Doug Mcintyre: A Big Moon Over My Shrinking World
Last weekend we had the largest moon of the year, a Super Moon they call it, but I missed it like I miss most things.
I also missed Woodstock, the Summer of Love, the Harmonic Convergence and Hands Across America.
I even missed Carmageddon and Double Coupons at Ralphs.
I don't own an i-anything.
Nor do I text or tweet, and I still own three rotary phones. If you don't know what a rotary phone is ask your grandmother.
I listen to the wrong music.
So, while that big ol' Super Moon was grabbing headlines my world continues, as Simon & Garfunkel said, “Slip Sliding Away."
Simon & who?
Overwhelmed by my obsolescence I sought the comfort of familiar surroundings. Which years ago would have meant happy hour, but happy hour is being litigated out of existence, so I chose to wallow in self-pity at the local bookstore.
But there aren't any.
Bookstores are rapidly going the way of the blacksmith and harpsichord. While a few hardy souls still fight the good fight - the Iliad in North Hollywood, David Kaye Books in Woodland Hills, Book Soup on Sunset - even the big chains have surrendered. Only the occasional Barnes & Noble survives on the low-hanging fruit of vampire novels, cat calendars and double lattes.
It's not like people don't read.
The Wife has Amazon's Kindle and devours book after book digitally - at the gym on the treadmill, in line at Costco and while getting her nails done. (This week, silver.) She's hardly alone. Amazon now sells more e-books than printed.
Take that Guttenberg!
According to Citi Investment Research, 314 million Kindle books will be sold this year; 311 million of which will feature hot vampires (as if there's any other kind) or steamy couples having gymnastic sex in handcuffs, or both.
The remaining odd million or so will either be celebrity confessions, diet books or expos s on how the president is either saving the world or the anti-Christ.
But reading is reading, right?
Still
It's hard to imagine a world absent the quiet thrill of the hunt among a maze of shelves populated by stacks of novels, anthologies, biographies and memoirs.
Soon this simple pleasure will join the long list of nostalgia as the inevitable march of time swallows up bookstores just as our downloadable world has devoured record shops.
Newspapers will vanish as well and columnists with them.
The sun will set, but the moon will rise. The world will continue to spin - a little differently today than yesterday and different again
