In anticipation of the fantastic new additions which will soon be added to my library, I went to Walmart (duh) and bought a bookcase. Two weeks later and, appropriately, it's still sitting in the box, leaning ominously against the door to my room, a testament to my poor time-management skills.
Even before I bought it, I knew it would likely fail to live up to expectations, which is probably why I kept progress on its assembly at an even 0% for almost the entire time it's been here. Walmart never fails to deliver in the department of sub-par merchandise. But I couldn't avoid the inevitable disappointment forever, and I think I knew that. So, this weekend, I was feeling particularly ambitious, and I set about the momentous task of getting someone else to assemble this monster. It was difficult to avoid succumbing to the urge to put it together myself, but I fought valiantly against that desire, and after multiple volunteers "forgetting about" and "getting too drunk to focus on" my project , I finally found someone up to the challenge.
This anonymous soldier - so brave, so admirable - went as far as to open the box and to empty it of all parts before we came across a problem: integral pieces of the bookcase were broken. Like, the entire side, which normally would act as the supporting feature of a bookcase, was straight up cracked. It's clear, at this point, that this is Walmart's error. As much as I try, I have yet to harm something by avoiding it entirely.
So, typically Walmartesque in their existence, the pieces of broken wood lay scattered on the floor, unusable. This pissed me off on more than one level - now, after weeks of summoning the effort it took to get started on this thing, I'm going to have to exert myself again to take it back. In actuality, it'll probably sit in the hallway for the rest of the semester looking pathetic. For the moment, anyway, this failure of a bookcase has given me reason to postpone reading any slop, since I simply can not compel myself to read when not in the presence of proper book furniture.
I'm sorry, Walmart, but that's not okay. You're forcing me to spend money on depressingly strange, mind-numbing romance novels for the sake of sparing others the pain, and you can't even allow me the pleasure of having a decent place to store them? Even now, as they sit on top of my dresser, flanked by superior literature (and yes, I did arrange those books specifically for that picture), they just don't look right. Everything about them is wrong: the font on the spines, the titles, even the height of the individual books seems off. The fact that these books have been published makes me upset, and thinking about the fact that I purchased them is giving me good reason to go all existential crisis about the state of the world.
I'm a glutton for punishment, so I'm going to take a minute to consider the chain of people who had to look at these books and think "yeah, okay, let's go ahead and do this." Publishers, editors, writers...why? This means at least three different people had to think a book about sex with dragons was a good idea. They had to be confident that enough people would be interested in this book to make it worth mass-producing.
By purchasing Alchemy's Hot Kiss, or whatever this particular book is called, I contributed to that. I reassured them that yes, there is a market out there for human/beast/magician erotica.
And that's why I don't sleep well at night.
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