These are INCREDIBLE!!! This is why I will never give up hope that Amazon and all these online bookstores will start to come back to Earth and allow customers to once again, feel the need to get out of their houses and venture down to their local bookstore. Yes, it would be nice to have one of these in my neck of the woods for sure. But all bookstores offer something you can't get online: Human interaction and amazing architecture.

The closet thing we have to something like this is Point Loma's Bookstar. Rather than tear down the Point Loma Movie Theater, a place where I saw such classics as E.T., Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies (which by the way was the last movie I saw there). They kept the interior and exterior of the building pretty much intact with all the ornate designs on the ceiling. But it's still nowhere near those in the Top 20. Not even close.

I use to ride my bike to Bookstar, Tower Video, Tower Records. I had legs that could kill terrorists without even trying.

So, I just drove over to Point Loma Bookstar today. Its been at least 5 years since I last walked inside. It seems different, but the same. I guess it's just been so damn long that I kinda felt out of place....and yet it felt like home away from home. My main objective to going there was to grab the latest issue of Playboy with Raquel Pomplun as the new Playmate of the Year. Naturally I grabbed the remaining copies. Then I headed over to Borders. I knew they went belly up a while back, but I figured that there would be a replacement bookstore. Nope. It's now Trader Joe's.

Ack!

So, I went over to see if Barnes and Noble was still around, which is a few blocks north of 'Borders'. They are still around. Grabbed the last copy of the Playboy issue they had on the rack. I feel like I have been driving all day today, which is something that I just don't do with regularity anymore. I hate driving. I'm glad that Bookstar is still around. It's nice knowing it's there when I need it.

Playboy = Disney. It's so tame. Now if it were something extreme, then yeah, it could make people a bit self conscious about getting it.

I hate not having a local bookstore. The library is fine for what it is. It's just not the same as going to a legit bookstore with magazines from other countries and whatnot. So, I have to drive over to Bookstar for that fix and getting there isn't always worth the time and effort. My life would be so much simpler if they just opened a f*cking bookstore down the block.

The last 'legit' bookstore we had here was Crown Books. It was in one location for a long time and then it actually moved a few blocks east, closer to my house where it stayed in business for a nice long run before finally closing. That was something like well over 15-20 years ago. Since then.....nothing.

I forgot to mention that I did hit Warwick's Bookstore over in La Jolla a few weeks ago when I was picking up my copies of Paul Stanley's A Life Exposed. The book store is right smack in the heart of 'Snobville'. It's for the elite that like to flaunt their weatlh. Just think of Rodeo Drive for San Diego. Anyway, Warrick's is a really nice book store....but it's tiny as f*ck. And for something that wants to pride itself on having a wide selection, they didn't have anything that I was interested in checking out on that particular day (besides Paul's book that is).

I have... well, I have Parnassus, which is the locally-owned one that Ann Patchett founded but it's limited selection, small... it's nice but I never FIND anything there, you know?  So it's that and Books-A-Million, which I do like and usually pick up stuff, but I miss the options.  I miss Davis-Kidd like a mother because that was TWO huge stories of books and the biggest magazine section I'd ever seen, and we used to have Borders which was also pretty good.  But I miss having the OPTIONS.  Those stores were different enough, somehow, and far apart that if you wanted to go to a bookstore, you could go to one and be subjected to a different selection.