misAdventures of Workmonkey 3.0

This Sunday, Jill required me to join her in a wonderful trip to Bennigan's, or Bennentons, or whatever store she had to return something to. Located in the huge Columbus Circle mall next to Central Park, it took me about five seconds to start developing a severe stress, as malls are among my least favorite places on earth, next to bathrooms Lee has been in, and Guatemalan boats (that's a story for later). Something about all the clothes, and dummies, and dummies in clothes, and gay people, and annoyingly hip mall music, and luxury yogurt shops, and unnaturally polished marble floors make me feel .. female .. and I don't like the feeling.

After a few moments at Bennigans, I had somehow managed to wander into a gigantic Barnes and Noble. This is one of those new city-type Barnes and Nobles that has much more than books ... It has coffee shops, classrooms, great white shark petting zoos, egyptian tombs, and glass windmills. It is fantastical. Which is good for me, because something I've suspected for a long time, and was finally confirmed on Sunday, is that I hate bookstores. I've always known that I get extremely agitated in bookstores, but only Sunday was I able to sharpen my mental knives enough to deduce the cause. And, as you are my captive reader, I will share the insight with you:

1. There are all-together too many books. It totally and completely overwhelms me. I walk into a bookstore and come face to face with the patheticness of my existence. Even if I became a professional book reader and read books 24-hours a day for the remainder of my life, I would probably only consume about .0006 percent of the books that exist. The human brain simply isn't good enough. And that is too mention nothing of the fact that I'd have to pick which books to read, which also would overwhelm me. Bookstores remind me of the infinite subjects and choices in life, and just as that choice often cripples me in real life, so does it cripple me in a bookstore. What direction do I want to go? Towards the Fiction? History? Automtive? Calendars? What do I want to learn? How to milk a snake? Where to find a razor used by Jesus? How many prime numbers can be found using The Sieve of Eratosthenes? Where Waldo is? How to draw Garfield? Why Lord Wellington chose the northern route during the Battle of Waterloo? The mechanics behind a collapsed star? The fundamentals of closed circuitry? The essence of animal auras and how to read paws? Building the ultimate card house? Do-It-Yourself elbow joint construction? Northern Italian low-fat cooking? How Stella Got her Groove Back?

It simply is too much for me, and I become frozen by the infinite possibilities. Because there are so many worlds to explore, and cannot take a choice. I don't look at it as choosing one world, I look at it as excluding all the others. And that is too high a burden for one man to take.

2. I further become distraught by writer's guilt, which is the feeling held by a writer when surrounded by books and realizing that none of them are yours. Only when in a bookstore does it occur to me that i have neither the talent nor drive required to write a book, though I am cursed with the desire. So I sit in a bookstore thinking to myself, "I should write a book. Why haven't I written a book? Too lazy? You lazy bitch, get out of this bookstore and write a book! But what should I write about? Well, they say write what you know. But what do you know? You know what everybody else knows, like eating, sleeping, and sneezing, so that isn't very interesting. Why don't u go do something interesting, then write about it? Like get attacked by a roving pack of mad fire ants in the Jungle, only to survive and have to find your way out using only your desire to eat Curly Fries again. Yum, Curly Fries. I should go to Johnny Rockets .. I think there is one down on 72nd .." By this time, I've devolved into a thought thicket so deep, the only way to regain myself is to leave the bookstore. But then I feel guilty leaving with out a purchase, which brings me to:

3. Books are too expensive. For all the agony I've just been through trying to decide on one, if I actually do, I simply cannot agree to spending $14.99 for one of them. Chances are if I do buy it, it will simply sit on my windowsill anyway for three years until I get through the other 68 books i've already purchased but never read. My reading list is over a thousand books long, and at my current pace of reading 5 books a year, it'll take me some time to get through that list.

As you might imagine, I dragged myself out of the Barnes and Noble and back to the Bennigans, where Jill was haggling with the gay store manager about how much she could get in store credit for a dress she returned one day after the thirty day limit. But I enjoyed it immensely. Compared to where I just was, I had finally found peace and quiet. Bookstores are for those braver that me.

I'm sticking to Johnny Rockets.