Showing posts with label book stores. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book stores. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 9, 2007

Middle School

Middle School

After the heavy handed move by the ALA to put me directly under a library in some of my most impressionable and tender years I would eventually be thrown into that circle of Hell that Dante’s feared to even imagine let alone describe, middle school. I don’t know who the genius E.d.D. who thought it was a good idea to take all of the children at their most cruel and vulnerable ages 12, 13 and put them all together in one or two schools to fight it out but they should be taken out and shot. It is unfortunate that the educational establishment has continued the practice despite the prevalence of bullying and abuse heaped upon the children by their peers. If these groups were split up in a different manner the mitigating behavior and different situation would surely lead to a more hospitable environment for learning. The reason that students aren’t prepared for college is not the high schools but the middle schools, where ones survival as an individual and even as an uninjured person is constantly at risk.

Fortunately out of this crucible of arbitrary educational goals and constant social persecution there formed within me an entrepreneurial spirit that while influenced by the ALA cabal had the potential to save me from its sinister clutches. A lot of students I knew liked to read Mad Magazine books and Charlie Brown books, as well as other comic strip type books. My mom who’s addiction by this time grew from Russian Literature to garage sales and bags of grass clippings started taking me out early Saturday mornings with here to steal bags of grass and shop at garage sales. I began buying books filled with comic strips for between 10 cents and 25 cents. I would then read them and then carry them with me to school and sell them for 50 cents each. I would buy back from the other students any book I sold them or that they brought in for a quarter or trade two for one with them. As I did this my inventory grew. I soon had al my desks and my locker full of books for sale with my most recent acquisitions in my back pack. This went on for 3 or four months and I was clearing between 15$ to 20$ a week in profit. Then the school administration found out and we had to have a parent teacher conference with the assistant principal. It turns out that entrepreneurialship and reading are not part of the 7th and 8th grade curriculum. Capitalism, math as in accounting, inventory, planning, salesmanship and developing a business plan with room for growth and additional employees were all apparently not part of my intended education and were in fact a corrupting influence that was against the rules. I was told to stop and received detentions for this obviously deviant behavior. Surprisingly we did have a library at our middle school but for the two years I was there not a single class that I was in went to it.

Well 20$ a week is way to much for a 12 year old to give up on, so I stopped carrying my books around and kept them only in my locker. I then made an alphabetical shelf list with prices and costs in a blue ledger that I purchased and did all my business out of the ledger and then passed out my inventory at my locker. After a couple of months of this the authorities again discovered my subversive behavior and punished me severely enough that I gave up on the book selling business. Yes I could have been a part of Barne’s & Reynolds or Reynolds’ Amazon of books .com. But all of that was thwarted by the educational establishment and ultimately by the ALA through its extensive connections in the educational community.

One may wonder why the ALA would go through so much trouble to get to just one twelve year old. Open your eyes man! They aren’t after one they are after them all. They have Literacy programs and information literacy and constant ad campaigns and volunteer friends groups to snare young impressionable minds and warp them into what eventually becomes a librarians worldview where nothing is in place, nothing is organized and everything should be left to us to straighten out. This idea of librarians’ megalomaniacal impulse to straighten out and rule the world is not a new one. It began in Summer and moved to Egypt where the librarians were part of the Priestly Cast controlling the Eternal and earthly destinies of entire populations through their stranglehold on literacy. Then over 2000 years ago in China the head librarian for Zhou dynasty “Lao Tzu” would write the “Tao Te Ch’ing.” This tome attempts to explain the the way of change or the order of the cosmos. Later other librarians would follow. Carl Marx who worked in the library at the British Museum, would develop the communist manifesto that swept across the world, then Mao Ze Dong, who started his adult life as a librarian and finished it as the leader of the largest communist nation on earth followed. Finally Laura Bush the unassuming school librarian, who all Washington insiders know is the true power behind the throne of the last superpower on earth. These are not accidents of history, but the diabolical plans of a cultural elite who will one day rule the world.

Next High School

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

The 4th Grade

My grade school in Quincy Illinois had been built in the early seventies right next to the old brick school building which was practically an overgrown one room school house. The year I entered 4th grade was the year that they finished renovations on the old school house and guess what they did with it? One half of the basement was an music, art and activity room, the other half of the basement was a fourth grade classroom. The entire upstairs was converted into, you guessed it a library. Guess which 4th grade class I ended up in. That’s right the one underneath the library.

Some might think this is a coincidence. They probably also think it is a coincidence that the LC call number for the Bible starts out with BS. Again it was a conspiracy by those misanthropist ALA demons again controlling my life, carefully leading me down the path of addiction and then obsession. The library was of course staffed with this friendly young lady, who read to us and let us get our own books to look at and read. She had a stack of large wooden keys painted in bright colors. We would take one of the keys and when we found a book that we liked we would place the key by the book and turn it to spread the books open and then we could pull our book out. We needed to remember our color so that when we were done we could go back and turn the key again to spread the books open and place our book back where we got it. I of course was her “big helper” in collecting the keys and putting away books others had left out. To this day I can not walk into Hastings without forgetting to get a movie and just get lost in alphabetizing their videos. It drives me insane. Their military section has a whole stack of shelves labeled WWI and the shelves contain nothing but WWII books. I almost had a seizure. The WWI books were in a completely different stack. I hunted down a staff member and asked her what was wrong with this picture? (Turns out it was Cassies’ old boss who wants her back) Do you know what the reason was? Hastings labels their books with price tags combination barcodes and a topic. They do not have a WWI or WWII topic or subject heading, they just have World War as a topic. So they sent a bunch of WWII books and a bunch of WWI shelf labels. So the store has to put a bunch of books about D-day, the Nazis etc. under WWI shelf labels. Has the world gone insane? This might explain why when I go to a book store and ask for a book on a topic they can’t do a topic search on their computer they can only do title searches. I have to instead b lead to this section with a generic label like “Sports” and look to see if they have anything related to what I want? That would be like someone coming to the reference desk and asking for a book on Tai Chi Chuan and us telling them to go look in the GV section. What’s up with that? How did bookstores become so popular with that kind of service? I don’t even get people asking if I need help anymore (Maybe it’s the clothes; maybe it’s the torturing of the staff) but I think it might just boil down to displays and merchandising. Maybe we need one list of what’s new this week and another of what’s hot this week? (Besides me)

Anyway by the fourth grade any chance I ever had of enjoying a video or bookstore was gone. Linda and I two anniversaries ago after dinner and a movie in Lufkin ended up in their super Wal-Mart alphabetizing their discount video sales bin. Is that sick or what? I’ve got a monkey on my back and he has a digital dictionary and thesaurus he carries with him. I’d hate to think what it would be like if I knew more than one language. Unfortunately this story does not end in the fourth grade. It continues on into one of the levels of Hell that Dante feared to write about, Middle School.

My Name is Phil and I am a Biblioholic