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The Paper Chase

This is a simple thing. I do not have a paperless office, I have an office covered in paper, and I'm running out of the stuff. Paper for the laser printers, and, even more importantly, the notebooks I use to keep track of the minutae (color builds, phone numbers, photo credits) which go into the making of each issue of our little magazine.

And envelopes. I'm out of the envelopes in which I mail sample copies of the magazine to contributors.

All of which is easy to solve, except that our family has a buy-local focus these days, and so I don't wish to drive to Wal-Mart; having the goods shipped in from Staples or Office Depot isn't better (though the quality probably is), but the simple fact is that there's no other place to get a reporter's notebook or a steno pad or a ream of good computer paper.

And so I'm writing on the back of a notebook. Recycling, which is fine up until the moment when I'm tired and hopelessly confused and can't figure out which end is up.

This is a simple thing. We wish to commit to buying locally, but the big box has driven the stationer out of business (his kids turned it into a comic book shop). We wish to commit to buying locally because it's better for the local economy in all sorts of ways. And because, yes, my in-laws own a couple local businesses, and the prospect of a Starbucks landing here, or of a large book section in the coming Super Wal-Mart, for which an entire hillside is being demolished and a babbling brook will doubtless be turned into a cesspool of runoff, all those things have a direct economic impact.

At some other point I'll trot out the statistics which argue for the necessity of buying locally. For now, please remember always to tip your bartender and to buy your music from local retail or mom and pop online ventures.

It's a hard world out there, and we shouldn't paper over the choices we make.

Something like that.

Posted by grant on May 24, 2007 11:22 AM | Permalink

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