Yesterday at the store Jason came up with a great way to fuck with customers’ minds. We’ve been having a lot of people come in and ask when the new Harry Potter book is coming out. Even if I knew the answer, I’d be annoyed to death with these questions. As if there aren’t thousands of other books (geared towards, oh, say, ADULTS?) they could read in the interim. As if there aren’t resources on the web that could give more accurate information regarding the publication date of a book than your garden-variety Barnes & Noble drone. As if Time and Newsweek haven’t devoted dozens of articles to the beleagured superstar novelist’s struggle to finish the book and get it to her publisher. But finding out for yourself is a lot of work, isn’t it? Much easier to just waddle up to Customer Service and bleat your question out to anyone with a nametag hanging, nooselike, around his neck.

Sorry. I got a little carried away there.

So but anyway, Jason came up to me while I was working at said Customer Service desk yesterday and said, loud enough for everyone around us to hear, “Dude, I was just in my car listening to the radio, and apparently, JK Rowling is dead.” “Really?” I asked, at this point buying it wholesale. “Yeah,” he contined, and made a distasteful gun-in-the-mouth gesture with his hand. “Offed herself. Dead in her mansion. Apparently couldn’t take the pressure.” “Really?” I repeated, gullible and slow on the uptake. “Yeah,” he said again. “I heard it on the radio, so it must be true,” whereupon he winked at me and walked away. At this point I knew the name of the game, and it was an effective one, too. A man standing nearby asked, “What’d he hear on the radio?” I laughed in lieu of an actual answer.

It’s truly cold out, now, and I haven’t got any good warm clothes to sleep in, so sleeping was a bit of an ordeal last night. Just as well, since I want to be tired tonight so I can get enough sleep to be up at six fucking o’clock for my new additional job. But first there’s the Racecar Radar show, which I suspect will be bittersweet because it will just make me miss my drums all the more.

SOME QUESTIONS I’VE BEEN ASKED BY CUSTOMERS AT BARNES & NOBLE:

“So is John Irving, like, the next John Grisham?”

“Why is Dante’s Inferno in Poetry?”

“Do you have any magazines about statellite TV?”

“Do you have a book called The ABCs Of Prostrate Cancer?”

“Where is your non-fiction section?”

“You never have anything I want. Why don’t you just go out of business?” (probably rhetorical)

“Do you work here?”

“Do you sell magazines?”

“Do you have books in stock?”

“Someone throwed up over by the magazines.” (not a question)