One of the biggest projects has been creating a book from my blog entries about my retail job, tentatively entitled “19th Nervous Breakdown.” Here is the opening chapter, written over the past few months:)

This customer, at least, was only in the early stages of emotional meltdown as she approached the information desk. Her long black hair flowing over an equally black, perfectly tailored jacket and black silk blouse, the legs of her elegant pants (also, of course, black) flapping behind her in the wake of her stride, she came to an abrupt stop at a search station.

As I came around to the front of the information desk, I saw her poking at the keyboard, mostly at the Backspace and Enter keys. She tried a wide variety of misspellings of “Judaism” before clenching her right fist. It looked like she was going to try to punch some
sense into the computer.

“Can I help you find anything?” I asked.

“No, I’ve got…Well, no, it’s…You know what I need? Can you find me a book that tells me why I keep ending up going out with Jewish men?”

That was a new one. “Well, we can try a few different searches. You might find something in the relationships section, or maybe under Judaism…” I could picture a book that might be useful, but not clearly enough to spot what it was. (Later, I discovered that I had been remembering Vicki Weiss and Jennifer Block’s What to Do When You’re Dating a Jew.)

“You see, the thing is, I’ve always gone out with Jewish men. And when I was a kid, sitting on the curb, it was always me and the Jewish boys. I wonder if it’s that I view the whole world through business. I think Jewish guys…do you think Jewish guys are ambitious in business and that’s what attracts me?”

“Well,” I said, “this Jewish guy dropped out of high-tech after a couple of decades and is now working in a bookstore.”

She shrugged and sighed. “I guess that kills that theory.”

We wandered over to the Religion section. She took copies of Judaism for Dummies, a book on intermarriage, and a book on Jewish business ethics. I started to suggest more things, but her Blackberry summoned her to a higher calling and she strode off to the coffeeshop, arguing with someone over her Bluetooth connection. (At least I hope she had a Bluetooth earpiece under all that hair — she didn’t seem to be prone to talking to invisible people without the use of technology.)

I probably wouldn’t rank very highly on anyone’s scale of ambition, at least if they were measuring it in financial terms. At almost fifty, here I am, scrambling along in an expensive city on a bookseller’s wages after a moderately extravagant life as a technical writer and programmer. Where I had once had a three bedroom house to myself in Dallas, I am now living with several others above a ramshackle monastery outside San Francisco, with my own bedroom crammed with boxed and unboxed stuff that spills over into our common room. Where I once had a CD buying habit that had me buying at least a disc a day in stores, plus about a hundred dollars in CDs every couple of weeks by mail order, I now have developed a knack for finding great things (at least according to my own eccentric musical tastes) in the dollar bins at the used CD joints in the city. Where I had eaten practically every meal at restaurants or take-out places, I’ve now gotten down to a schedule of eating good, quick breakfasts at home, cooking a huge dinner once a week (I can knock out a sumptuous meal for four for under ten dollars, if needed) and freezing leftovers for the following week’s lunches (though I do eat my midnight dinners out more often than would be perfectly frugal).

But on a more important scale, I’ve achieved my ambitions. I get to hang out in a book and CD store all day, talk to people and help them find things that make them happy, and I even get paid for it. After jobs that had me spend every waking hour chained to my computer, I am ordered to go home when my shift is over, giving me time to work on my writing, other creative work, and to relax (if I ever learn to do that). After years of piloting a desk, sitting in a box and yelling at a box, I’m in constant motion, walking around the sales floor (as well as up and down hills on the way to and from the store), in better physical shape than I’ve ever been before. I’m noticed for doing work that I’m actually good at, rather than living with the constant worry (that still pops up in nightmares) that people would notice that I really didn’t know how to do my jobs and was continually improvising hacked together kludges to get things done.

Most of all, taking a breath and looking at my life in general, I can say that I’m happy. I still have frustrations and disappointments, but I can go to bed most nights with the sense that I’ve done something to make someone’s life better.

Doing this work has put me in a different social class than I had been before: I’m now one of those people wearing a name tag, ringing up purchases or answering questions at the information desk, that people often don’t see or recognize as people until they need us (and they often make it seem that we have offended them by being in a position to help).

I can understand where they are coming from in this. In my previous life, in the extravagant phases when I was paid too much for tech work and in the extended stretches of near-penniless unemployment that often came between jobs, I think I’ve been each of the people that I now find that I have to summon some compassion to handle:

• I have been the arrogant dot.com guy, sure that the cashier to whom I was speaking must be some kind of pitiable failure to be working a cash register late at night.
• I have been the guy stomping around the sales floor, certain that the employees must each be personally incompetent because they haven’t dealt with my search immediately, sometimes trailing too closely behind a worker who is helping others so that I can pounce once he is free, sometimes tempted (but only tempted) to stand dead center where the aisles meet and yell, “Does anybody work here?”
• I have been the guy who glares blankly or barks at a store worker who has approached with an eager offer to help when I just want to be left alone.
• I have been the guy who, having finished what he came for, stands around inside the front of a store, not wanting to venture out to walk home in the rain.
• I have been the lonely, lost guy in a new, strange city, scraping together pocket change to buy his hometown newspaper.
• I have been the guy in the bookstore coffee shop, sitting with a foot-tall stack of magazines and a single cup of coffee for hours, sometimes dozing off, sometimes failing to put the magazines back where I got them.
• I have been the guy flipping through the CD racks all evening, not ready or able to buy anything, but not ready to go home and face an empty house.
• I have been the guy following a worker around, talking nonstop about irrelevant matters while he tries to help others or get his tasks done, not quite admitting that I am there not because I need a book but because I need a friend.

Trying to establish more of a web presence in the days after my last dot.com job ended, I started a blog in September 2001. At a variety of web hosts, using a variety of programs, I’ve been blogging ever since. I’ve built this book from blog posts, starting soon after I came to the San Francisco area in mid-2002. I’d written these posts either on my weekends (which happen midweek) or upon coming home from work, usually after midnight, unable to sleep until I’d blogged about the surprises, joys, sadnesses, and the sheer weirdnesses that I’d encountered that day.

I work the closing shift most of the time now, shutting things down and reshelving books and CDs after the customers have gone. As I recall, I ended up reshelving most of the books with which the customer with the earpiece wandered off. I think she got Judaism for Dummies, leaving the rest in the cafe along with a stack of business and fashion magazines and some general trash. Sometimes I find customers exactly what they want; I hope that sometimes I find what they need. And helping the store make a profit is probably a good thing, too.

But what I look for is the human contact, the communication, the chance to help people leave the store happier than they came in. Here are some of the stories of some of these people, and what happened when our lives crossed on the floor of this large and often crazy store.

Our supervisors gave the ritual announcements starting an hour before closing to make sure that people had time to pull their stuff together and leave on time. They even made more announcements than usual, since some of the people seemed especially resistant to leaving. We also had a steady barrage of people zooming in and having to get one of the Harry Potter books immediately. We had plenty of the new one, but the whole industry seems to have been caught unaware by the sudden demand for the earlier books, and everyone in the country seems to be running short of them. (I’d seen the five movies, so I read book six last week and am reading the new, final one this week so as not to miss the cultural moment.)

Right after the ten minute warning, just as I thought I had cleared the floor for the night, a woman came up the escalator, dressed in a sharp business suit and carrying a briefcase. She stopped after walking ahead by a few steps, and went into the usual bird-like head bobbing of someone trying to figure out quickly where we’ve put things.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“I need the Paul McCartney,” she said. “The new one. The latest one.”

“That’ll be over here,” I said, walking over to a display. It wasn’t there. “Or definitely over here,” I continued, heading back to the McCartney bin in the Pop/Rock section. I pulled it from the bin, handed it to her, and began to walk back with her to the escalators.

“Is it good?” she asked. “Is it a good one? It’s not for me. It’s for my dad. Will he like it?”

“It’s good,” I said. “It’s a good Paul McCartney album. No one’s going to go ‘Oh, wow, I never expected Paul McCartney to do this!’, but if you liked the last one — and I liked the last one a lot — you’ll like this one.”

“OK,” she said, then slowed and turned to face me. “Um, would you have…” she paused. “What music do you have for someone who’s dying? I mean, he’s dying right now, and I want to have music for him… to have… when he goes.”

“What does he like to listen to?” I asked.

“Classical. Jazz. Choral. Instruments. World. Chants. You know…” she replied.

“Well, I can think of one thing right off,” I said. “I read an article in the New Yorker a while back about music playing in hospices. It said that this piece –” I pulled a CD of Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa from the composer’s rack “– was the favorite music for people who… were there.”

“For dying people? Can I listen to it?”

I took her over to a listening station and showed her how to scan a disc and listen to excerpts. She listened to the snippet that we could play of Tabula Rasa, nodded, and took off the headphones.

“This is good. What else would you suggest?”

I got her the Trio Mediaeval’s Soir, Dit Elle. “This is a favorite of mine. Three soprano voices, very spare, drifting and winding around each other in the silence.”

“I like that,” she said. “I’ll give it a listen. Do you have any chants that would be good, Tibetan or Hindu or something like that?”

I went over to the world music bins as she listened to the Trio Mediaeval and pulled out some suggestions. She listened to several. She immediately liked Lama Gyurme’s Rain of Blessings: Varja Chants, and turned down Nawang Khechog’s Tibetan Meditation Music since it had flutes instead of chanting. I stepped away while she was listening to those and pulled out Pat Metheny’s One Quiet Night, Deva Premal’s The Essence, and Sacred Tibetan Chant by the Monks of Sherab Ling Monastery (though I ended up not suggesting it to her as I remembered that it gets kind of raucous toward the end).

When I got back to her, our manager was announcing over the loudspeakers that we were closed. The customer appeared to be talking to herself, but I realized, as I returned to her, that what I had thought was an earring was a Bluetooth earpiece for her phone. “OK… OK… I’ll be there… So he’s… OK… So I’ll be there soon… Bye.”

Our manager was now asking the employees to clear the floors. “I’m going to be a moment,” I said over the headset. “I’m still with a customer.” I decided that I was going to give this customer as much time as she needed.

She decided to get the Metheny and the Deva Premal. “Thanks,” she said. “This is… we didn’t expect this. He just… and I had to find the music, and I…”

“I understand,” I said. “I lost my father about a year ago, and I can feel where you are.”

“Well, thanks so much for… for this,” she said.

I nodded. “It’s an honor to be able to help you.”

She headed down the escalator. I got on the loudspeaker, announced that the fourth floor was clear, and listened as each of the remaining floors were declared clear as she descended.

I moved around the floor, putting away the CDs that she didn’t get, and found myself shaky and tearing up. This had been more difficult than I had thought as I was doing it, and I felt like I had been involved in a kind of sacred responsibility.

On my way down, I told a coworker about the customer’s search. “Wouldn’t you just want to play whatever music the person liked most?” she asked.

“From what I’ve learned,” I said, “that’s not quite it. Sometime you don’t want anything with too strong a hook or a rhythm. If a person is in the process of going, that music can get in the way, and can block some of the emotions.” (I recall that there’s a story in the Talmud about just such a thing.)

“Hmm,” she said. “Not something I would have imagined.”

I got down to the basement and finally clocked out. My manager was down there, waiting to close the building. I told him what had happened. “What an end to the day,” I said.

“And what a night,” he replied.

I leaned against the wall, regaining my balance, as I waited for the elevator. Thinking back on all the annoyances of the day, I returned to the image and emotions of that final customer. And I realized that, after all the problems, this is why we are here.

“Actually, I have a question for you,” he said. He spoke quickly, not quite agitated but clearly wired, and with an accent that sounded vaguely West African or Caribbean, though I couldn’t pin it down further than that. “What is the difference in relative mass between this DVD and an empty DVD?”

I figured that this was somehow going to lead to a question about shipping charges. “Well, DVD’s don’t weigh very much, so an empty case won’t weigh much less than a case that has a DVD in it.”

“No, no, not an empty DVD case. An empty DVD, without information on it.”

“Do you mean a blank DVD versus a recorded one?”

“Yes, yes, precisely, an empty DVD versus, as you say, recorded.”

I thought for a moment. “There should be no difference at all.” (Actually, I wasn’t quite sure if the change in the die caused by the laser actually made any difference in the mass, but I don’t think so.)

“Ahah!” he said gleefully. “So Einstein was indeed wrong!”

Thinking rapidly and deeply about this revelation, I responded with an erudite “Huh?”

He walked over to our display of blank DVDs, picked one up, and waved it in the air. “This DVD is empty. It has no information. Correct?”

“That’s close enough to true,” I said.

He waved the recorded DVD in his other hand. “And this DVD is full of information. Correct?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Yet they weigh exactly the same amount!” Apparently he had taken into account the weight of the substantial booklet in the recorded DVD’s case.

“Ok… But Einstein?”

“Einstein!” he crowed. “Einstein declared that e equals m c squared, that energy and mass are the same thing. Yet this contains information, which is clearly a thing, yet you say that it makes no difference to the mass.”

“Well. It does have more information. But information doesn’t necessarily weigh anything.”

“Yes! And therefore Einstein was wrong!”

I was growing more puzzled. “Look, if there’s a piece of paper with a bunch of random letters on it, and another piece of paper with the letters arranged into a poem, what is the difference in what they weigh?”

“You say that there is no difference. But Einstein said that there must be.”

“What does Einstein have to do with it?”

“The information is either a thing, in which case it has mass, or has moved the items around, in which case it is an energy, which should be converted to mass, like ice turning to water. And a lecture that I just came from said that all twentieth century science, especially Einstein, was wrong, because they ignored the presence of information.”

OK, so this guy had just fallen off the deep end of science without having taken Physics 101. “But Information Science is a huge field.”

“Physics ignores it,” he said. “It is wrong.”

“So you’re saying that if something contains information, it must be heavier than something that is not.”

“Correct!”

I picked up five CDs from a display and put them on a table near us, shifting them around. “OK, here are five CDs. They are in alphabetical order. Would you say that that is more information than they contain on their own?”

“Obviously,” he said.

Using my best Three Card Monte skills, I scrambled the order of the discs. “Now do you see that they are not in order?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Do you say that they now weigh more or less than they did before?”

“If there was an order to them, they must have weighed more, and you dissipated the mass in the energy of scrambling them.”

“Hmm, how can I explain this?… OK, information exists, but it doesn’t make things heavier or, um, warmer. It’s irrelevant to mass or energy.”

“If it is a quality that exists it must be expressible as mass or energy, or Einstein was wrong.”

At this point I really wished I could reach over and pull Douglas Hofstadter out from behind a pillar. “Look,” I said, “It boils down to a simple analogy. Tell me: Is red louder than a square?”

He actually stopped fidgeting for a moment. “That question cannot have a meaningful answer.”

“Precisely!” I said. “And there can be no meaningful answer as to the weight of information, since information is not a mass-or-energy kind of thing.” By this point I was plowing ahead on my own momentum, vaguely aware that I was utterly winging it and wasn’t entirely sure that I wasn’t, in some high-level scientific way, dead wrong. But I tried not to let it show.

“So Einstein was wrong!” he said again.

“What do you believe that Einstein said about this?”

“Einstein said that e equals m c squared, that energy is the same thing as matter and that that’s the only thing in the universe.”

I started to get what he meant. “OK, he did say that they can be essentially the same thing. But I don’t think he said that they were the only things in the universe.”

“What else might he have believed that there would be?”

It was time for a mad theoretical leap. “As you might recall, Einstein said that God does not play dice with the universe.”

“I recall that he did, yes.”

“So he must have allowed for the possible existence, in some sense, of God, correct?”

“I suppose that he did.”

“So is God matter or is God energy?”

He stared blankly for a moment, his hands dropping to his sides. “God must be neither. So… Einstein said that there was matter, energy, and… God? And God is above them?”

“Well, I think he said that there might be a God. And I don’t know if God would be above them, or alongside.” I gestured, moving my hands in skew lines.

“Alongside… not… maybe…”

“And thus information is alongside energy or matter, and doesn’t affect weight.”

He stood silent, his face moving between epiphany and breakdown.

Suddenly, another customer ran up and stood between us. “Joe! I loved the discs you sold me last night! Now you have to find me the Brian Eno, Gerald Markoe, and Tony Scott discs again!”

“OK,” I said. I looked up at the Einstein guy and said “Excuse me,” but he didn’t seem to notice. And by the time that I found the discs for the other customer, he had disappeared.

Later, a coworker who had been standing nearby said that we had been getting rather loud in the conversation. “I thought you were arguing about a bogus coupon or something until I listened to you. Then I thought of getting involved, but couldn’t find a way to wedge in.”

“I wish you had,” I said. “Your science is probably less rusty than mine.” As with most of my coworkers, he had probably taken a science class a quarter-century more recently than I had.

My supervisor then came over. “You do know that that’s the guy who was in here a few months ago complaining that we had conspired with the FBI to steal his jacket, right?”

“It’s that guy? That sort of makes his not making sense make sense.”

“It figures that he’d come to you.”

I sighed. “They all come to me. I’m the freak magnet.”

I had a few more weird people during the day, and there will be more in the next few. Whether or not these have an effect, it is just about the full moon, and it’s the first of the month, when many of our regulars get their government checks. So we’ll be seeing more, with more odd encounters. Perhaps I’d better brush up on relativity, just in case.

The CD player is a five-disk carousel thing, so we can load in several discs to play in sequence. I’m not too clear on what the sequence is, since the numbers on the tray can’t be read easily. I know that the disc that is in the center position when the tray is open plays first. If I put in three discs, one to its left and one to its right, it will play the center disc then each of the others, though I’m often surprised by which it chooses. Tonight, when I was the only worker on the the floor for the last three hours of the day, I loaded it up with three discs: Kelly Clarkson’s Miss December (OK, no surprises, but I can’t remember much about it not long after); Trio of Doom by John McLaughlin, Jaco Pastorius, and Tony Williams (amazing pyrotechnic jazz-rock from a trio that lasted about a week in 1979); and the first disc of Sinéad O’Connor’s new Theology (quite good, though her lyrics get clunky when she stuffs in undigested Biblical quotes).

I had an idea tonight, though, that may remove this problem: I’ve burned a CD-R containing an hour of silence. Now, whenever we’re playing a single disc, we can pop this silent disc into any other position in the tray. The person in charge of the music should have plenty of time to get to the player before the music restarts.

On the other hand, I think the player tends not to replay the first disc if more than one are loaded. Oddly, I think I’ve experienced this both happening and not happening, which means that either it’s inconsistent (which is possible) or my memory is glitchy (which is probable). If it does stop after a second disc, having one with a minute of silence would work as well as one with an hour of silence. But I’ll see how this one works first.

Unrelatedly: seeing that the store had gotten a copy of John Cage’s Silence in stock, I kidded my supervisor that I should put up a display with that and some blank CDs. Thinking about it further, though, it seemed like a less crazy idea. So we now have a display with the book, two blank journals, a box of clear empty CD cases, a foreign film called The Silence, Simon and Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence, a book from the Religion section on silence and solitude, and a sign that says “(silence)”. It looks good, and our General Manager says that it’s one of the best displays he’s seen in the store. Running with a sublime, goofy idea works again

As mentioned before, most of my writing effort is happening in The Book of Voices. So hop over to bookofvoices.us to see the ongoing Biblical microfictions. I’m currently writing a monologue for Elijah, which is turning out quite curious: his story in the Biblical text is weirdly repetitive and discontinuous, and putting that together with apocryphal and more recent legends is pointing to some interesting possibilities about his identity.

But now to sleep…

The early parts of the piece are actually the most difficult to perform. As I worked on it, I got more used to how my vocal rhythms and breath patters were falling in reading the text, so I gave myself a lot more space. In the first few pages of the score, however, the text comes much more rapidly, and I have to nail the rhythms much more exactly to avoid getting out of sync with the strings. I suppose that it makes sense, dramatically, since the early part deals with Moses’s surprise and fear upon seeing and hearing the burning bush. As it moves on, it gets more thoughtful and deals with more expansive visions.

This will be another of my whirlwind vacations in which I’ll probably have little time to relax. I fly out on a red-eye on Wednesday, arriving in New Jersey on Thursday morning. On Friday, I’ll be helping my mother prepare for Passover. On Saturday, I may be dragged to a bar mitzvah at my mother’s synagogue. The performance is on Sunday. On Monday, we go to Philadelphia (about two hours away) for the first seder, which will be at the home of one of my aunts there. On Tuesday, we head back and have the second seder at either my mother’s or my brother’s house. And I head back to California on Wednesday morning.

On top of the rushing around, I’m going to be massively jet-lagged. Since I work an evening shift on the other side of the continent, I regularly go to sleep at just about the time that people on the east coast are waking up. I expect that my family will be expecting me to snap instantly to their sleep cycles and to complain if I don’t.

I also have a few things that I want to get done when I’m out there. I have a large amount of CDs (roughly 700, I think) that I want to pack up to sell off. A friend from college works at the Princeton Record Exchange, and it would make sense to arrange to get the CDs to them. A lot of them are pretty obscure, and that’s the one store in the state that might make sense of them and give me a fair sale price.

I also want to go through the books in my mother’s garage. I haven’t touched or thought about most of them in almost five years, so I figure that I might as well get rid of them. I figure that I’ll donate the Judaica that I don’t hold onto to my mother’s synagogue library. Many of the others are music books, and there must be something appropriate to do with them, though I don’t know what. And I have a lot of computer junk in there that I should just throw out or appropriately recycle. I don’t know if I’m going to have any time to look at any of this, though.

It also looks like the only window of time that I’ll have to get together with anyone is on Saturday late afternoon and evening, and we’ll have to get together in Toms River. If anyone’s up for coming down and getting together then, let me know! (And take the Parkway, not Route 9, unless you’re very confident and relaxed…)

When I get back to Berkeley, I’m going to want to get rolling on several projects again. The Ocean of Ghosts album has been on hold for several months, and I want to look into how to get that moving.

The book of “The Rounds” has also been on hold; I had been waiting for a friend to edit it, but that person seems to have dropped off the grid, so I’m going to proceed with whatever I have when I return. Chelsey shot photos for the book several weeks ago, and I’m hoping to see them and start making some selections when I return.

I’ve also started poking at another writing project, which will probably turn into another small book. It’s been hovering in my head for years, but aspects of the form, voice, and organization have clicked into place recently. But there’s no deadline, and I’ll let this take as long as it needs.

Work is continuing as it has. Our annual inventory is coming up while I’m away. I had hoped to get my entire section perfectly organized before it, but we’ve been short-handed at work, and I’ve had less time to work on it than I’d hoped. For most of the CDs that are organized by composer, I try to sort them by the major work on the CD, then by the primary performer of the work, then by the date of the recording, then by the label. (Chopin is the exception: since most discs have a smattering from amother the many mazurkas, etudes, impromptus, nocturnes, and the like, I just gave up and, except for the Cello Concerto, sort the rest by performer regardless of the main work.) Most other sections are content to hav e works by a single artist together without further organization, but I get kind of compulsive on these things.

(I had a maddening conversation with an innocent and well-meaning coworker last week. She needed an inventory code to log a returned CD, and asked me to look it up. After failed attempts to pronounce “Rachmaninoff”, she spelled it out, then said that the album was of “Symphony number 1.” She seemed baffled when I told her that I needed more information to determine which recording it was — after all, it’s not as if anyone needs to know who performed a given disc of, say, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Well, there have been tribute versions of it, but they have different names.)

I’ve been listening to my usual array of music, both for enjoyment and to glean ideas for more music. Right now I’m listening to a wonderful bootleg of the Cecil Taylor Unit from 1978. I thought it might give me ideas for a piece that I’m sketching, though it’s mostly pointing out things that I don’t want the piece to do, which is useful.

I’ve seen a couple of movies recently. The high point was Miss Potter, and utterly charming depiction of the life of the author of Peter Rabbit. The utter nadir was the execrable and inexcusable Borat, which took schtick that had been worn out by Yakov Smirnoff and Candid Camera years before and filtered it through the sensibility of a nine-year-old boy who had just discovered that he could get a rise out of people by talking obsessively about feces and genitalia at dinner. The combination of ambush interviews and doo-doo humor should an utter lack of compassion or consciousness on the part of anyone involved. That anyone actually liked it is, to say the least, dismaying.

And it’s time for me to wrap this up and get to sleep. It’s going to be a busy week, what with trying to get everything together for the trip. And I’m eagerly awaiting Sunday’s season finale of the new Battlestar Galactica, though if as good as the previews suggest, I may be staggering around for a couple of days trying to sort out what the frak I had seen.

The BART was delayed coming into Berkeley, and had more delays as it went along into the city. At 3 PM, People were already stumbling on the platforms and meandering through the cars yelling. As I came up out of the BART at Powell Street, there was more of the same, with crewcut fullbacks bellowing as the rambled through the dense crowd. Parents pulled their children out of the way as the brawlers plowed forward and crashed into the walls outside Forever 21, attempting to show the wall who was boss. Some of them might even have believed that they succeeded.

The path uphill to the store was similarly mobbed, though it thinned as I got closer to the store — perhaps the steep hill defeated the attempts of some of them to climb. My supervisor, who was out on the square for his lunch, reported even stranger behavior: he saw several pairs of people ride into the square on bicycles. In each case, the one who wasn’t driving would hop off the bike, disrobe, be photographed, dress again, and zoom out of the square. It all seemed organized, though the purpose was unclear.

I got into work a couple of minutes late. While I should have gotten a sticker from the Loss Prevention person at the door to show that I had brought in the book that I was carrying from outside (so it wouldn’t be a problem when I tried to leave with it), he was tied up trying to explain something to a customer. I went into the office, got a sticker from a manager, and proceeded up to the music floor.

When I got up to the floor, the other workers told me that things were quiet — and then three of my usual avid customers came charging at me from different directions at once, each wanting to deal only with me. One wanted my opinion on some DVDs of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, none of which I had seen. Another was asking about Joshua Bell’s recordings of Kreisler, quite loudly — though he is a choir director, he seems to have no control over the volume of his speaking voice. The third just wanted to say hello, but was very insistent on it.

What other customers there were weren’t too rambunctious, but many seemed either unusually clumsy or to be moving stiffly. As customer after customer got to the registers, I caught the whiff of beer on the breath of many. Several laughed too loudly at jokes, or tried hard to appear nonchalant about large purchases. Others were having a bit of trouble figuring out how money worked. And a large shared the excessively formality that people use in trying to show that they aren’t, in fact, trashed.

Other than that, though, there was little impact up on our floor. (I’m told that things were different at the front door, as the Loss Prevention folks had to convince a continuing stream of people that they couldn’t come into a bookstore while brandishing steins of beer.)

The most interesting question that I got today came from a woman who was walking around, picked up CDs, looking very closely at their covers, then putting them down. She didn’t seem to notice when I had asked her if she could find anything. But eventually she came up to me and asked if I worked there. (That I was on the store phone and was wearing a large badge might have suggested to her that I did.)

“Do you know jazz?” she asked.

“Somewhat,” I said. “What are you looking for?”

“I’m trying to find an album. I think it was recorded in 1957. I had a cover by the same guy who did this.” Digging into her bag, she pulled out the CD cover booklet of Dave Brubeck’s Time Out.

I was stumped. Looking through the book, I tried in vain to find out who did the cover, but came up cold. “I don’t have a clue,” I said. “The best thing you could do is get online, and search for ‘dave brubeck time out cover art.’ Come to think of it, it may be Joan Miró.Once you find that, search on the artist’s name, and it may take you to –”

I paused, as a image suddenly flashed through my head. Recognizing it, I stepped around to the next jazz aisle and pulled out a copy of Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um. “Is this it?” I asked.

She took the CD from me, looked closely at it, and then back at me. “How the hell did you figure that out? You must have every album cover in the store in your head.”

“Actually, someone else was looking for this same album a few hours ago, and I saw it then, so I must have still had it cached in RAM.” I immediately realized that she probably had no idea what “cached in RAM” would mean, but she didn’t look confused. She thanked me, and gleefully ran off with the CD.

(I just tried the search strategy that I suggested to her, and, to my relief, it did work.  I was wrong about Joan Miró, though. He did Brubeck’s next album, Time Further Out. This one was by Neil Fujita.)

The earlier customer who was looking for the Mingus CD had originally asked for a Miles Davis album named So What. It took a bit of doing to convince him that what he really wanted was Kind of Blue. (And I just found online an apparent album named So What. but it looks like a bootleg.) He had just started reading John Szwed’s biography, which is named So What, and wanted to get the corresponding album. We went over to the jazz books, and I flipped through discographies until I was able to convince him that no official album of that name existed.

Another frequent customer, who was usually angry about something, showed up later, looking for a recording by Leonard Bernstein of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. (She was pleased to have gotten the main riff as her cellphone ringtone, and wanted to have the rest of the piece.)

The one recording that we had in stock also had Beethoven’s 4th Symphony and Egmont Overture. She had looked at it skeptically. “It has another symphony and this Eg– Eg– this Eg thing on it, too? Are you sure it has the whole 5th symphony?”

I had assured her that it did, and asked if she would like to get it.

“Oh, no,” she replied. “I had already ordered it from you, and you have it for me downstairs. I just wanted to see if it was the right thing before I waited in line for it.” She zoomed off before I could explain to her that there were several different releases of Bernstein’s Beethoven’s 5th, and that there was no certainly that what she had ordered was the same one,

When I took my ten-minute break toward the end of the day, she showed up again as I tried to flee for the breakroom. As usual, she was annoyed. “This is not the same recording!” She handed me the CD that she had ordered. It did, indeed, have the 5th on it, but laso had an interview with Bernstein about the work. “This has talking on it! I do not want to hear someone who’s dead talking about the music. That’s just too creepy!”

I looked at the CD, and at the price sticker. “We can certainly exchange it. This one is the same price as the one that I showed you earlier.”

“Where can I find it? Where were we when you showed it to me?”

“It was up in the Beethoven area, near the beginning of classical, in the… um… come on upstairs, I’ll get it for you.”

“But aren’t you headed to your break or lunch or something?”

“Yes, but this takes priority.”

“Oh! I wish more stores had service like this!”

What I didn’t tell her was that I had gotten utterly flummoxed trying to describe where the CD was. Since I have trouble with “left” and “right”, especially in mapping the words to the actual directions when I’m not actually pointing at something, odds were very strong that any directions that I would have given her would have been incomplete or just plain wrong.

We got upstairs, and I quickly got the CD from the rack for her. “If you bring it back downstairs to the ground floor registers, they can do the exchange for you.”

“Here,” she said, “let me give you this for it.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a very well-made, but obviously fake million dollar bill. “Now don’t leave this lying around. People have a way of running off with them.”

(About the ten-minute breaks: I had wondered for a while if there was an optimum time to take one. A few months ago, while bored, I did some calculations. Since it’s good to have the earlier part of the shift be a bit longer than the later part, I figured that the ratio between them should be that of the Golden Section. By my calculations, that means that the best time to take a break in a four-hour shift is about two hours and eighteen minutes after it starts. For a three-hour shift, the best time for a break is one hour and forty-five minutes from the start. And I suspect that John will quickly show me that my math was wrong.)

Fortunately, all the customers cleared out of the store fairly early, and we actually had reshelved all the books by closing time, so we zoomed out soon after we closed. I even managed to get down to the BART station in time for the last train, and didn’t have to take the bus. A coworker was glad that I accompanied her down the hill, Powell Street still being full of revelers, some of whom she had found threatening when they had gotten and early start on the drinking the night before.

The BART took longer than usual. It was crowded, and several people had trouble understanding that this was the last train and that they had to board it. Some also had some trouble getting into the train, and remaining standing or sitting once the train lurched into motion.

A lot of people laughed and talked loudly, some cursing volubly, as the trip progressed. A few couples also appeared to be a bit more avidly intertwined than might be appropriate on public transit.

By the time we approached Berkeley, most had gotten off. The person sitting alone in front of me alternated between stern grimaces and brief explosions of laughter, sometimes pounding on his bicycle and shaking his head as if in response to music, though he didn’t appear to be wearing headphones. Despite the shamrock stamped on the back of his hand, though, I recognized him as the one of the regulars from the train rides. As I got off the train and his sudden howl faded away, I felt assured that things were getting back to normal.

Finally releasing his grip, he stepped toward the listening stations. I looked around for Material Girl, who had fled surprisingly quickly, the door to the back office closing behind her.

“Do you like to dance?” he said.

I shrugged, smiling. “It’s not quite in my skill set.”

“Everyone can dance!” he said and shifted into a sort of shuffling Wild and Crazy Guy motion, stepping back and forth, his shoulders rolling with the rhythm and his elbows flapping as he clenched his hands close to his heart.

He was good — very good, in fact, the wackiness of his dance steps elevated by the untarnished glee he took in moving to the music. The other customers had turned and were watching him, and he welcomed their gaze. One by one, his pleasure melted their embarassment at watching him, and they all began to smile. He gestured to several to join him. When no one did, he closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and continued to move to the music.

This is the first time that I had seen the Dancing Man in a long time. When he had first appeared, sometime last year, he would spend hours on the listening stations, often listening and dancing to the same thirty second snippet of the same song. “Best song in whole world!” he would call out to people who saw him. “Paula Cole! ‘I Don’t Want to Wait!’ Greatest song in whole world!” He would go on about the song as long as anyone would listen to him, though he couldn’t say much about it, his sentences spiraling around in greater and greater praises. I couldn’t place his accent (Material Girl told me that he is from Morocco), and his slightly scrambled, rather formal English would get more loopy as he rambled on.

Watching him, I was surprised to find myself singing along with the Yemenite singer on the CD, which got even stranger glances from some of the customers.

“How do you know that song?” Material Girl asked, having snuck back from the office.

“It was a big hit on an Ofra Haza record, and sampled all over the place a while back.” That was eighteen years ago. I was struck once again by the difference in time frames that I have from most of my coworkers. While I was thirty then, and it fits more or less into my vague sense of “now”, she was twelve at the time, and not yet noticing more than immediate pop.

“What’s it mean?” she asked.

“If the doors of heaven are closed, the doors of… um… something… will not be closed… or will not be open… or something.” (According to its Wikipedia entry, it means “Even if the gates of the rich will be closed, the gates of heaven will not be closed.”) “I used to know this, but can’t remember what the two most important words mean anymore.”

As the beat of Madonna’s “Isaac” dissolved seamlessly into the next song, the Dancing Man came out of his reverie and jogged back toward us. He shook my hand again as Material Girl once again backed away. “God bless you! God bless this country with peace and respect for us! Peace and respect, yes? God bless everyone here and this country!” He turned with a flourish and, in a more directional version of his shambling dance, headed to the escalator and down to the other floors.

“That is one happy man,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Material Girl, “but I wouldn’t shake hands with him. Shaggy said he saw that guy washing his hands in the urinal.”

“Eek. Um, uh, ick,” I eloquently announced, then shrugged. Material Girl went off to continue shelving books. I reached for the hand sanitizer, just in case, then went back to helping other customers.

As often happens, the line at the café had forked, with some people queued up toward the business books and more standing alongside the pastry case. The lines merged pretty amicably, with a rough alternation of people taking their places. The person in the spot corresponding to mine in the other fork, however, continually made it clear that he was to be handled before me, stamping his feet and stretching out his arms, pretending that he didn’t see me. I think I annoyed him somewhat by not challenging his position, making his gestures seem even more pointless and lame.

When I finally got to the front of the line, I handed my coffee cup to the worker there. “Just coffee, Joe?”

“Yup,” I said. “Nectar of the geeks.”

“No, that’s Mountain Dew. We’re out of that. So, coffee. Do you want Seattle’s Best blend or the Saturday’s blend?”

“Saturday’s blend? On a Sunday?”

The worker shrugged. “It’s about as much sense as drinking Seattle’s Best in San Francisco.”

“I like the logic. I’ll go for the Saturday’s blend.”

The worker poured a cup, the last bit of it dripping reluctantly from the spout. “Looks like that’s the last of it. Maybe it was from yesterday.”

“Should be good and strong, then. I like coffee I can chew.”

The fourth floor was relatively quiet when I got up there. A few customers milled around, trying to decide on purchases or just enjoying their shopping meditations. With the “Buy 3, get a 4th free” sale on DVDs ending today, several were wandering with three that that really wanted, daunted by the prospect of finding a fourth.

One looked relieved when I asked if I could help her. “I hear that Bambi and Lady and the Tramp I & II are going to be disappearing soon. Where are they?”

I guided her to the Disney shelves. “Disney’s like that. They release DVDs for a few months, then pull them off the shelves for several years.” I spotted the three discs, pulled them, and handed them to her.

“But what do I get for a fourth disc?” she asked.

“Bambi’s Revenge?” I suggested.

“Bambi’s back!” she said in a mock-announcer’s voice. “And he’s got his therapist with him!”

(There actually was a Bambi II, but I understand that it wasn’t particularly traumatic. And then there was Bambi Meets Godzilla… which apparently was made at a studio owned by Adriana Casselotti… which shows that almost any random chain of references might converge somewhere…)

We had the usual array of Manga teens lounging about, leaving their trails of read magazines and graphic novels lying on the floor and on windowsills. Other teenagers sat on the floor in various aisles, acting as if they had marked off their own personal phone booths, and looking annoyed when people came near them or stepped over them, interrupting their conversations. Grownups with cell phones prowled the rest of the floor, darting away as others approached, looking as if rude people had barged into their offices.

One tiny girl, maybe two years old, with long brown hair and high boots more stylish that one might expect to see on someone so small, ran laps around the entire floor. She didn’t seem to be related to any grownups that I could see, and repeatedly barely missed crashing into people and other objects.

Most of the times that she ran past, I was engaged with other customers, so I couldn’t intervene. After several circuits, though, I was able to step out from behind the register and get in her way. I dropped into a crouch and held my palm out like a crossing guard. She stopped directly in front of me. “Miss,” I said, “please don’t run here. You could get hurt.” She nodded sagely and walked slowly away. But once she thought that she was out of my sight, she once again took off running.

Customers engaged me again, and I wasn’t able to confront her as she came around on her next lap. But when she appeared yet again, I once again stepped into her path. This time, she ducked around me and out of my view behind a tall display. I stepped around it. When she saw that I saw her, she darted off to behind another display and again stopped. After several iterations of this, I realized that she thought that we were playing Hide and Seek.

I dropped again to a crouch, stepping around and putting my arms out so that she was boxed in. “You can’t run here. This isn’t a playground.” She nodded again, and I stood up.

“Elena!” I heard two voices call in unison, coming toward us. The girl turned and ran to the couple approaching us. The woman scooped the girl up and scolded her (I think) in a language that I couldn’t identify. The man nodded toward me. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you we sorry thank you bye.” They headed down the escalator to the lower floors.

I was able to get some good work done in my section today, sorting the discs from Copland through Dvorak. The more I work on organizing the CDs, the easier it gets (except for the problems caused by the shelving that was installed a couple of years ago and which makes it much harder for customers and workers to locate, handle, and file discs). Organizing the Bach CDs, for example, occupied much of the first six weeks or so that I worked in the store. Last week, it took me about two hours. I spent too much time talking to a couple of tenacious and loquacious customers, but still had things pretty much under control.

By late evening, most of the customers had gone — which meant that the store seemed mostly to be occupied by the denizens of the area who use it as some sort of refuge. Tracksuit Man showed up, as usual, about twenty minutes before we closed and left with about three minutes to spare.

Crutch Lady was, as usual, the last one to leave the café. Also, as usual, she headed up to the restrooms, which she knew had closed. She appeared to have given up about arguing her way in, since she saw that the entrance was guarded by the indomitable Miss Broadway. So she headed on out, remembering, this time, to take with her the crutches that she appears not to really need. (We wonder if she’s connected somehow to the guy who wandered off without his wheelchair before Christmas. Does our coffee have miraculous healing powers?)

Another woman spent well over an hour in the restroom. (I almost said “ladies’ room,” but I know how that word annoys msmas.) When she emerged, she immediately asked Miss Broadway if there were any public restrooms around and tried to engage her and, later, DJ LP, in a monologue about blood and hygiene products that neither was in a mood to hear.

Mr. Duffle was also on the fourth floor. He didn’t fall asleep this time, but spent a couple of hours among the movie books in an energetic monologue. He has a beautiful speaking voice, and could easily get a spot on talk radio if he were a little less coherent. When he launched into an apparent demonstration, with descriptions, of what looked like a litany of movements from the martial arts, I let people know over the headset intercom. DJ LP said that that was probably OK, as long as he didn’t hit anyone or knock anything over, and didn’t head into the kids section.

Fortunately, he left on time. I had had trouble with him on Thursday. Each time that I let him know that we were about to close, he nodded and kept on reading. When the closing announcement came, he gradually closed his book and put it on the table… then carefully rolled up his bag of Cheetos… then opened his Walgreens bag and put the Cheetos in it… then put down the bag, stood up slowly, and picked it up again… then picked up his duffle bag… then walked a few yards over to another table… then put the Walgreens bag on the table… then put the duffle bag on the table… then picked up the Walgreens bag… then took out the Cheetos bag… then put down the Cheetos bag…then put down the Walgreens bag… then zipped open the duffle bag… then picked up the Cheetos bag… then rolled it tightly and tried to stuff it in the duffle bag… then put the Cheetos bag down… then took a sweater out of the duffle bag… then picked up the Cheetos bag, unrolled it, and laid it flat inside the duffle bag… then put the sweater in the duffle bag… then zipped up the duffle bag… then picked up the Walgreens bag… then put down the Walgreens bag… then unzipped the duffle bag… then pulled another small bag out of the Walgreens bag…

…and so on. If I hadn’t been so tired, it would have seemed like some fascinating piece of minimalist theatre, needing only a score by Philip Glass.

But today, he left on time, as did all the others. Many of those who shuffled out at the end of the night will be back tomorrow. And I’ll be there, too, out of the breakroom, endlessly shelving. There’s always more shelving to be done.

As it was, we had five people out on Monday, a significant chunk of the forty or so scheduled to work that day. Working within the standard capitalist directives to squeeze the most work out of the fewest workers possible, we have close to no redundancy in the ranks–we even had to close the café early because we had no one left to staff it effectively.

I slept until about 2:30 this afternoon, and have been vegging at the computer since then. My housemates cooked dinner tonight (a wonderful soup made from, among other ingredients, the leftovers of the cooking that I did on Thursday), and have me drinking copious amounts of ku ding cha. Aspirin is also helping, and I’ve been wolfing down oranges.

I’ve been trying to relax, but, not doing so easily, I’ve catalogued some DVDs, working on reconstituting the archive for a mailing list that I run, been following the news from Macworld (I may go tomorrow, if I’m up to it, this being the first year that I’ve actually had a Mac), and done some upgrades to my desktop Linux server. I’ll do my rounds at the church at about midnight, as usual, and see what else I can keep myself from doing.

By the way, having gotten the Bluetooth connection working predictably, I’ve set up a Flickr page for my photos. By default, anyone can look at them, and they’re released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. I’m having some thoughts about how differently things look to the naked eye, to the viewfinder, and on the PC screen. But those will have to wait until I can think more linearly.

I was mysteriously scheduled to work at 11 AM today, so I was up at 8:30 (after getting to sleep at a little after 4 AM–I got off work after midnight, and the BART train that I was on got delayed by debris on the tracks, a fist fight in the next car, and a belligerent panhandler on our car who was corralled by the BART police after threatening anyone whose name began with “D”).

I actually had breakfast at the same time as my housemates for once, though that involved complex three-person maneuvering in a kitchen built for one. Attempts at conversation failed, though; I’m not particularly verbal pre-coffee. I cooked myself something moderately elaborate, since I have the patterns of cooking it internalized and can do so easily. Cutting it back to do something simpler with similar ingredients would have taken a lot more effort–I would have had to rethink the patterns (much as, now that I’ve internalized one of the things that we’re supposed to do in ringing up customers, I’ve become consistently our most successful employee in doing it, since not doing so requires active effort).

I took a different path to the BART than usual, since my usual path would have taken me past the church where I have my other job at just the point that people would be arriving for services, and I would have gotten embroiled in talking to friendly folks there. I somehow ended up getting to the BART just after the train that I wanted left, anyway, and got in to work about five minutes late.

Fortunately, things were quiet there, and I was working mostly with someone into even farther-out music than I am. As opposed to our usual overhead music, we ended up spinning some more unusual stuff: Steve Reich, Dave Douglas, Johann Johannsson, Sigur Ros, Bobby McFerrin, the latest Wire Tapper compilation, and the like. And, as usually happens when we play this music, we sold copies of several of the CDs.

My supervisor handed me an interesting challenge: we had to design one endcap for jazz and one for classical music. (What’s an endcap? It’s the vertical plane at the end of each aisle of fixture, perpendicular to and facing out into the main walkway. I didn’t know there was a word for that, either, until I learned to speak retailese.) These usually feature items of which we have multiple copies. In classical and jazz, however, while we have a lot of different items, we tend to have only one of each; almost everything for which we had multiple copies is already on display somewhere.

I had the inspiration, for the classical endcap, of putting up several different recordings of a few works. That way, if anyone buys anything from the display (and things on displays do sell better than things in the racks), we can replace it with yet another version of the same work. I ended up with four of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” (sixteen seasons in all?), six of Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” and six of Orff’s “Carmina Burana.” My supervisor created a sign saying “What a Difference a Performance Makes.”

For jazz, I made a selection of some of the more challenging and interesting artists that we carry (as opposed to the usual deluge of smooth jazz and singers whose main appeal is on the CD cover rather than the CD itself). Labeled “Expand Your Jazz Horizons”, it had discs from about 20 artists, including Anthony Braxton, Uri Caine, Andrew Hill, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Evan Parker, and Marc Ribot. (Oy, I just realized that my coworker will probably gently lambaste me tomorrow for forgetting to put up anything by his current obsession, Steve Lacy.) Here, again, if someone buys one, we can put up another by the same artist or an equally interesting one.

We hope that the endcap will signal to aficionados that, while we have the usual corporate emphasis on the questionable stuff that tops the jazz charts, we have at least some interest in digging deeper, and that people looking for the less popular jazz will have a possibility of dealing with someone who knows what they are talking about.

It’s apparently getting increasingly hard to find Record Store Guys, outside the extreme niche stores or magnificent anomalies such as Amoeba Music, who have any interest in jazz. When I mentioned to the representative from one label a few months ago that we were eager to play this music overhead, he told us that he had a whole box of promos in his car that he couldn’t interest anyone in, ran down, and brought them up to us. When we realized this, we told other representatives, and ended up with a bounty of recordings on Blue Note, Impulse, and other labels that are owned by the huge conglomerates. (Getting at the stuff on the smaller labels not connected to the massive distributors is difficult, and this is where we’re starting to get repeatedly whacked by the long tail. And as record companies continue to consolidate, they’re cutting back on representatives and giving them huge territories to cover, which means that most record stores’ personal contact with labels is approaching nil.)

I’m back to working the closing shift for the next two days, so I should regain some sleep tonight. Assuming, of course, that I push myself away from the computer at some point…