Discomfort

Objectively speaking, it may be a good thing, but it creeps me out that he likes me so much. I'm not your friend! I want to say. Stop being friendly! Don't ask me politely to do things if you're going to bark orders at people whom I like! But would I rather he made me as miserable as he makes some of you? These are uncomfortable sorts of questions to ask yourself.

But of course, all of this is what I find terribly fascinating, and why I find it so damned entertaining to write about. All the weird, unfathomable stuff that somebody like that brings out in ordinary people like us. We're not used to it; we don't know how to deal with it. My intuition, much of the time, is that the world is full of people like that and we just haven't had to deal with them this closely before, either because we're young, or like me, have worked in bookstores our whole lives. Because I'm learning that it's really really easy for us to conclude that he's something Horrifyingly Unique, a Perfect Monster, a sociopath. And that's a bit dramatic, isn't it? A bit "over the top," as the District Manager might say?

Then, a certain amount of the rest of the time, I think oh my god it's all true. Because this feeling is pretty universal, isn't it? I've seen it growing in the past month or two, as everybody's private disgust has slowly combined into a critical mass. It can't just be mass hysteria, can it? It can't just be Resentment of Change, or the Clash of Cultures between a corporate retail guy and some wacky bohemian bookstore types. This person is uniquely repellent, and everyone knows it after five minutes. Maybe there really is something seriously wrong, something we're all picking up on.

Because it's not like he really likes me, right? He's aware that I'm good and could quit if I wanted, and he knows how to approximate human emotion in my presence, right? I have to think that.