I don't like going to American Apparel. It makes me feel poor and un-"trendy." Their mannequins fill the glass window-displays next to the bus stop across the street from the used bookstore that has the cats in it and instead of doing the whole awkwardly-shuffle-wait-and-feign-checking-my-cellphone-and-pretend-to-read-my-book sometimes I'll (regretfully) go inside until the metro comes. This is always a mistake. There is so much spandex and neon, and they always put the nicest stuff upstairs so you have to stay longer; have to make the trek up there and in an unhurried-enough, time-consuming way so as to look "casual." There'll always be, like, one shirt I'm interested in, but it's always $40 or more. I'm not a "career-woman;" I don't have that big of (or rather: any) disposable income and so I'll say, "Fuck this shit, Goodwill works for me," and go back outside and resume not-making-eye-contact.
But I can see why Tao Lin would title a book Shoplifting from American Apparel. I can see why a person would do that. If I had the skills, I'd do it. Clearly I don't because I am constantly running out of money from not having it in the first place and from spending all that I do have on goods that could otherwise be stolen. Obviously, I am not a master in the art of petty theft because I am writing this instead of going to the nearest Barnes & Noble and slipping Tao Lin's novella into the secret-inside-pocket of my "dad jacket" that makes me kind of look like Daria. I regret having started-to-read Les Misérables at so young an age, as I fear it has instilled in me a great terror of getting caught wrong-doing by the authorities, and this makes the ability to truly shoplift a personal impossibility.
One time while at Barnes & Noble I wanted to buy Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You. I asked the info-desk man about it because none were on the shelf. He looked it up on his computer-monitor from the early-aughts and said that there were some in stock and led me back to where I had just come from. But I know my alphabet, and I know my way around a bookshelf, and even when this khaki-slack-donning man knelt down and scanned spine-to-spine, there were still no copies physically there. Apparently, going by what the man told me, a lot of Miranda July books went missing this way. I wonder about that sometimes, about what kind of "status" goes with being an author hip to the type of demographic that wants to read your work but doesn't want to pay for it; whether those "sales" still make the publisher money; whether this practice discourages book stores from carrying the kinds of books that I like to read.
I like Tao Lin a lot, though, so I pay for his books. But I still buy them used from amazon because I am cheap.
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