Yay, ranty time!

S: just out of morbid curiosity, what would you call this record store?

B: Bottle's Music.

C: that's not exactly an exciting name.

B: i'm not exactly an exciting guy. Records and a coffee pot, what more do you actually need? I suppose customers, but who the hell knows where to find them? Forbes said albums were dead 4 years ago. Me and my friends are dinosaurs in the micro-machine age. You could probably make 9 or 12 fortunes if you could find a mechanism for snorting music or injecting it between your toes or smoking it, but what kind of sales pitch is "if you buy it now and don't open it for 20 years it might be worth $20 more than you paid for it?" I suppose i'd have to sell stereo equipment and replacement cartridges and cleaning brushes and who knows what else.

E: but you'd need employees and an accountant and...

B: why? I sell records, you buy them. Tell me what you want, enjoy a show twice or thrice a month, help Mr. Sandos carry groceries up 3 flights of stairs for 10% off Thursday, support what you like. None of this 8:30 to 5 garbage. 2 to 10 and weekends, you know, when people can actually shop there. DIY recording room in a closet, buy something or be cool, musicians and DJs stopping by to hang out and meet other musicians. Obscure stuff, not boring crap you can find anywhere. You hungry? I got snacks.

Why do down towns turn to shit? Because A) all the supposedly good people went home, and A^2) us night owls got no place awesome to go. Sorry if you own a bar, but bars suck because they're full of drunk people. Sorry if you're a drug dealer, but this is my block. We'll pick up trash and politely ask passing strangers to stop throwing that trash on the sidewalk. Bottle's Music helps little old ladies cross the street, Bottle's Music donates books and pencils to schools and libraries, Bottle's Music will drive you to your dentist appointment, Bottle's music will tutor you and your kid in algebra. I'm being ridiculous on purpose, the point is stop being terrible to each other.

S: i see your vision, though. I get it.

B: i feel like it's too nostalgic and sappy. There were still independent record stores when i was a kid, but i couldn't afford records and i watched them all die. Everything became a dumb corporate branded box store, and they suck. I want a butcher shop and a farm stand and kids riding skateboards and bikes in the middle of the street and ice cream trucks driven by guys who aren't creepy as hell like when i was a kid (i mean they weren'tcreepy when i was a kid). Was it all just a facade? A fake world of fantasticness where you could just run around outside all day and night, hang out at the arcade, go to the 24hr gym to work out? Was it really a world of grift and extortion and bribery and insurance fraud?

I mean, yeah, i listened to the economy die but no one actually realize it on my car radio in Denton, TX in 2008, paying $4 a gallon to drive back and forth between my apartment and my home in Moore, OK, watching the town get big as the people got less and less and reassuring the almost certainly meth dealers across the street that no i wasn't the one who called the police after we could all hear him screaming at his wife in their front yard, and pointing out to the traveling alarm system salesman that no i don't want a perpetual security system bill and if my house gets broken into 3 months from now his business card will be handed directly to the investigating detectives. I would sit on my front porch and draw during the Summer, made The Slumlord EP in the garage my dad and i converted ourselves just because i had nothing better to do in 100 degree temps with 90% humidity.

A new Wal-Mart opens and magically the other 3 nice grocery stores in town immediately decline. People scamming for gas in a Lowes parking lot, huge new movie theater i never went to. When i was as kid my dad would take us to the high school tennis courts until they tore those down for a softball field. I used to skate and bike and play basketball at the elementary school across the street until they locked those fences up tight.

That's not upper-middle Bourgeois extravagance i'm remembering, that's people trying really hard to take care of themselves and not burden their equally working-class neighbors. The world i knew just up and died in the late 2000s. I really am a 9,000 year old curmudgeon on the inside, but maybe not the kind you're used to. People don't start out bad, you make them turn out that way by selling them cheap substitutes for things they once did for themselves and each other.

Which brings me to my real dilemma. I don't really care what job it is i'm supposed to be doing, but somebody has to pay to do it, and the money has to come from the community. The community at large has to support individual people when they need it, not the other way around. 100 people can help 1, 1 can't help 100 all at the same time. Do i want to be "warehouse manager" for an infant giraffe of a company trying to learn how to use its corporate legs before the lion attacks?  No, not particularly, but hiring someone else above me is a pretty garbage move on their part and it puts us all in a real bind in the sense that i officially don't care any more.

Are they spying on my facebook page? Don't care. Are they mistakenly mad about something i wrote in a book? Don't care. What good does it do to train a new guy on receiving and stocking if you immediately put him in a truck so he can't help me do all of it? If i have to filter and edit and double check every ticket and explain logistics every day, how long before i start complaining that everyone else is a moron? I'm on the phone 3 times a day correcting some other branch's mis-shipments compared to maybe once every other week of my own for which i apologize and correct immediately. I'm the bad guy for pointing out peoples' mistakes, i'm the bad guy if i ignore them. Guess what, don't care. I show up, i work all day, i go home. Pay me or fire me, don't care. It's trivial work anyone can do but nobody else does. Sorry for ranting, it's not your fault. Cheers.