5 Stages of Grief: Local Bookstore Edition

My paperboy job has many ups and downs. The negatives are obviously the early hours and the subsequent antisocial sleep schedule. But the positives, well. Let's just look at my history, my personality. You take all the data points and plot them and any statistician will come to the same conclusion. Some day, I am going to have to build something big, something really big, for no good positive reason other than I find it amusing, and I'm going to have to build it out of a metric assload of Papier-mâché. When that day comes, and by his noodley appendage it will, I am going to need a lot of newspapers. Ladies and Gentlemen I am here to tell you that when that day comes, or more likely very late night. I. Am. Fucking. Ready.

Very seriously, my heroes.

Another positive that came with it recently, a bitter sweet positive point I might add, was that it allowed me to discover that my local used book store was closing this Saturday. I might not have even noticed had not my route made me drive past it. While I was in there I heard the phrase "it's a sign of the times" at least three or four times. This is sadly true as Borders is also now joining the now almost endless list of defunct book retailers, though Borders has a different problem. Having dealt with this particularly devastating kind of grief, I feel like I have enough data point to satisfy psychologists. So here is,

The Five Stage of Grief

(So your bookstore is closing)

Denial

Oh, its like every furniture store ever opened since the Big Bang, their just saying that. Their not really going out of business, just an excuse to throw a sale, broaden the customer base. Maybe they're just moving locations, yes! That's it. They're just moving. This building closes and another opens. Well maybe another bookstore will move in and take over, this is temporary. This is temporary. All will be well...

Anger

I shop here 3 times a month and this is how I'm repayed?!? Sure! So I don't buy anything and perhaps I'm just browsing before buying at a more reasonable price on Amazon. You know what? It's not my fault, it's society. Yeah! Most people in this country have no interest in books. If our culture encouraged it more. I didn't do this, FUCKING FOOTBALL PLAYERS DID THIS!

Bargaining

Look, I will go home right now and cancel my Amazon account. Oh for fucks sake, so Amazon makes it difficult as fuck to do that, not my fucking fault. 

Depression

Please... don't go. If this place goes I'll have no place to kill half an hour while I'm waiting for the pizza I ordered to cook. I'll have no where to browse before buying online. The first time I see a book will be after I bought. I just, please... I'll miss you...

Acceptance

Holy. Living. Fuck.

25 cents a book. All the books here are 25 cents. Every single book. All of them. I can buy them, for a god damned quarter. I've got quarters, my carpets in the car are made from quarters. I can buy books with them. Whole books. For 25 cents. Any book, any book they have. This is... It's just... This is,

THE GREATEST FUCKING DAY EVER!!!!!!!!!!11111111111

My Review of "The Rise of the Planet of the Apes"-related Dream I Had Last Night

So I had no plan to go view "The Rise of the Planet of the Apes" anytime soon, but apparently my brain had other ideas. It decided to make me watch it's own version of it based on the small amounts of information I've picked up from the very small number of television advertisements I've seen for this film. Since the movie-dream was so, we'll go with intriguing, I've decided to review my dream remix of "The Rise of the Planet of the Apes".

Amazingly, no Inception references. 

Note: From here on out, my brain will be referred to as The Director. 

So the film opened with Dr. James Franco demonstrating his new box of Alzheimer's fixing black lights. He had a monkey named George, a curious little fellow, open up his Pandora's Box shaped suspiciously like the IT Crowd "Internet". George was suddenly able to talk after being bathed in it's ultraviolet creaminess. The room applauded and the next scene opened with George helping Dr. James Franco make some improvements on the black light box of wonder. This of course was trickery as George made the box turn him into an asian human with a fashion aesthetic that screams, "I'm on my way to a rave, a monkey rave" with the only monkey bit left being the face. George then proceeded to kill Dr. James Franco using what looked like a neck bone snapping variant of the Vulcan Death Grip. I thought this was an interesting choice on the part of the director, as many of the previews I saw for this film indicated the James Franco would be the main character. It would appear that I had been deceived, but in a pleasant way, at that moment only ten minutes in I knew I could leave all my expectation at the dreamdoor.

The following scene just showed a nice downtown market in an nondescript US city. Suddenly raving neanderthal anime characters with sunglasses came down from above with jet packs and proceeded to one by one NeckSnapVulcanDeathGrip every person there to death. The interesting and almost confusing thing about this sequence was that no one in the crowd fought back. No police armed themselves and nobody fought against their own deaths. This apathy made the scene incredibly eerie and disturbing. It was as if all of humanity faced with extinction just accepted their fate. The director seemed to be using these BrightlyDressedNeanderthalSquareEnixNeckSnappingVulcanDeathGripMonkeysWithJetPacks as a metaphor for our own acceptance of the destruction we are bringing to our planet.

Then, once again, the film took a 360 degree turn from a serious and deep metaphorical analysis of human society and introduced our true main characters, Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter. 

Wait the what the fuck a what a why a woahhhhhh...

Leonard spent the rest of the movie basically protecting Sheldon who personally accepted his ape overlords. Eventually they were killed like everyone else on Earth, apathetically accepting the SuperVulcanDeathGrip. To be honest I was expecting this part of the film to be much better than it was. Up until this point the film had been shocking and caught me off guard but by the end it was just a really bad Big Bang Theory season finale and as much as I love The Big Bang Theory, it's not really cinema quality stuff. Also I'm not sure how this prequel fits in with the overall Planet of the Apes canon as the apes apparently abandoned their rave based society. I guess it was just a phase, maybe a side effect of black light radiation. Overall not what I expected when I realized that this was how I was going to spend my entire night of REM sleep.

I give The Rise of the Planet of the Apes a 6 out of 10