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I had a kind of dream that was embedded in a dream. Except when I woke up, I couldn’t figure out whether it was a dream or a memory…
I was hiking up an extraordinarily steep trail. The trail led to a pasture where there was a whole settlement of houses, people having parties, people I knew.
In the dream, this was the third or fourth time I was making this trip, and I was remembering that the first time I’d made the trip, I’d been very frightened, but by now, it was actually fun! I knew the trail.
When I woke up, I immediately thought: Right! You and Barbara Angell…
Did we make a hike like this? It’s entirely possible. Barbara and I were running partners, and we used to take off for spur-of-the-moment explorations of Yosemite and the Los Padre National Forest pretty regularly. I have a terrible memory, and this was – what? Thirty-five years ago?
It could be a real memory.
In other news, temps hit 97 degrees yesterday. Walking outside was like walking in soup. I had to buy a bday gift for Jeanna, so I ended up at the mall. There’s a shop that sells Tibetan curios at the mall. Very bad location for a shop that sells Tibetan curios.
For a long time after the Little Store crashed and burned, proximity to retail made me want to slit my wrists.
But recently, I’ve mellowed a bit in that regard.
The mall was almost completely empty. That sallow blonde woman who asked me with such a desperate smile, “Can I help you with anything?” She had to be the owner.
“How’s business?” I asked. Back in the day when I was a shop owner, I used to love it when customers asked me, “How’s business?” and I could launch into a diatribe on the plight of the small businessperson in America.
The blonde woman did not share my enthusiasm.
“Business is… Well…”
She sighed.
Last time I’d been in the store, winter sometime, the store had actually had a few nice pieces. Pretty much everything was crap now, leading me to surmise that she didn’t have enough liquidity to pay her best vendors. I can’t even imagine how desperately high her rent is.
You’re about two months away from going broke, I thought. But that year-long lease you signed with the mall management corp? It's unbreakable.
“Malls are hard places for independent businesses,” I said chattily. “I mean, the big chain stores have pretty much given up on selling anything in their mall stores – the stores mostly exist as three-dimensional billboards. But you have to sell --” I shook my head sympathetically.
Poor woman looked as though she might burst into tears at any second.
When will you just learn to shut the fuck up? I chided myself.
But I ended up buying Jeanna a pair of earrings that were about twice as expensive as what I’d originally intended to spend, so at least the woman got something for her humiliation.
Sheesh.
Throughout the rest of the day, I carried that sense of being the world’s most socially oblivious oaf into everything else I attempted to do.
Trying to finish the Eleanor story today so that I can give it to Ben to read when I go up to T-Burg Wednesday and so that L can read it on the plane to California.
I was hiking up an extraordinarily steep trail. The trail led to a pasture where there was a whole settlement of houses, people having parties, people I knew.
In the dream, this was the third or fourth time I was making this trip, and I was remembering that the first time I’d made the trip, I’d been very frightened, but by now, it was actually fun! I knew the trail.
When I woke up, I immediately thought: Right! You and Barbara Angell…
Did we make a hike like this? It’s entirely possible. Barbara and I were running partners, and we used to take off for spur-of-the-moment explorations of Yosemite and the Los Padre National Forest pretty regularly. I have a terrible memory, and this was – what? Thirty-five years ago?
It could be a real memory.
In other news, temps hit 97 degrees yesterday. Walking outside was like walking in soup. I had to buy a bday gift for Jeanna, so I ended up at the mall. There’s a shop that sells Tibetan curios at the mall. Very bad location for a shop that sells Tibetan curios.
For a long time after the Little Store crashed and burned, proximity to retail made me want to slit my wrists.
But recently, I’ve mellowed a bit in that regard.
The mall was almost completely empty. That sallow blonde woman who asked me with such a desperate smile, “Can I help you with anything?” She had to be the owner.
“How’s business?” I asked. Back in the day when I was a shop owner, I used to love it when customers asked me, “How’s business?” and I could launch into a diatribe on the plight of the small businessperson in America.
The blonde woman did not share my enthusiasm.
“Business is… Well…”
She sighed.
Last time I’d been in the store, winter sometime, the store had actually had a few nice pieces. Pretty much everything was crap now, leading me to surmise that she didn’t have enough liquidity to pay her best vendors. I can’t even imagine how desperately high her rent is.
You’re about two months away from going broke, I thought. But that year-long lease you signed with the mall management corp? It's unbreakable.
“Malls are hard places for independent businesses,” I said chattily. “I mean, the big chain stores have pretty much given up on selling anything in their mall stores – the stores mostly exist as three-dimensional billboards. But you have to sell --” I shook my head sympathetically.
Poor woman looked as though she might burst into tears at any second.
When will you just learn to shut the fuck up? I chided myself.
But I ended up buying Jeanna a pair of earrings that were about twice as expensive as what I’d originally intended to spend, so at least the woman got something for her humiliation.
Sheesh.
Throughout the rest of the day, I carried that sense of being the world’s most socially oblivious oaf into everything else I attempted to do.
Trying to finish the Eleanor story today so that I can give it to Ben to read when I go up to T-Burg Wednesday and so that L can read it on the plane to California.
