Imagine you're browsing in a Borders and you're minding your own business, perhaps sipping on a reasonably-priced iced coffee or thumbing idly through a coffee table book about the dying graffiti culture in Oklahoma, when suddenly you smell something in the air: dander... fur flying... the faintest hint of some sort of animal musk... there's something
inhuman in the store. What little lizard instinct remains in the back of your brain rears back with horror.
Fight or flight, motherfucker!, it screams inarticulately,
There's a predator in your
vicinity, asshole! And the moment you suspect your well-being is jeopardized, you hear a low growl behind you. Too late. You turn to regard your doom. There is a dog in Borders.
Is this a sure sign of the end of times, the reclaiming of the earth by the beasts, a sick side-effect of a diseased economy? Where on this planet would one be blindsided by a canine in a store regarded for its atmosphere, intelligence, and high standards? Did they foolishly build a Borders on the outskirts of Death Valley, where starving animals siege the vestiges of civilization, blind to the imaginary boundaries of man? Or could this scene be playing out in the wild and wiley Ozark Mountains in Missouri, where high standards inherent to a business or corporation are slowly whittled down by the ignorance and lethargy of the locals until people eventually go to their bookstore to go hunting for coyotes or rattlers rather than a further appreciation of the works of T.S. Eliot? Perhaps this is a Borders in the poorest, most dilapidated swamps of rural Florida, where desperate folk sick vicious attack dogs on themselves to reap insurance payoffs so they can spend the rest of their stunted, underpriveleged lives going on Borders shopping sprees with two mauled arms and a head permanenty cocked to the right?
No, dear reader, this collision of animal and shopper takes place in none other than the Borders in Century City Shoppingtown, Beverly Hills'
mall chante; a winding sun-kissed collection of stores so high-class and expensive you'd be lucky not to go bankrupt just looking at the directory. A mall that caters to the elite, wealthy, and socially-retarded by allowing them to tag their hyper, yippy, yappy, fluffy, rage-fueled little trophy-dogs along into stores that normally would, you know, frown upon, like, creatures and stuff being inside since, you know, animals can sometimes, uhm, piss and shit and bite and bark and freak out and generally introduce chaos into a retail environment that thrives on structure, order, beaurocracy, and there not being piss and shit everywhere.
So, in summation, these stores must SEVERELY LOWER their standards in attempt to meet the RIDICULOUSLY HIGH standards of their most entitled patrons. Are you following this? If your nose or ears are bleeding, please take a moment to dab them with gauze and then let's continue.
Borders, in particular, is a surprising victim to the L.A. belief/custom that reality and common sense can be warped in service to the rich. One, because no boutique or fashion store has ever pretended to have a brain; Stephen Hawking, for example, will never be featured on the cover of a Hollister catalogue, shirtless or otherwise. Borders, on the other hand, sells books... so it absolutely has to preserve the vestige of some intellectualism. It relies on the presumption that you can come in and get your literaty rocks off without a spoiled-rotten Yorkiedoodle or Labrachoodle or Screwyoutoodle conversely getting
theirs off by humping your leg.
Let's not even go into the fact that Borders also has a coffee shop that sells beverages and foodstuffs and that having wildlife anywhere near their inventory would result in the automatic lowering of a letter-grade... *shout-out!* just like three absences for a class at Columbia College Chicago! *end shout-out!* How do these men and women get so far ahead in life without a basic enough understanding of how the world works to know that, no, you fucking absolutely canNOT have your dog shed and pee in the same place where food is prepared, no matter how many calendars it's modelled for?
The best part of watching these dumbkopfs try to maintain their feelings of entitlement and composure through the store while these ludicrous animals run around their legs is that they always seem to feel, perhaps through obligation, that they have to visit the section on dog books. To let the world know that they are experts, yes, on the little hairy things at the end of their rhinestone leashes, for look at how long they're standing in front of these books on the topic and staring at the titles! They could teach graduate-level classes on... matching the pictures on the covers to the titles, I guess.
Funny. If they ever actually bothered to open one or do a bit of research outside of "OHHH, Lauria at the beauty shop said a Golden Pugraschnausadoodle is just the cutest little dickens," they'd know that their multi-million dollar designer dog probably has bones so weak and brittle that their legs will collapse under own weight before their extravagant second birthday party. Or they'd learn about how many millions of worthy dogs languish in shelters while they're paying to have new dogs fucking
imagineered. Or, hell, they could stumble upon a Thesaurus and learn a whole new word that fits the definition of their multi-breed investment:
MUTT.In the meantime, though, welcome to Century City Borders. How may I help you? Oh... I see. Where did you say it is? Over in Politics and Government? Well, your dog is certainly very critical of the new Bob Woodward book, isn't she? Ha ha... what? Oh.
He, of course. So, will you be needing some cleaning supplies? We have paper towels in the restrooms... well, we don't actually offer that, uh,
service at the store, madame, it's actually expected that the owner clean up after their own... what's that? Uh huh. Uh huh... yes. Uh huh. Sure. I'll get on it right away. Have a great day and thanks for shopping at Borders. Thanks a bunch.
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