Tag: class

Borders on the border

I was at our local Borders bookstore the other night rediscovering how crummy it is even for a Borders. It’s also right on the east-west divide of town, where the haves meet the have-nots and a few of the latter live in desperate circumstances in motels.

Surrounded by soccer moms, clip-art cute college students, and red-faced businessmen, I looked through the map section. Next to me an undergrad-aged East Asian-American guy was thumbing through a Parisian travel book, and next to the computer books a nerd of some kind with a shoulder bag and headphones was peering at an ASP howto book.

Suddenly the bathroom door next to us burst open and out lurched the other Costa Mesa: a 35ish tweaker with long dirty blond hair, sweaty t-shirt, bad acid-washed jeans, and a wild 1000-yard stare. He looked around with that bus crazy bugeyed face that says “look me in the eyes and I own you,” so I studied a map of Turkey carefully. Without a particular victim to address, Motel Guy emitted this statement to the bookstore in general:

GOD DAMN, I HATE THE SMELL OF ASS!

He left, so he couldn’t see me giggling helplessly into the maps, or the soccer moms blanching.

The unspeakable lured by the unreadable

I try not to to be too hard on hack writers most of the time. It’s hard to make a living in journalism, and a lot of jobs are at boring and stultifying industry house organs or shilltalk ad rags. These are people who wanted to be ink-stained front page reporters or film critics and they get to write about aluminum foil or fabulous getaway weekends. Sometimes, though, they cross a line. This piece, from a credit card company’s luxury travel magazine, is… well, I’ll pay you a quarter if you read the whole thing straight through. It’s for our local South County seaside resort, and the writers decided that instead of the usual luxury porn template that bored them so, they’d use an alternative literary form for thier puff piece: A film script! Because that’s what they really wanted to do anyway.

THE SCRIPT