IT WAS NICE DAY, if a bit brisk. Most folks were wearing sweaters or jackets. Not me: I was standing in Half-Price Books in a black long-sleeve shirt. Looking idly ahead. I had stepped aside in the aisle to allow a few customers who were entering the store to move past me.
The last customer in line was a pretty blonde. She saw me standing there, unmoving, unsmiling—and the latter is so normal for the store employees that I sometimes think that smiling is reason for termination—that she made a normal assumption.
“Do you work here?” she smiled.
“No,” I nodded back.
“Oh! Sorry. You look like you do,” she said.
I gave her my best John Reece/Jim Caviezel look and sotto voce and oh-so-cooly replied, “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “You have that used-book look.”
FEATURED IMAGE: The photo at the top of this page is actor Jim Caviezel as John Reece in a CBS television series we just binge-watched our way through. In the show’s first season, Caviezel played Reece in a rather stiff Clint Eastwoodian manner that made the prospect of more seasons seem dire. But he picked up the second season, adding just enough humor and warmth to make his almost monotone character more engaging. The remaining four season were a fun roller-coaster ride.
Mystically liberal Virgo enjoys long walks alone in the city at night in the rain with an umbrella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig who strives to live by the maxim, “It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.
I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a college dropout (twice!). Occupationally, I have been a bartender, jewelry engraver, bouncer, landscape artist, and FEMA crew chief following the Great Flood of ’72 (and that was a job that I should never, ever have left).
I am also the final author of the original O’Sullivan Woodside price guides for record collectors and the original author of the Goldmine price guides for record collectors. As such, I was often referred to as the Price Guide Guru, and—as everyone should know—it behooves one to heed the words of a guru. (Unless, of course, you’re the Beatles.)