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Brick and Mortar Adventures
The joys of going into a comic or game store and freely exploring their wares cannot be gained by shopping on the ‘net for such things. Sadly, there’s always a hitch when it comes to these types of businesses. I’m not the most experienced comic store enthusiast, but I’ve seen my fair share to know that they can have some serious problems. Sometimes you’ll find a shop that will make you question how on earth it could remain in business. There’s a store near me that’s located in what looks like a converted house. I’ve never seen anyone enter or exit the building and it’s almost always closed. The only time I’ve ever seen anyone near it was during Halloween when there were three kids standing within 10 feet of the front door. All three of them looked like they were dressed up as the Punisher. Perhaps they were in some strange Punisher themed gang where the initiation was to stand as close as they could to the store for five minutes before they got scared and ran away, because otherwise the situation was too bizarre for description. I’ve always wanted to go inside myself, but I’m held back by an irrational fear that the store is some sort of Stephen King inspired other-world where the inventory consists mostly of cursed monkey paws, gremlins, and Yu-Gi-Oh cards. One of the worst comic stores I’ve ventured into had boxes scattered all over the floor full of various junk that I wasn’t sure was for sale. It also looked like the place was in need of a severe vacuuming job. In the front there was a couch and an old school big screen television that had some movie on it. The store owner and some other guy were watching the film, making me feel kind of uncomfortable, like I was interrupting them in their living room. In the chaos I managed to find a few things to purchase and haven’t been back since. Now that I think about it, I wonder if it really was a store at all or if it was just some geek’s poorly located apartment. There’s a comic book store in my town that is small, clean, and except for a few hideous clientele it’s a great place to shop. It’s in an older building and has a neat small business kind of charm. If you don’t have a random encounter with an overly frightening nerd, it’s a great place. The big gaming store on the other side of town is another story altogether. While it’s in a newer building, it's super clean and is locally owned and operated. There’s one really big drawback, however. Sometimes it stinks. No, scratch that. It freaking reeks of unwashed bodies and Doritos. I’m not sure why, but it seems that the game store attracts a greater quantity of the part of society that only ever ventures outside to get cat food or pick up a copy of the extremely pointless pen and paper Everquest role-playing game.
Many of these scary nerds hang out in the back room. Coincidently, much of the odor emanates from that place where only the bravest may dare to enter. I’ve only briefly glimpsed what dwelled within that section of the store before averting my eyes away in terror. The eldritch horrors were too much for my human mind to comprehend. What I do know now is that what I had seen was outside the bounds of normal reason. From the little I remember of the event, I saw many tables set up for hideous beasts to play games of various types, most involving dice of absurd geometry. I still wake up in a cold sweat thinking about it. Most of the time I’ve been in the store the screams of small children playing the latest Japanese card game echo throughout, often masking the cries for help issued by doomed pizza delivery men who have mistakenly stumbled into that dank pit. There will often be nerds at the game store that make me question my devotion to things like Star Wars and comic books. They are the untouchables that won’t ever know the ways of a woman without some severe social conditioning. I was trying to check out once, avoiding a mass of horrid nerdage when one of guys in line ahead of me purchased not one, but two unopened boxes of the X-Files card game. Who is this person? What dimension does he come from? How many other cave dwellers play the game with him enough to warrant purchasing all the X-Files cards in the world? Questions like these are better off without answers. If I can successfully keep at least three feet between myself and the troglodytes that haunt such places, I’ll live in ignorant bliss. However, if any of them talk to me I can’t be held accountable for my actions. - Paul - 01/24/06 |
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