The bright side: this was the first birthday in five years where I wasn’t dealing with a photo shoot, a television interview, a newspaper interview, or a medical emergency. (Well, manufactured medical emergency.) The dark side: the aerogel that we laughingly call Dallas air is getting so thick that four months of allergy shots are probably the only reason I’m still alive. The air isn’t too thick to breathe. It’s too thin to plow.
Anyway, one of the benefits of spending a three-day weekend in allergy-induced hallucinations is gaining insane insights into the universe, and having lots of horticulture -related reading material by the bedside definitely helped. This was compounded by being functional enough by Sunday to get up and around, and I decided to test this by visiting one of the local Borders bookstores being liquidated. I’m still concentrating observations and impressions based on what the implosion of Borders entails for the publishing industry, especially the horticulture and gardening components, and they should be coherent enough to share by this week.
One absolute, though, based on multiple visits to multiple putrefying Borders stores over the last six months. When someone finally chronicles the exact whys and wherefores of why Borders went under, I suspect we’ll get a lot of answers to various surreal questions. “Why did so many employees assume that working for Borders was ‘working in the publishing business’?”, for instance, seeing as how you didn’t hear Steak & Ale frycooks insisting they had to stick with a dying company because they wanted to keep “working in the ranching business”. The biggest one I have, though, is what Borders ordering rep was responsible for the company’s incredible selection of marijuana growing guides. Each store’s selection was already famous, and the current liquidation just accents how many copies of The Cannabible must have been stockpiled in the back of each store for years. Was this selection the result of a lost bet, or was someone in the ordering staff in Ann Arbor really, really projecting on their career plans after they left Borders?