So, provided that you hold assertions A and B to be true, where A and B equal
a) you want to play hobby games
b) you want to buy them from a person
your travails still aren't at an end, because the sort of person who runs a game store probably isn't the sort of person who should be running a game store. Let us speak with specificity: I don't know anybody who hasn't fantasized about owning a shop utterly devoted to their personal mania. That's pretty normal, and why wouldn't you want to do that, safely ensconced within your own brainpan. People very rarely go on to convert this fantasy into something with a street address. That requires something extra, and this mutant quality is not always concomitant with expressions of basic humanity.
The strangest manifestation of this property is the bizarre tendency to judge or even abuse the customer, as one sees at "Bernie's," but it's by no means rare. It happens at the vast majority of hobby shops I go to, and it's pure mystery. It'd be like a zookeeper who looks down on people for liking animals. Actually, no - it's the drug dealer, who detests and abhors the addict. They have what you want, slash need, and such power differentials rarely come to our people. Put in this context, it almost makes sense.
It may surprise you, or maybe it won't, but when I don't have a keyboard or a microphone in front of me I am fairly shy. If someone approaches me, I can speak to them, but I don't make it a point to bother other people. "I lead a rich internal life" is the way I typically explain it to myself when drinking alone, but the fact of the matter is that, yeah. I need your help. I would never say that the customer is always right, but it's tautology that the customer is a customer, and unless the carpet of your store is slick and dark with petroleum leaking from some fissure in the earth, those motherfuckers coming in the door are the reason you have a door in the first fucking place.
(CW)TB out.
