I sell many, many things in my shop. Along with Indian tapestries, Japanese incense, glass jewelry and Obama stickers are several cases of tobacco accessories. I have always blamed this on my old friend Eric, who back in 1987 talked me into displaying three deer antler pipes that he made in between downing twelve-packs of PBR and smoking packs of More menthol cigarettes in the back of that sharecropper shack he was staying at off Highway 301. I agreed to consign them, and shoved over a few vintage rhinestone brooches in the case to make room for them.
They sold.
Although I didn't care for smoking in any form, I kind of liked selling pipes. The tobacco paraphernalia clientele is generally a grateful one, and not shy about shelling out the bucks for a myriad of smoking devices. A couple of decades later, I sell vaporizers, water pipes, handpipes ranging from corn cob to color-changing glass, bubblers, and traditional meerschaums. I still don't smoke, which means that I spend a lot of time listening to people describe the pros of cons of carburators and the widths and lengths necessary to draw from an upright sherlock, and whether a Gravitron is practical for solo use. There's a thesis waiting to be written regarding the fine art of smoking, I'm sure of it.
So - in spite of the fact that a certain 1994 Supreme Court decision rendered the selling of a thing called a "bong" a felony (so of course none of us in the business sell anything named the "B" word, we're just selling tobacco waterpipes) - I attended an accessories show in Las Vegas this week which my daughter and I nicknamed The Bong Show. We spent several hours staring breathlessly at thousands of pipes. While others at the show were obviously considering their personal smoking possibilities, I was one of those parties whose cartoon balloon floating above my head would have instead focused on this subject: Can I Triple My Money On This One? Would My Shop Move A Hundred Of These By New Years?
Besides, there were way too many Bong Babes in there. The average thirty year old dude who owns a store would salivate over dozens of women clad in fishnets and Daisy Dukes and black brassieres, but middle-aged mamas such as myself - there were perhaps another one or two women who made buying decisions in addition to me - were just angry that there was not a single Scantily Clad Man.
I mean, I feel good about selling an item which so obviously skirts the legal line of respectability. Pipe-selling makes me feel vaguely bad ass, although I realize that this is just an illusion (but it's a pretty good illusion when you're pushing fifty, as I am). It's a nice business, nice folks, nice products, and nothing that Wal-Mart can ever take away from me. Pipes have helped put my daughter through college and paid two mortgages. But - just like when I ran the biggest used CD and indie music business in a college town back in the nineties, it's a man's world. And nothing reminds me of this fact so much as being at a trade show where all the girls wear push-up bras and stilletos, while the men handle all the money.
All of this just inspires me to try harder. Pipes aren't really a gender issue, anyway, right?
BONGBONGBONGBONGBONGBONGBONGBONG...
NTD
Friday, August 29, 2008
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
I Heart Hyphens
I spilled my Shredded Wheat on the keyboard the other day. There are three keys which have not worked ever since: the five, the six, and the hyphen. Rather than plugging in a spare keyboard to replace the faulty one, we have been adjusting to the change. I was definitely becoming too hyphen dependent... in fact, I am jonesing to use one right this second, and am substituting the melodramatic ellipsis instead. I've also gotten a little more high faluting with an increase in semicolons and colons. Alternating between semicolons and ellipsis, my writing resembles the ramblings of a depressed spinster English professor.
Project for the day: replace the keyboard....
NTD
Project for the day: replace the keyboard....
NTD
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Monday, August 11, 2008
Mean People
The amazing Stewart left his 401K and other benefits behind him in order to help his girlfriend with her shop. That would be me and my store. While some view this merging and mingling as a precarious teetering toward potential disaster, I think that it is just peachy. A) I need the help, because all other wonderful people involved have health, family and educational conflicts, and B) Stewart is a completely excellent human being who knows how to open a cash register and make change.
Twenty one years of a very eccentric retail business has taught me that every day can be weirder than a series of Clerks outtakes. Take our bathroom: our loo has suffered everything from opiate works left behind on the toilet tank to clogged-up leavings from allegedly good friends who neglected to notice the plunger, and you can take both of those facts literally as well as metaphorically. My own daughter managed to open the superglue and taste the contents when she was two years old and another daughter was largely raised in an appliance-sized cardboard box filled with styrofoam peanuts and watercolor markers. They both ran credit card machines while too short to reach the cash register without a stool. I got divorced and fell in love (the latter more than once) while standing behind the counter. I fired one employee who had bragged about having sex in my dressing room, although that was not the particular offense which led to dismissal. I fired several others who sold drugs, stole merchandise, and/or would not leave their vicious dogs at home. Plus, there are the customers.
Stewart is already meeting The Mean People: The Mean Blind Girl, The Mean Dwarf. Any day now he'll meet The Mean Spitting One-Eyed Vietnam Vet, if no one sends him back to jail. Stewart is really nice, so he was trying to describe The Mean Blind Girl to me with compassion:
An interesting girl who couldn't see came in today, and I tried to help her with the rings...
"Oh my God! That mean blind bitch is back! Don't let her waste your time..."
He was taken aback by my nastiness, but I know this girl and her longsuffering older husband/parent/caretaker/whatever. She complains and insists on cutting deals in a charmless way:
Gimme a break, I'm blind... can't I have this twenty dollar ring for twelve? C'mon... God, why don't you have more rings my size... show me all your size nine rings with square stones, I don't like round ones... Harry! make her help me with this....
I try to look at Harry and imagine that he married this girl when she was fourteen and cute and has to face the aftemath forever, sort of how I also imagine Woody Allen and Soon-Yi. So I treat the couple like I would any other unpleasant customers and go about my business, leaving her sputtering and angry. It makes me smile.
The Mean Dwarf rarely comes in, he prefers to intimidate the tourists with a pack of spare-changing gutter punks. He has threatened to kick my ass when I declined to give him a quarter and I avoid him almost as much as the one-eyed Vietnam vet, who once spat on a friend of mine when she didn't pony up some change.
I know that the dwarf and the vet and the blind girl have had their hard knocks. Honestly, I think that they are far more entitled to their bad attitudes than, say, when a rich tourist gets huffy because I don't have a Coexist t-shirt in their preferred size and color. I just think that everyone would catch more flies with honey than vinegar, as my grandmother would say.
Welcome to the street, Stewart. No one but pregnant women and children in our employee bathroom, please. And don't ever let the mean people intimidate you into giving them something for nothing.
NTD
Twenty one years of a very eccentric retail business has taught me that every day can be weirder than a series of Clerks outtakes. Take our bathroom: our loo has suffered everything from opiate works left behind on the toilet tank to clogged-up leavings from allegedly good friends who neglected to notice the plunger, and you can take both of those facts literally as well as metaphorically. My own daughter managed to open the superglue and taste the contents when she was two years old and another daughter was largely raised in an appliance-sized cardboard box filled with styrofoam peanuts and watercolor markers. They both ran credit card machines while too short to reach the cash register without a stool. I got divorced and fell in love (the latter more than once) while standing behind the counter. I fired one employee who had bragged about having sex in my dressing room, although that was not the particular offense which led to dismissal. I fired several others who sold drugs, stole merchandise, and/or would not leave their vicious dogs at home. Plus, there are the customers.
Stewart is already meeting The Mean People: The Mean Blind Girl, The Mean Dwarf. Any day now he'll meet The Mean Spitting One-Eyed Vietnam Vet, if no one sends him back to jail. Stewart is really nice, so he was trying to describe The Mean Blind Girl to me with compassion:
An interesting girl who couldn't see came in today, and I tried to help her with the rings...
"Oh my God! That mean blind bitch is back! Don't let her waste your time..."
He was taken aback by my nastiness, but I know this girl and her longsuffering older husband/parent/caretaker/whatever. She complains and insists on cutting deals in a charmless way:
Gimme a break, I'm blind... can't I have this twenty dollar ring for twelve? C'mon... God, why don't you have more rings my size... show me all your size nine rings with square stones, I don't like round ones... Harry! make her help me with this....
I try to look at Harry and imagine that he married this girl when she was fourteen and cute and has to face the aftemath forever, sort of how I also imagine Woody Allen and Soon-Yi. So I treat the couple like I would any other unpleasant customers and go about my business, leaving her sputtering and angry. It makes me smile.
The Mean Dwarf rarely comes in, he prefers to intimidate the tourists with a pack of spare-changing gutter punks. He has threatened to kick my ass when I declined to give him a quarter and I avoid him almost as much as the one-eyed Vietnam vet, who once spat on a friend of mine when she didn't pony up some change.
I know that the dwarf and the vet and the blind girl have had their hard knocks. Honestly, I think that they are far more entitled to their bad attitudes than, say, when a rich tourist gets huffy because I don't have a Coexist t-shirt in their preferred size and color. I just think that everyone would catch more flies with honey than vinegar, as my grandmother would say.
Welcome to the street, Stewart. No one but pregnant women and children in our employee bathroom, please. And don't ever let the mean people intimidate you into giving them something for nothing.
NTD
Friday, August 1, 2008
The Hazard of Googling One's Self
In an entirely weak moment on a lazy Sunday, I typed my own name into Google. Big mistake. For days now, I have been hot and bothered about a particularly mean-spirited tirade on my newspaper column. I really should rise above a standard flaming incident. However, it is infinitely more pleasurable on a hot summer night to jump directly into the fray.
I frequently discourage my boyfriend from reading message board tripe out loud to me when I am about two sips into my morning coffee. Why would one spoil one's mood with so much negativism, I say. But hypocrisy is so human, now that I have pulled up the personally offensive post and made him read it once more just to refresh his memory before I point out all the flaws in the writer's logic.
As an op-ed writer, one must roll with the punches. It's the reasonable, mature thing to do. You can't please all of the people all of the time, and columnists are not even aiming for universal appeal. We invite controversy, right? However, in cyberspace, intellectual discourse is rarely the goal; personal attacks are the standard-bearer. Critics are not bound by regular debate procedure, or even decent manners. In this case, the writer describes his dislike of me largely due to nonexistent details about my personal life - i.e. he doesn't even know me, but rails on, unencumbered by reality.
The kicker here? The rant against me was written by a Macon writer who also happens to be a columnist for that edition of our paper. We are unseen co-workers in the virtual office space.
Dear Macon Columnist: For the record, I am rarely one to blather on about jambands. In fact, the major events I have attended in 2008 would include the Lou Reed show in Asheville and Tom Waits at the Fabulous Fox. I would bet good money that either Lou or Tom would curbstomp anyone who linked their names to the term "jam band". I also don't smoke pot, I hate the music of Dave Matthews, am friends with many soldiers, have never aligned myself with the libertarian party, have lived a tattoo-free life, and never stepped inside a yurt. I don't feel as though I am compensating for a lack of some earlier, essential life experience by being a middle-aged person who writes two columns a month. I will eat the occasional veggie burger, but prefer barbecued pork a la Vandy's of Statesboro. I don't speak derisively of the troops, although when a security guard screams that he has been to Iraq before touching breasts in a so-called patdown, I think that I can call a spade a spade without criticism from someone who wasn't even present to witness this.
I do, however, own a pair of Crocs as you surmised. But so do most Americans, so that's only a half credit for a lucky guess.
In other words, it is lazy thinking to attempt to turn anyone, either liberal or conservative, into a cultural stereotype so that the person does not have to be dealt with as a real human being. My life extends far beyond the boundaries of newspaper and web pages, as does yours.
The larger point is not which sort of columnist is more interesting, the one who aspires to be Charles Bukowski or the one who aspires to be Molly Ivins. That’s based entirely on whether one is more concerned with tales of excessive drinking, or tales of political life. I enjoy a stiff drink considerably more than I enjoy the presidential campaign, but there’s only so much I can say about alcohol. I’ve seen its destructive power on close friends, so it would be dishonest of me to recommend it wholesale, particularly to a readership of largely twentysomethings. I might hate politics on some level, but am afraid of what happens to the world when too many good people ignore it. We can’t let the bastards shoot up and poison Planet Earth without a fight. So I write about the things I care about; and those who regale us with drinking stories are also writing about what they care about. Only the late great Hunter S. Thompson and a chosen few get to write about it all.
Write what you know, that’s the first rule of all writing.
It’s a brave thing to put yourself out there, no matter how a person chooses to do it. I commend all those who write with their own faces and names - I avoided it as long as possible myself until served with a photographic ultimatum, and deliberately chose a picture that my daughter took of me from a safe distance. I behold the hundreds of photos that the current generation fearlessly uploads online with a sense of wonder as they smile confidently at the universe. I hope that such self-assurance will follow them all the days of their lives. The lessons here are slight - don’t Google what you don’t want to read, and when it’s too late, try to work through what it is that bugs you. Be honest, and avoid cheap shots - that’s too easy, and ultimately is unsatisfying. Feel free to respond, whether privately or within a suitable public arena. Then get over it, because life is way too short to do anything else.
I frequently discourage my boyfriend from reading message board tripe out loud to me when I am about two sips into my morning coffee. Why would one spoil one's mood with so much negativism, I say. But hypocrisy is so human, now that I have pulled up the personally offensive post and made him read it once more just to refresh his memory before I point out all the flaws in the writer's logic.
As an op-ed writer, one must roll with the punches. It's the reasonable, mature thing to do. You can't please all of the people all of the time, and columnists are not even aiming for universal appeal. We invite controversy, right? However, in cyberspace, intellectual discourse is rarely the goal; personal attacks are the standard-bearer. Critics are not bound by regular debate procedure, or even decent manners. In this case, the writer describes his dislike of me largely due to nonexistent details about my personal life - i.e. he doesn't even know me, but rails on, unencumbered by reality.
The kicker here? The rant against me was written by a Macon writer who also happens to be a columnist for that edition of our paper. We are unseen co-workers in the virtual office space.
Dear Macon Columnist: For the record, I am rarely one to blather on about jambands. In fact, the major events I have attended in 2008 would include the Lou Reed show in Asheville and Tom Waits at the Fabulous Fox. I would bet good money that either Lou or Tom would curbstomp anyone who linked their names to the term "jam band". I also don't smoke pot, I hate the music of Dave Matthews, am friends with many soldiers, have never aligned myself with the libertarian party, have lived a tattoo-free life, and never stepped inside a yurt. I don't feel as though I am compensating for a lack of some earlier, essential life experience by being a middle-aged person who writes two columns a month. I will eat the occasional veggie burger, but prefer barbecued pork a la Vandy's of Statesboro. I don't speak derisively of the troops, although when a security guard screams that he has been to Iraq before touching breasts in a so-called patdown, I think that I can call a spade a spade without criticism from someone who wasn't even present to witness this.
I do, however, own a pair of Crocs as you surmised. But so do most Americans, so that's only a half credit for a lucky guess.
In other words, it is lazy thinking to attempt to turn anyone, either liberal or conservative, into a cultural stereotype so that the person does not have to be dealt with as a real human being. My life extends far beyond the boundaries of newspaper and web pages, as does yours.
The larger point is not which sort of columnist is more interesting, the one who aspires to be Charles Bukowski or the one who aspires to be Molly Ivins. That’s based entirely on whether one is more concerned with tales of excessive drinking, or tales of political life. I enjoy a stiff drink considerably more than I enjoy the presidential campaign, but there’s only so much I can say about alcohol. I’ve seen its destructive power on close friends, so it would be dishonest of me to recommend it wholesale, particularly to a readership of largely twentysomethings. I might hate politics on some level, but am afraid of what happens to the world when too many good people ignore it. We can’t let the bastards shoot up and poison Planet Earth without a fight. So I write about the things I care about; and those who regale us with drinking stories are also writing about what they care about. Only the late great Hunter S. Thompson and a chosen few get to write about it all.
Write what you know, that’s the first rule of all writing.
It’s a brave thing to put yourself out there, no matter how a person chooses to do it. I commend all those who write with their own faces and names - I avoided it as long as possible myself until served with a photographic ultimatum, and deliberately chose a picture that my daughter took of me from a safe distance. I behold the hundreds of photos that the current generation fearlessly uploads online with a sense of wonder as they smile confidently at the universe. I hope that such self-assurance will follow them all the days of their lives. The lessons here are slight - don’t Google what you don’t want to read, and when it’s too late, try to work through what it is that bugs you. Be honest, and avoid cheap shots - that’s too easy, and ultimately is unsatisfying. Feel free to respond, whether privately or within a suitable public arena. Then get over it, because life is way too short to do anything else.
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