When I start out a post, "I love books." I know exactly what is happening in your brain. You picture a leather chair, a wool throw, a roaring fire, and the type of person who likes the Sunday Times Crossword. You smell the library and maybe picture me reading Aristotle or Thomas Paine.

I do love books. BUT.

We're boarding a plane in I think Denver, but really all the airports are the same, and due to chronic lack of sleep and a generalized stress that comes with visiting family on the East Coast my memories of the entire trip are hazy. This could have happened in California or Denver or Chicago or Washington.

Some asshat in front of me wearing nice-ish clothes with a nice-ish haircut is carrying around Atlas Shrugged, and despite the presence of my impressionable children and the heavy security, I definitely want to start some shit with that guy.

Ayn Rand makes me fucking crazy. So crazy that I can't articulate my position. I just want to shove the person with the John Galt T-shirt really, really hard, and perhaps dislodge his head from between his two cheeks.

I stare at the ceiling for a while, and I pretend that he's reading it just to see what the enemy is thinking, which I did maybe 15 years ago. When I read that book--which is HUGE like phone book huge or bible huge--I was using public transportation and was extremely self-conscious about reading it. I imagined people staring at me and giving me angry looks. Probably because they were. No one ever said anything. Not like the Hindu who approached me and gave me his card when he noticed I was reading You Can't Go Home Again.*

ANYWAY. Fast forward to North Carolina. I'm in the Outer Banks in a beach house with my in-laws. I've been around my kids for too long. I need to get out of the house. I've finished my Zola and finished the new Dave Eggers 24 hours after I bought it, so I pull out the phone book and find a book store in Duck. Small and independent, just how I like it.

Browsing in a new bookstore without the children or anyone bothering me SOUNDS pretty blissful. But the first book I see is Free: The Future of Radical Price by Chris Anderson. I see red in about 1.5 seconds and pause to wonder why I can get so angry so quickly simply by viewing a book. But really, people, can you see where I'm coming from? I haven't read this book, because I might hit someone with it, but I've been following the arguments. It makes me crazy that someone who writes and knows the effort it takes would tell me that in the very near future people will want to read everything without paying for it. Mental note: this book is no longer free. It's $26.99 on Amazon.

I have to retreat from this section so that I can find the bliss I was expecting, but I get turned around what with all the sweaty tourists, and I find myself staring at an entire row of books authored by Glenn Beck. Do you realize how many books this man has written? Can you imagine how many times I was confronted with the smug face of Glenn Beck as he taunted me with titles like America's March to Socialism: Why we're one step closer to giant missile parades and Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government?

Unbearable. I see the words "Errol Morris" and "Philip Gourevitch" and grab The Ballad of Abu Ghraib like a life preserver. At the register, I stare at the young, college-age cashiers and look for signs that they are not your typical book store employees but part of the Palin Youth. But they look OK. They are uninterested in me, the middle-aged Californian with a pinched look of disgust on her face muttering hatefully under her breath.

* I have no idea why a Hindu would give me his card after noticing I was reading that book. I stopped reading that book shortly afterward because I just wasn't interested. So any of life's secrets that it was going to impart to me just didn't make it in.