digital guerrilla

Beside the fact that she paid an unmentionable sum for floor seats to the Springsteen show in Chicago, here’s a prime example of why Ellen is my best friend.
I walked down to the neighborhood bookstore tonight to pick up the copy of the Library of America’s Philip K. Dick collection that I ordered, planning to buy nothing but that. I walk in and, well, it’s a bookstore, how could I not look around (as anyone who’s been to a bookstore with me knows)? Within less than a minute I know that as soon as I leave I’ll be calling Ellen. Sitting right there on the new release shelf, taunting me for my ignorance of its existence, is a novel titled The Gum Thief. A Douglas Coupland novel. A new Coupland novel about which, as I mentioned, I knew nothing before this moment. I hem and haw, wander around, do some mental math, but it’s really a foregone conclusion.
Walking out with two books in hand, I call Ellen. As one of the few Coupland fans I know, I have to let her know even though both of us were underwhelmed by his last novel. She’s as surprised and excited as I was (and, I suspect, also shares my slight wariness). Additionally though, and here’s where the whole best friend bit really comes into it, even though it’s Friday night and she, unlike me, has a significant other, she’s in a bookstore at that very moment.
Ok, I think it feels more significant than it sounds. It’s probably due to the influence of that new Coupland novel sitting here taunting me. Time to read it cause I know we’ll be talking about it in a day or two. .