big box/litter box

Cat hair is never charming.

Doesn't that go without saying?

Having lost a pissing contest to my last cat, Cinco, I'm no longer a full fledged Cat Person, but surely everyone but the old ladies with a house full of Tabbies would agree that, once detached from the cat, hair is something to be brushed off or sucked up-- and not something to be featured in a retail establishment as a Reason to Shop Here.

Thanks to the modern miracle and/or curse of preform concrete, a warren of big box stores and strip malls has been sprouting over acres that were once a nursery, and, un-ironically but hysterically, the county's tuberculosis sanitarium. First came the new grocery store, where I'm somehow a little too happy to pay a little too much for, well, pretty much everything, it's so nice and calm and non-crazy-making in there. And the food is better, too, I swear. I didn't think I'd give up the less expensive bag-it-yourself store, but apparently, I'm easy, and what's one chain over the other.

Anyway, while I have no use for the pet food, craft-y crap, and crappy furniture stores that are filling the intervening spaces, let alone the "Hair Saloon for Men," a moral dilemma lurks over in the far corner, under the temporary sign that reads Borders Books & Music, coming soon. If only it were a Barnes & Noble, I'd have no dilemma at all: that particular big book store leaves me cold. I walk in, I walk out, my dollars and debit card safe in my pocket. But my money just leaps out of my wallet at the Borders, just like at the good grocery store, the subliminal messages in the Muzak apparently calibrated just right.

That and the fact that I can find the books.

As opposed to the independent bookseller right up the street,a store that resembles its owner the way that some dogs do. Except that this owner has a cat, and a penchant for random piles. Or piles that seem random, even though they aren't. And cardboard boxes shoved under and above. It should make me feel at home, but it just makes me feel a little nuts. It's not a small space: there's plenty of room for it to be a perfectly lovely store, but it's not, and I kinda hate it, even though I wish I didn't.

And then there's the cat hair. To be fair, the hair's not everywhere, but to my mind, there shouldn't be any. On the cat, I guess, that's okay. It's quirky, it's cute. Oh, look, a cat. In a store. I get it. An independent's gotta do what an independent's gotta do, and aren't we lucky to have one? Well, yes. Theoretically. I suppose. I am glad it's here, or I'd like to be, in the same way I'm glad I can still go to Buhrmester's Paint instead of Lowe's. And I try, I do, stopping in when there's a book to be bought, giving up the discount that the big boxes would buy me off with because I would rather live in a town not completely overrun by corporations, and I'd like to support the little guy, even when she's a crazy cat lady. But when that Borders opens, man. I know it's the cat hair that's gonna do me in.