Behind the scenes of the small press revolution

Today I'm staffing our little literary outpost in Sacramento (read: bookstore), covering for my wife who is home with our sick little girl. I'm usually here a couple of hours a day, 4-6 covering the closing shift. Since I work an 8 to 4 job as well, I rationalize that this two hour slot is time to do Poems-For-All production. (Hell, if I were my employee, I would have fired my slacker ass by now.) I amazed and overwhelmed by how much by-product this "little" project creates. Mail, answered and unanswered. Piles of sheets of poems ready to be cut; little piles of cut covers, seperatated from their intended content pages (called "guts" in small press parlance) and looking very much like surreal business cards. As a chronic hoarder, and someone with a sense that all this stuff related to this three-year long literary effort should be, somehow, somewhere, archived, I keep everything. It's nuts. Ask my wife. And its in boxes all over the place. Our mega-sell-your-soul-to-Xerox color printer is out of ink as of yesterday, making me realize just how much we do on that thing, within PFA and beyond. Print, print print. About 45% of my daily activity. Except today, when, pining for magenta ink, and customers to buy books, I type here, clear shelves in the back, and use a pitchfork and shovel to move one SOC (Stack of Crap) from one location to another. Hey, its better than the day job. And word is in from the wife: go ahead and order that ink... Sweet Jesus I am in business again!