Monday

So I’m sitting in a nearby cafe to the bookstore. Even though this is to be my fifth day, I do not have a key and it does not look likely I will get a key. On nice days I can sit behind the store by the river, but on days like this, humid, sticky, raining days, I am forced into shelter to wait a half hour. And of course this means having to buy something. I just paid $1.68 for a teabag.

I had thought, all right, I’ll bring my laptop with me, get some work done, or some blogging. But I am foiled in my plans. In a place like this, a big cafe with a yoga studio and right downtown Belleville, there is no free wireless. I am not asking for a pin. But I’m pissy about it.

And I happen to have arrived on a morning when three rather loud people, one of them the owner, are having some discussion on something I can’t quite figure out. He’s got a projector and has turned up the volume to extremely loud, which , to me, is extremely rude. In fact, I’m flabbergasted. Hello? You have a fucking customer!! Well, now I know: unfortunately, the cafe only a few doors down from work that promotes calm and inner peace and all that jazz is not the place to take refuge. Who knew.

And I start to rage. This is why downtown Belleville sucks. They have become so used to not having business, they have given up. Because it’s true. This is a cafe, and so far, in half an hour, I am the first and only customer. No people coming in for coffee or tea before they go to work. I assume they all go further down the street to a place that’s in a real estate building and which has even more exorbitant prices than here, or else they don’t support that, either, and go to one in Century Place even farther down the road. I’ve heard enough people say they don’t come down here, they don’t do Front Street, but there’s been so much talk about the need to improve it. It’s just that everyone else wants everyone else to do it. The sleazy City Hotel, blight on the main drag, is haven for all manner of sketchy people, and sometimes I hear someone yelling ignorantly. More likely than not, if these people ever came in it would be to ask, “Hey, man, you got a light?” I don’t know if it’s the weather. Maybe it’s PMS. But I hate this town. I always have.


Life as a Bookseller

It’s fantastic. I love it. I love being surrounded by books and magazines and newspapers and pretty cards, and by people browsing books. I find the fragrance of pages wonderfully intoxicating every day, all day, and that gives me a perpetual silly grin (at least for 8 hours). I like the women I work with.


A New Leaf, Literally.

So tomorrow I start my part-time job at Greenley’s Bookstore, the independent new-book shop in downtown Belleville. It’s taken 5 months to get to this point (I first spoke to the owner in April), and now that the time has come, I’m actually find myself hard-pressed to get  as excited as I should be, considering.


Defeat

Today I had a moment, the last straw, as they say, that shocked me and possibly frightened C and Lucy who were beside me. I was standing on a chair when I totally lost it. I pounded the wall I was facing with both hands as hard as I could and screamed goddamn it with


Catching Up

I wrote the last post a while ago and nothing much has changed. I used to come on here and write anything, no matter what it was, but it seemed to me after some time that it was mostly dealing with issues and having a hard time, and eventually I got tired of writing about


Transitioning

I haven’t felt inspired to write here in ages, possibly because of my preoccupation with Bella’s Bookshelves, freelancing, work at the clinic, reading, and surfing the web looking for distraction. Probably all of those, in addition to the fact that the more I interact with people outside, the less inclined I feel to write here.


Pisces

Down to the water today small waves softly undulate lapping feet in flipflops I toss pebbles my dog is a waterbaby much to my Piscean delight for hours she swims lets her hind legs float drags rocks up onto the shore waits for me to toss another pebble and another another the water is softcool


The Facebook Dilemma

So last night I once again had a dream about someone I went to elementary and high school with in Tottenham, my hometown, almost 20 years ago. I dreamed about a bunch of classmates, actually, and this might have been because of Facebook. But I’ve been dreaming about Tottenham classmates for years, way before Facebook.


The Tempest

Completely the opposite of my last post, I’m feeling as tempestuous as the weather here right now, which rages blackly, coldly, noisily, unpredictably outside my window, spitting hard rain and bending over trees. I feel a million different things, none of them good, and I would likely bite your head off with gusto if you


Sunday

This morning, right now just after 8:00 am, I’m sitting in my living room beside my wall of books, the sun so beautifully filtering in through the picture window and bending in golden rays on the warm blond hardwood, across the old wooden accordion closet door that I hate but which suddenly looks gorgeous. My