Beth and I visited not one but 2 furniture stores yesterday, roughly 2 more than I really need. I don't mind furniture stores per se, but they represent big sensory overload for me. well 1st we hit Panera, where the soft pseudo-jazz stylings lull you into your coffee and bagel. it pleased me to see a Panera in West Virginia last year, there seems so few little pleasures in WV. I mean, we were in Spencer WV once. the big place to go to for a special time was McDonald's, which had 3 televisions for your viewing enjoyment/transfixation/narcotizing. at Panera you can at least expect to get something more robust than brown water when you ask for coffee, WV being a bleak outpost for coffee aficionados. after Panera was a visit to Ethan Allen, and soft rock sounds piped over the sound system. too much to look at, and we have no immediate needs. hard to figure old portraits that you figure should be hanging on castle walls. in one rather frumpy livingroom arrangement, the display books were the Hardy Boys. a nice touch at Ikea is that the prop books are in Swedish. to get me to enter Thomasville down the road, beth suggested that we hit Barnes and Noble after. Thomasville store was better lit than EA but not much different otherwise (to these critical eyes). bowls of hard candy were my main points of interest and--score!!!--a bowl of Hershey Kisses(tm). a crappy rock station sounded merely obnoxious, not the music but the dopey patter of the djs. tho I must admit that that old song by Melissa Etheridge gets on my nerves. it's almost inexplicable why she starts yelling in the song. I can explic, however: it's a show of passion and sincerity, but it sounds like phony shit. I was glad to leave. B&N was its same old self. trying not to spend heedlessly, I avoid a lot of areas of consideration. in fact, I spent little time downstairs at all. Beth, on the other hand, can stand there and read, which I can't do. she found a book that had postcards from anonymous people who detailed secrets they've never told. unnerving to say the least. someone pees in her husband's coffee when she's mad at him. others carry tremendous guilt for some little acts or failings. a little is funny, a lot disturbing. I looked at books by Jung, but I must admit that I got a lot to go thru as it is. the poetry section looked bleary. the highlight table seemed better than what was displayed at Christmas. Berrigan, for one. I get the feeling, tho, that someone thinks they ordered too many of that. I saw Legitimate Dangers (misnomer alert), which looks like smell. author photos and CVs accommpany the poetry, which suggests to me sleight of hand: look at this not the poetry. I can't remember where I read it, but apparently Dante Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne lived together for a time. and one of them had the idea--alas, never fulfilled--of getting an elephant to clean the windows. that's the sort of thing I want to read in one's bio, not where you went to school or what forgetable magazine you've been published in. please, tell me about your window cleaning elephant. in my absolutely hurried scan of the anthology I detected no aesthetic, which is to say, no compelling idea to make me want to buy it. it was just a bunch of poems, hey hey hey. I don't know why people buy anthologies except for teaching purposes. few rise up to more than targets for potshots like this. I glanced briefly at the philosophy section. B&N has put out affordable editions of a lot of philosophy classics in the public domain. I wasn't hankering to buy anything however. nothing new from Terry Pratchett, Beth's passion (I've read the 1st 20 or so Disc Worlds but nothing since). it seems Gertrude Stein wrote only 2 books, Alice B Toklas's autobiography and Three Lives. there were at least 3 editions of On the Road, makes no sense to me. nor the 23,000 editions of Lord of the Rings. I'll leave the thinking to the folks in marketing. Beth almost got a Tony Hillerman and a Robert Ludlum but threw them back when she saw a history of the French and Indian Wars, which is my cup of tea as well. that book represented our swag for the day.