business discussion with a record store troll

JW went up to it, the desk.

"How many web sites can we sell you today?" JW asked playfully, with venom in his stride, as he whisked past the proprietor, who was in his habitual mode of staring at a computer screen. JW advanced rapidly, as he headed for the far end of the record shop, pretending to forage.

"None," the scraggly owner retaliated. "You must really want something," he continued, in reference to the driving rain that was forcing other customers to stay at home and wait it out.

"No. My boss isn't coming in for another hour, and it's 11:30 already, and I'm bored. So I thought I'd come in and harrass you. If I'm really stupid, I may buy something. But I better not."

JW stared intensely at the used CDs. Nothing there to tempt him, not today anyway.

"So your band is playing at Blues Fest, eh?" JW interjected abruptly as he moved toward the check out area. "End of August? What time?"

"9:00"

"PM?"

"Yeah."

"How long?"

"Hour and a half."

"Good," JW replied with a hint of a smile. "You want me to set up a channel for live streaming video so your fans can watch you live, right? That's what you said you were interested in last time we talked."

"What? No. Not a live stream," he said gruffly, like it was some horrible thing. "I just want someone to take a video camcorder and film us playing, then give it to us in a file format that we can attach to a newsletter, or upload to YouTube and MySpace."

"What?" JW asked.

"But I don't want to spend any money on it. Anything beyond...breakfast...I'm not interested," the record store owner growled solemnly.

He continued in a violent display of vocal aggression and desperation: "I'm not spending anymore money on a band! Never again!"

JW could see through the grim demeanor and thought he saw a plain vanilla loser, a wounded animal who's angry at the entire world and all it representatives. The message was clear: if you want to do any work for me, it has to be free. Maybe I'll buy you a cheap breakfast at Hardees, for doing the video work.

"There are all kinds of free music marketing tools out there, in what they call Web 2.0. If you have the talent, the tools exist!" JW exclaimed as he exited the dilapidated rotting mess of a broken building that housed the record shop.

It was painfully obvious. He dumped a lot of money into his band, but nobody wants the kind of music his band plays, it's just a bar band doing cover tunes, and nobody cares.

Now he's bitter and spiteful, ending his days doing eBay deals, losing money again, but not knowing what else to do. Any talk of promotions, marketing, web sites, or video streaming is just more salt in the wounds.

सोमोने एल्स'एस सॉफ्ट दीप mud

Alenby just sat there. The more he sat, the more angry I became, though I'm not a big fan of being angry. It's just that Alenby was so smug in his sloughing and I hate sinking in someone else's soft deep mud.

"What's up Alenby?" the boss said, as I turned my gaze toward yet another board in the floor. I was searching for a precious office supply, in this case a paper clip, that I thought I heard myself drop. Perhaps it was nothing. Maybe that ill defined sound was the last gasp of a dying star somewhere, triumphant in its fry, yelping its swan song across the cosmic effluvium.

"Chillin'", said Alenby with a carefully prepared grimace, locally applied.

"Don't you have any work to do?" boss says in retaliation.

Alenby says nothing, jams a cigarette in his sneer, and storms out to sit in his car for a while, it's his security blanket and place of meditative refuge, the womb of all regrets. "If only I hadn't screwed my life up so bad ever since I was born", he prays to himself in solemn strange smokey silence.