Report From The Trenches. →[More:]Today around 5:30 (a half hour before the buying counter closes at the Famous Indie Bookstore, we had a line out the door of people waiting to sell us books that I had to unload. The guy at the head of the line..well, he looked he was going to a party dressed as an Upper Class Twit: yachting blazer, lavender corduroy pants, black slippers with embroidered pitchfork-brandishing devils on them, pink-checked oxford shirt and a fucking ascot for crying out loud. He had about 15 bags full of art auction catalogs, picture books of yachts and horse racing at Saratoga, and shit like that. After him was a homeless dude from one of the missions nearby (Salvation Army's national headquarters is nearby, too, so we got a lot of them) who I see almost every other day, with one bag full of paperbacks that looked as if they'd been run over by a car. He was a guy anywhere between 50 and 200 years old with rheumy eyes, a resigned expression, and dirt on his clothes so thick you could have drilled for oil in it.

Both of them reeked of gin.

Holidays in retail. It's an adventure.