That was
a spoiler, I know, but I needed a little reassurance. Today I finally, after a
month, got up the nerve to go down to this local bookstore to see if they want to carry my book, because it’s a book and they’re
a bookstore and it all seems very fitting. And ok it wasn’t a month, it was months, many of them,
because it takes a while to work up the nerve to go someplace where they’re
going to laugh at you and throw rocks. Yeah I know that’s an unlikely scenario,
but it’s not an impossible one.
But I’ve
been putting this off and off, and I have decided today is the day. I take a
shower and I put on the new perfume I got for Christmas. I’m wearing my best bra
and my lucky, Hello my name is Inigo
Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die, tee shirt so now I smell
good, look adorable, and feel only mildly nauseous. I manage to get myself down
there with my promo postcards, and a copy of my book for their consideration. I
end up parking right in front of the store, which is not ideal because someone
might see that my car really needs a wash, and decide they don’t want to carry
my book based on my automotive sloth, but there’s no place else because it’s
busy downtown. And of course, I park poorly because I’m nervous.
No one
throws rocks at me. No one laughs. They are closed for inventory. For four
days. Maybe it’s a sign. A sign that everything is topsy turvey and vice versa.
That my lucky, Hello my name is Inigo
Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die, shirt is not lucky at all. It
may even be unlucky. I wish I had a better idea about the shirt, but it’s new and
it hasn’t done anything really spectacular for me yet. I can say I've never been exsanguinated while wearing it, but that’s true of all my shirts.
It’s
hard to tell if this is a sign, or if it’s just something that happened. It’s
probably just something that happened, because I usually don’t believe in signs.
But there are times when I want to, times when it seems so obvious and
reasonable that when a door that should have been open is not, it’s because that door is not meant to
be gone through; ever. I resist, because I know if I start officially believing
in signs I’ll be three steps away from becoming young William Shatner stuck in
a diner with narration by Rod Serling.
The problem is this seems a little
bit like a sign. Plus there was an actual sign. On the door. Which seems like a
sign that this is a sign. Although the sign (on the door) did say when they
would be open again, so maybe that’s the real sign. That I should go back. The metaphysical
sign, not the paper sign, which it indisputably is. If you don’t think this
paragraph makes sense, just skip it.
If it
is a sign it seems like a bad one, but I can’t know for sure. Maybe if the
store had been open a conniving employee would have thrown rocks at me, taken
my book while I was crying, and kept it for his own nefarious purposes, never
passing it along to the owner. So maybe it was an amazing cosmic intervention,
saving me from the mean employee so that my delicate spirit remains unbroken, that
I may someday venture out once again to the bookstore. But it’s hard to say. I
do think that if the universe is going to go to that much trouble on behalf of
my delicate spirit, it might find it easier to just have the mean bookstore guy
step in front of a bus. Or see the error of his ways. (Now that I’ve written
that I can see it's probably easier for the universe to have me drive to the
bookstore an extra time than to completely transform or kill an imaginary someone.)
I don’t mean to be ungrateful. I’m
referring to the lack of stoning. But by now, I was supposed to know how it
turned out. I was really hoping to secure a, “Yes, please!” or a “Fuck you. Bitch.”
(I don’t know why imaginary mean guy had to call me a bitch, I was already
leaving.) But no. Inventory is my undoing. Curse you thieves! And people who
can’t subtract! (I believe those are the two main causes of taking inventory.)
In a
few months, I’m going to have to do it all over again. Unless I take this as a
sign.
So then I'm not the only crazy one? I'm taking this as a GOOD sign!
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