Books on Running a Bookstore
No wants wants to admit they failed.
Especially when it's your fault the city is covered in a fine film of the slightly pinkish, sticky substance that goes into cotton candy.
But that's only ever happened to me once. This time, well, all right, I failed. But I didn't have to admit that.
The sun had been out, the birds had been singing, I was, due to the last incident, not playing with any kind of chemicals at all. Court order approved and legally attainable in the United States chemicals only, and in their appropriate (read: safe) doses. There was a nice song or two on the radio, which was rare. I was usually sick of the songs they played on the radio, over and over again, or played by that annoying DJ in the morning, forever ruining the song in my mind by association.
I had on a blue blazer. I didn't necessarily need it, as it was unseasonably warm, but I never trusted unseasonably anything days. I figured that they were being unseasonable only as a temporary thing: like how a Venus Fly Trap will sit still, all nice and pleasant like a normal flower until it lulls a fly into its lair, and then... lunch. I didn't want to become lunch for any old unseasonable day.
I was just about to cross the street when I noticed an old woman crying near a lamppost. As she was crying, I assumed she hadn't seen me yet. As she was also hunched down, looking at one of her shoes, which seemed to have come untied, I figured this was a safe assumption.
So I decided this would be a perfect opportunity to practice my ninja stealth moves to sneak up on her and then, mission accomplished, help her out with her shoelaces or whatever it was that ailed her. Maybe help her across the street.
Now, I'm not, and I was not, an official ninja. I am simply a man. A simple man, if you will. A man who has honed his sense of stealth and fluidity of movement such that I was indistinguishable from the wind on a summer's evening. Or at least I had in my practices at home. This was to be my first real world test. At home, I was able to stealthily make my way from one end of my apartment to the other without creaking a floor board, without casting a suspicious shadow across the floor, without anything audible above a whisper. If I had cats, they would have been unnerved and thrown into fits of worry when I practiced gliding across the apartment in my specially ordered ninja shoes -- they had special soles and, for some reason, a separation between the big toe and the other toes. I didn't have cats, though, because I hate cats. I do have a dog, and dogs generally, in my experience, aren't unnerved by much. They seem pretty happy to lie down on the floor by the couch and watch their owner leap silently around the apartment, so long as they've been fed in the last hour or so. My last test run was also successful, with sneakers this time, because, let's face it, no one walks around in ninja shoes these days, it's a dead giveaway.
The street, however, poses, well, let's call them "special" challenges. Like other pedestrians. I had kept in a low crouch along the buildings, occasionally leaping over a railing and on to the steps of a walk-up where I felt it best suited to my ninja-like approach. A couple feet from the old woman some lady in a power suit with a power briefcase whacked me but good as she was rounding the curb to cross the street, and another woman walking her inexplicably tiny dog crossed the path I was destined to fall by the natural laws of physics, and so I was forced to twist awkwardly to avoid the inevitably shrill yelp of the dog should I follow the course I would have taken, first yanking the dog nearer as I fell on its leash and then squashing the little thing as it was sucked in, like some sort of blackhole of falling ninja, which I figured would be decidedly non-ninja-ific. So down I went in a heap, very un-ninja-like, unfortunately, the only other way I could fall, at the old lady's feet. The old lady, which, it turns out, was a sculpture, some sort of new art exhibit. I know this because I was able to read the brass plaque on the sidewalk at her feet.
Still slightly coated with cotton candy, it seemed, even though I was sure it had rained since that fateful other day.
Summary
disclaimer:
This has been an issue.
Be good to one another. Don't set fire to anything that isn't expressly for being lit on fire.
And, with that, good night.
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