So I was out running errands this morning and while I was in one of the small-shop areas in west Duluth I decided to stop in at a little second-hand bookstore I've passed now and again. I was looking for a Bible, which they didn't have (mine's battered to heck and in storage anyway,) but as I walked towards the shop I thought, "heh, maybe they'll have Ember from the Sun." That being a pulpy light contemporary sci-fi novel (did I mention it was one of the inspirations for my Neanderthal gal? No, I didn't. Must've forgot. Well, it was, though not as much as the works I did mention.) It's not nearly as good as it could be, but it's not bad, and I liked it enough that I'd been kind of figuring I should buy it, having first read it in PDF format through...channels that are totally ethical and not illegal I swear.

Anyway, that notion took hold in my brain with the curious compulsion that my thoughts sometimes do, and I wandered over to where "Mark Canter" would be in the summer-reading section of the store. Gosh golly, there it was. Turned out the store didn't take cards and I hadn't brought my checkbook, so I had to stroll down to the gas station to use the ATM, but I figured that I probably wasn't going to find it for four bucks on Amazon, and I had a feeling that this was another in a loose string of weird browsing coincidences.

See, this isn't the first time this has happened to me. Last fall, while on vacation in Washington (state,) I wandered into a used game store one idle evening. "Heh," I thought, "maybe they'll have The Guardian Legend." They had it; I got it on the cheap. Before that, I've found records, books, and videos that I kind of knew I wanted but didn't go out intending to find and buy and never really expected to find sitting in a second-hand store in the first place. (And then one time I found Fish out of Water by Chris Squire, which I'd been wanting to buy for months...a couple weeks after I'd bought it on eBay. And Celebrate This Heartbeat by Randy Stonehill, same story. Oh well.)

None of these things are exactly True Rarities of which I have obtained the Sole Surviving Copy, but most of them aren't really mass-market hits with millions of copies littering the shelves of garage sales and thrift stores across the state. (Though if I ever develop a taste for Andy Williams, I'll be in business - I've hardly been to a sale or store that doesn't have half a dozen of his records.) And of course there have been any number of things I've wanted to buy but haven't coincidentally stumbled onto. Still, it's happened often enough that it kind of strikes me as odd. Maybe I have some sort of latent empathic bond with thrift stores.

Now if I could only figure out how to induce this kind of thing. Let's see, next time I go to the recycle center, I'll find an Amiga 4000...no, TI-990! Yeah, that's the ticket.