Blank walls

No, this isn't evidence that the warehouse is haunted. I put in a few hours this evening, in the failing light of some dying fluorescent bulbs, taking down some crappy old shelving racks from the store and moving dozens of boxes of books and LP's. The result was a clear wall space, ten feet high and ten feet wide, where my buddy Kevin is going to build a massive floor-to-ceiling rack for our CD inventory.

The entire time I've been doing this, I've been using scrounged shelves - stuff I've picked up at yard sales, gotten along with a purchase, or just grabbed off the curb on garbage night, in a few cases. Great way to start out -- low overhead and all that -- but it's time to put in a little work on the infrastructure. To make this work, I have to be able to walk in and immediately put my hands on one piece of inventory among thousands, especially if it's something cheap. If I spend fifteen minutes looking for a $3 CD, I just cost myself money.

Walls of CDs, library shelving for books in the middle of the room, metal industrial-strength shelves in the back for computers and bulky items -- by fall, I'm hoping the warehouse looks like a place where grown-ups do business, not a hoarder's nightmare or the aftermath of a tornado.

I mean, if you think about it, this whole gig is about bringing order to chaos. You want item X, but you're not gonna drive across 700 miles of two-lane blacktop to find it sitting on a card table in a side yard of a falling-down house in the rural badlands where the rust belt meets Appalachia. I go out and get that one shiny thing out of the infinite maelstrom of crap out there, and pass it along to you. But I can't fully focus on exploring the chaos beyond my street when I'm bogged down by chaos inside my own walls. I earned some of that chaos, in some of the haphazard ways I got to where I am now, but things are stable and growing, and not cleaning it up at this point would just be madness.

And yeah, maybe some new lighting would help in there, while I'm at it.