cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There's this bookstore. Desperate to make enough money to pay for gas and groceries and the monthly car payment, I followed up on a tip about Ch@rlottesville's oldest bookstore needing someone to cover two days a week running the place. Today I had my first full day. This place is a labyrinth that I've been patronizing since I was 15. Badly organized, dimly lit, filled with supposedly around 100,000 books. The building is literally crumbling into the interior. The founder has some degenerative disease to the point that he has a colostomy bag, can only lift a finger to shake hands, and falls asleep repeatedly while I was helping him to price books. He makes very poor decisions about what books to put on the shelves. He takes everything when the shelves are already overflowing. This place is also something of an institution. A patchwork of retired volunteers and part-time employees staff it. Shelves of badly-treated books are piled on top of one another, leaning in askew directions that cause them to bend and sorta melt downward. I spent six hours straightening that shit up. Pulling books that will never sell (nobody will buy a book published in 1992 that explains the future of post-Soviet arms control), tidying up shelves and putting books into their proper categories. It is very satisfying. In about eight more days of this, I can have the entire shop in proper working order. I will clean the filthy light switches, vacuum floors and carpets that have not been touched in years, build new blocking into sagging bookshelves that have unsupported spans, flag rare books that should be sold online for ten times what any visitor will pay in the store, and generally be a manic pixie dream boyfriend who fixes up the place and makes it shine. Of course, I will not be paid any more than $15 an hour for this transformation. There will be no reward other than the thanks and admiration of the other random weirdos who work or volunteer here. The kinda hot wife of the fading owner of the place, in her late 60's, will thank me by trying to schedule me for more shifts at the same horrible wage. I will do this mostly for the satisfaction of fixing something. I am a sucker for fixing shit. And then I will take an offer for a job in my field for somewhere between $80-$100k and apologize for not being available anymore. 2:19 a.m. - 2023-06-15 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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