Alphabetizing

Among other attributes, one of the main qualities that got me hired at the l.n.c.b. was my familiarity with the alphabet. I was asked to take on, from time to time, sections of the store where the alphabetizing was particularly bad -- meaning that customers had torn up the section and books had gotten reshelved in the wrong place -- and clean them up. One of the most egregious sections is the poetry section -- so bad that I spent part of my lunch hour working on it, and then after my shift was over, I actually went back and worked on it for another 35 minutes, off the clock. Why? Because it's bad enough that no one buys poetry, but if they did go looking for poetry, it would be tragic if they couldn't find what they were looking for. The work of Charles Simic was for some reason spread all over the S's. Wilson, the several Williamses, and Whitman were all entwined, along with a stray Louise Gluck. Mary Karr was all over the place, and Kenneth Koch was hiding among the M's. I tried to put things back in order, but the poetry section was too large to be made perfect in just an hour -- which is, I guess, a blessing.

I found another news story about Clear Lake, the amorphous suburb in Texas where I went to high school, and where I set many of my erotic stories involving teenagers. (You won't find Clear Lake on any map; Clear Lake City (not an incorporated city, by the way) is more or less the center of it, but much of that is in fact an incorporated area of Houston, which is actually 25 miles north. It's all very confusing and not worth figuring out, but if you really want to, use Yahoo maps to find Webster, TX, and then Seabrook, TX, and the Clear Lake area includes those towns and everything in between.) Mysteriously dead teenagers with the wrong friends are the victims in this story. One of the teens is named Tiffany, of course. I'll try to run updates (here's an AP story) of this story, which should have some legs, though not as long legs as the story of Andrea Yates who lived in the same neighborhood -- that's the insane housewife who drowned all her kids.

I celebrate these horrific tales because they fit my mental picture of the place, a desperately sterile suburb practically coated in bored teenagers and middle-class angst.