It was a quarter past nine and as cold as I’ve ever felt in San Francisco.  This city has never having felt for me as Twain described it; the “normal” air being perpetually brisk but rarely biting.  I was ducking for refuge that night, however, as surely on some meteorologist’s graph there was a cascade of blue arrows from the north pounding downwards to that very corner, aiming to frost my manhood into test-icicles.

Amazon kept me out of Borders for nearly a year, but the choice between succumbing to a carefully orchestrated theatre of retail commerce and the cold refreshment of York peppermint pecker is really no choice at all.  Getting reacquainted with traditional shopping after such a prolonged absence was much like re-embracing an old lover after a significant dry spell, which is to say timid, awkward and more than a little humiliating.  As I entered her, I fumbled clumsily with the door.  I murmured a quiet “Sorry” after bumping into an end cap. I made a right mess of her bathroom knowing fully I’d never have to bear the responsibility of a return trip.

The question was what to read in the thirty minutes until my bus would arrive?  Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters?  The latest Anne Geddes coffee table book featuring weird pictures of infants?  One of the multitude opportunistic anti-Palin unauthorized bios looking suspiciously identical to her upcoming ghostwritten rag Going Rogue?

Turning left at the Twilight fan periodical stand and ducking around the setup for tomorrow’s Fark in-store signing I managed to find a comic book stand.  Held up with unremarkable steel and advertised with the higher brow moniker “Graphic Novel.”  While the honorific seemed to carry greater weight than “comic book,” it’s retail placement said otherwise.  Situated between the young adult paperbacks and the Dungeons and Dragons manuals, Borders seemed to have identified its customer most accurately.  Heavy language couldn’t hide the truth of geography.

“That’s a good one,” a greasy kid next to me squealed.

“Is that so?” I replied, my fingers last stained with red and blue ink of a Spider-man comic maybe five years ago.

Such a novel thing, I thought as I enjoyed the greaser’s recommendation, and then another.    I spend most of my life in this technologically fueled popularity contest.  Submerged in this arms race of gadgets and cool, the basic joy of a comic book now seemed like a delicacy. All the Twitter followers and Facebook friends, for all the records I love that never make the charts and the writers I adore that will never get on The Colbert Report.

Here was a thing that was only asking for fifteen minutes of my day and only promising the childish thrill of watching a dude in tights bust up a bank robber.  In a world where every record I spin is a part of my identity and every newspaper I read a pledge of my political fidelity and every TV show I don’t watch a unit of measurement of just how fucking cool I am, none of those things gave me the naked, simple and uninvolved pleasure of that comic book on that cold night.

I missed my bus and froze after the Borders pulled out their lights and was grateful for it.

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