandering around the desk chairs. Boy, these things are more expensive than I would have imagined. I don’t need anything so special, I’m not looking for an Aeron or anything like that (even if I could afford it). But even the low end ones were more than I wanted to spend ideally.

Anyway, an “Office Mega Box” employee heads over, and asks what I want. And I explain; something with arms, and that has some back suppport. Nothing too difficult, you’d think? So he looks me up and down, then announces (in fractured English I should add) that none of the cheaper chairs would work since I was too big for them. Now, I’m not skinny, but I’m hardly the biggest guy around, and these chairs should be able to hold me.

He starts showing me chairs in the $400 range, and I explain, pleasantly, that I need something cheaper. Clearly disappointed in me, he turns to another customer and starts to help them as I continue wandering around. I find a chair that looks OK, and that won’t require me to eat Ramen noodles for three months in order to pay for it. And I sit down to try it.

Whizzz … “Office Mega Box” boy scoots over, and tells me, rather loudly, to not sit in that chair. Why? Because he’s already explained to me that I’m too big for a chair like that, and I might break it!

Slightly dumbfounded, I sat for a second and he says it again. At which point, I lost it a little. His English may not have been too good, but both of the words I used before storming out were pretty short ones. He understood those.

Which is all very well, but I still don’t have a new chair, and my back hurts. Now what to do?

My name’s Greg, as must be obvious from the blog address, and I have never tried writing a blog before. Not sure yet what I’ll be writing about … probably the same sort of brain-numbing inanities that so many bloggers come up with, but with my own unique style.

I suspect I’ll be writing a great deal about books, since I work in a bookstore. It’s what I know, and until I started working in a bookstore it was always what I liked. However, having worked in this store for nearly three years I’ve managed to rid myself of any vestige of interest in literature, books, or the literary life that I might have once fantasized.

I’ve always hear that about restaurants … there’s no easier way to spoil your experience of your favorite restaurant then to work there. Suddenly, you see the true nature of the chef, the patches of dried crud stuck down between the stove and the sink, and the extent to which your favorite restaurant is quite capable of serving up last week’s catch of the day and calling it fresh fish. (Yeah, trust me … it’s been done.)

I always thought I’d love working in a bookstore, and truth be told there are still a few cool things about it, but the reality of book selling is much less enthralling than you might think. True, it really is quite satisfying to spend time with a customer and help them to find the perfect gift, but that’s not how I spend the bulk of my day.

Oops, a customer just walked in … this will have to wait for the next post.