What Nina said.

As of the last post, your humble narrator was conquering North America and being smug about it.

He even had the audacity to use the word 'conquering' when the verb should really be something closer to 'inspecting.' Or perhaps it was North America which was inspecting him. There was sex, drugs and a whole lot of Greyhound buses filled with crackheads and the occasional saint. There was Jews and stuffed crust pizzas and seemingly endless art galleries which your humble narrator stumbled through, feeling overwhelmed and mostly dumb and wishing all the while that his Art History-themed friends were there to slap him around a bit.

And then, after three plane rides and all the duty free alcohol my tired arms could carry, I collapsed back in my beloved New Zealand. A faction of the Mills clan met me at the airport; their smiles too wide to be taken sincerely. They kept up the facade all afternoon; the younger siblings clawing for presents, the older ones eyeing up the Duty Free. Exhausted, I caved in at about 9 o'clock and with one last bout of thank yous, they clutched their precious treasures to their chests and went about their various strands of their busy lives: school, sport, op shopping, breakups, Facebook.

And so your narrator, more humble than ever, found himself back to pre-Japan square one. And in typical square one style, he again began working at Unity Books; Wellington's premium independent bookshop and employ of Liberal Arts graduates. It is a wonderful, gleaming place. Like a gay bar, it's almost impossible to get anything done. But oh, if only gay bars were as full of rich pickings. "Pick me" the books whisper one by one as I begin my early morning rounds. "I'll keep you up all night and give you a good go again in the morning..." The fiction wall is particularly awful, especially during long, hot afternoons around the A to F section. The Faulkners and the Easton Ellises pant heavily, shelves apart. "ohhh, just the first paragraph" they moan. "We were maaaade for each other...." I swallow heavily and swing back into the Film & Music table which is an even bigger mistake. Big, glossy encyclopedias pledge life commitments, happy to sit submissively in my bookcase for decades, so long as I promise to pull them out for a bit of fun on the occasional rainy day. Most days, I leave the store exhausted, with my brow sweaty and my pants half undone.

At Unity, it is important to 'fit in.' This means having a favourite David Bowie album, and unless it's Low, it doesn't count. This means preferring cheap red wine to expensive white and using the phrase "Coetzee-esque" without batting an eyelid. It means reading The Lovely Bones ironically and rolling your eyes at anyone who buys Eckart Tolle. Being in a band helps, being an aspiring poet helps more. It's wonderful but frequently difficult to keep up; whether The Smiths are a valid band changes on an almost weekly basis. As a group, the Unity Staff with their quirks and passion for soap-opera-indie-kid lifestyles fall somewhere between Black Books and Empire Records. They wish.

Then there are the customers. Last week, an old man stamped his foot in a rage after discovering we didn't have any books about crop circles, furiously crying "what kind of book shop are you?" There was the frustrated housewife who couldn't find any kids books for her two year old with an extended reading level because none of the smart ones were 'pop up-ey enough'. It took all my all of strength not to yell at her "Margaret! Margaret!" I doubt she would have understood. My favourite customers are the Narnians. These are the middle aged men (in the closet, another literary pun, geddit?)with red faces who spend a good half an hour browsing the biography section, easing closer and closer to the Gay & Lesbian table as if by accident. Once finding themselves here, they glace quicky around and whip a paperback edition of erotic man tales (usually Up the Back Passage or Daddies) off the table before darting back to biography. They turn up at the counter ten minutes later, eyes averted, the offending text momentarily hidden under a small stack of Evelyn Waughs. I smile and flush everything quickly into a brown paper bag, forcefully mentioning the weather and watching the relief spill over their face. The other end of the scale is the nineteen year old boys in singlets and dyed blonde locks. They take a few fertive glances at the queer table and might even pick up a book or two, but they never make it to the counter, never able to meet the eyes of the knowing bookseller who stand behind it. Worry not my readers, they'll be back.

The sun sets across the bay, a glass of chardonnay sits beside me. Nick Lowe, Junior Boys and Lady Gaga crank it on the itunes. Life is good. The future is bright and the tepid wasteland of Urakawa is far behind. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a little alarm bell rings the word "future" over and over again. But that's for next week.