"Read a book you illiterate son-of-a-bitch and step up your vocab" -"Big Pimpin"

The nurturing juxtaposition of the psychology section and the self-help section massaged me through adolescence; my insanity was predetermined in genre presentation. The humor section has helped me trip and fall semi-comfortably on my face through early adulthood. Like a socially versatile butterfly, I was able to maneuver clique by clique with ease, finding my niche from book corner to book corner. I casually greeted the autobiography section, traipsed through the Spanish-speaking section, and breezed past fiction (the untouchables, in my genre caste system) until I reached the literary core of my identity. I prided myself in having been able to play "process of elimination" with all the psychological memoirs I had conquered, leaving quite a paucity of unread books in the mushroom cloud of this game.

I took such comfort in the milieu of bookstore delineation that I inadvertently attempted this in my own bookshelf: racial inequities section, Irish history section, reference-text section, bullshit books section (I figured Barnes & Noble always meant to have one of these, but never could), Latino lit section, overwhelming-amount-of-crazy section. That last one is the truth. As a test of friendship, if the magnitude of my books-about-crazy-people section is OD for you, it's probably not a lasting friendship...in my book. <--Did you see what I did there? "In my book?"

PROBABLY NOT, BECAUSE THERE ARE NO BOOKSTORES ANYMORE. DESPAIR ABOUNDS!

My first "rilli tho?!" came when the 23rd & 6th Barnes & Noble was gone. Now Borders is gone from 33rd Street. We are not advanced enough to have compromised bookstores in our view of the future. As an editor, I feel that I am walking through my own custom-made version of "Twilight Zone" hell: Trader Joes and Kmarts where books used to be. The lowest form of consumerism where the highest form of consumerism used to be. $1 Sunny Delight where people used to learn stuff good. People spending money who probably can't read the words on the money.

Even if I WANTED to peruse the paranormal teen werewolf-vampire zombie-blob dialectical monster section of a bookstore, I'd have to work too hard to even begin to try to find one.

And no, Kindles and Nooks do not suffice (although I will probably have to buckle down at some point in the nearer-than-comfortable future); if I can't see from afar how many pages I have left in a book, I don't wanna read it. I'm an OG reader and I'm gonna act like an 80-year-old averse to technology for as long as I can hold out. The feeling of hitting "check out" online is incomparable to the adventure of finding your way to buying a new book.

It's 2011 and we don't have flying cars yet, but there are almost no bookstores. Rilli tho?!