I'm seriously weirding myself out by how much space I dedicate to this little store. Someone tell me I'm very creepy and need to let go, so I don't have to do it myself.

Anyway, actually, this isn't really about BMV per se, but it relates vaguely back to it, because whenever I walk inside, I'm always reminded of my lifelong professional dream of running a bookstore of my own.

Ever since I was, oh, alive, I've wanted to be an illustrator. This was back when I read more picture books, and when I thought I had commerically viable artistic talent. After I realized I had maybe a passing knack for drawing at best, I naively switched to author, thinking I could do better at it, that it was easier.

I haven't written anything in a year. And more. Being awarded English Laureate seems so far away.

But I still want to do something with writing, with books. I persist. Critic, editor, seller. For a while, I even toyed with the idea of being an English teacher, but decided I couldn't deal with that kind of social responsibility, not to mention hordes of snotty kids -- ones like me who secretly believed they knew everything but pretended outwardly that they were modest, and possibly worse, ones who openly believed they knew everything but in fact were even stupider.

If you've seen or read Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, that's the kind of quirky, sadsack, geeky, elitist, patchwork establishment I want to run one day. I want to be surly. I want to be scary and emanate the false illusion that I am literate, and by stepping into my store, you are conceding that you are not, at which time I temporarily own your ass. I have been an introvert my whole life, and I need a little piece of the world, a personal realm, that I can rule and control.

The day before I started my first day at my new job, I was ranting at my mother -- nicely -- about this ideal job, preferably with lots of underlings I can demean. I told her about how great it feels to be able to intimidate total strangers with a literary knowledge merited only by the fact you work in a bookstore.

I told her about the floor-to-ceiling worn dark wood shelving, and the rolling ladder. I told her about the tarnished brass -- or iron or pewter -- accents, and the metal spiral staircase that goes tap-tap-tap like a typewriter when you walk down it -- antique typewriters being another thing I'm crazy about, just like rotary phones.

I told her about the restored Victrola I would keep brightly polished and subtly lit in the corner, and how I would play old blues records, Beatles, disco, and so-bad-it's-good 80s numbers on it all day, and bark at my minions when they try to play something less unhip. 

She said maybe I could be a librarian.

I paused.

A library isn't the same, I should've said. A bookstore is more social, more diverse, more contemporary. It's by far more elitist, in a secondhand bookstore, especially. I want to be pretentious and exclusionary -- a library by its very nature is communal and all-embracing.

I shelf a book and never have to worry about it again, whether or not someone leaves with it tucked under their arm; a library is repetitive, the same titles, the same people, cycle perpetually. The constant shelving and reshelving of the same materials over and over ... it would kill me with its dreary repetition. I can endure, say, seven weeks of a temporary job dusting and filing tens of thousands of papers, but as an occupation, I could not. (Moreover, U of T would hardly be impressed by me trying to use a below-minimum salary to slowly ... very slowly ... line their pockets.)

Instead of explaining all of it -- which I would have had to have done in English in order to achieve the level of eloquence I would insist upon and she wouldn't understand it well at all then -- I sighed, and said yeah, you know, maybe.