Diary of the 2009 Christian Retail Show

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1729 - Dan and I leave the conference, our legs weary and laden with any swag we could poach.  Not wanting to encroach on the Gray’s evening, we stop at Dave and Buster’s.  We don’t even eat or drink.  We just play games.  We end up spending four and a half hours and a combined $60 dollars on a Japanese horse racing video game, where you breed your horse and train them to race against other people.  I cannot describe to you the shame of realizing how much of a waste that was.  It certainly drowned any regret I had over having a goatee.

Apart from their trivia game, I’m going to go on the record and say Dave and Buster’s is an abomination.  With the advent of home gaming devices, the state of arcade games is disgraceful.  You can download better games for free on an iPhone than you can play at an arcade.  To compensate for this, arcade game makers have gone for size.  There was a massive installation in this particular Dave and Buster’s, covered in camouflage netting, and it took up a solid 5% of the restaurant.  It was a game where you shot down planes and invading ships from a gun turret.  The graphics were not far removed from Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” video.  This game cost around $1 per play, though that’s obscured by D&B’s deliberately-hazy point system.

Unless Dan drags me to another one so he can earn more tickets in trivia, I will never go to a Dave and Buster’s again.  Nothing good can come of it.

2253 - I sleep far better than the night before.

TUESDAY, JULY 14th

0813 - Back at the convention.  Our final day is punctuated by meetings and passing business cards to marketing directors.  The one highlight, depending on how you look at it, was getting a signed copy of Old Satan What a Character (the actual print copy does not have a colon).  The author may have been insane.  I told him the book sounded similar to The Screwtape Letters, and he didn’t know what I was talking about.

1430 - We head out early, as we’ve heard The Kolache Factory is great for cheap eats.  We’ve never had kolache, but we both liked meat wrapped in carbohydrates.

It turns out kolache is just a bland dinner roll with some scalding meat inside, like a fancier version of a Hot Pocket.  They cost around $2 each, and are not nearly worth it.

1516 - We consider driving north to the Odell’s Brewery in Fort Collins, but opt for a shorter trip instead.  Thornton, Colorado, is home to Daveco Liquors, the largest liquor store in the worl, and that was something both Dan and I had to see.

And Daveco Liquors is a site to behold.  It’s about the size of a Costco, and it’s wall-to-wall booze.  It had the best beer selection I’d ever seen.  I bought a $25 dollar bottle of Odell’s Woodcut #2 Oak-Aged Golden Ale.  I poured a small glass for everyone back at the Gray’s, and we all visibly recoiled at the first taste, which seemed more scotch than beer.  I had the rest to myself after that, and it grew on me.  Maybe my tastebuds were seared, but it was the best beer I’ve had this year.

This glorious beer cooler extends around that corner ahead.

1730 - I talked a big game about grilling the Grays some steaks seasoned with just butter, salt and pepper, but they turned out boring as cardboard.  It wasn’t until the drive home I realized I didn’t put any salt or pepper on them.  I blame the oak-aged golden ale.  That night, Tim talks a lot of smack about our upcoming fantasy football season, which Dan enjoys greatly, because Dan talks a lot of smack about everything.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 15TH

0738 - We say goodbye to the Grays and begin the long journey home.

For the return route, we opt for I-70, which cuts west through the Rockies to Grand Junction and Utah.  Driving through the Rockies feels like a giant version of Thunder Mountain at Disneyland, then there are times when you feel like you’re on top of North America.  Most of those towns, we’d heard of: Vail, Breckenridge, and Eagle.  The third one, we couldn’t remember why we knew it, because it seemed pretty podunk.  This was why.

Then the elevation drops out a bit into Rifle and Grand Junction, then eastern Utah is a burnt out moonscape.

Once you turn south onto Highway 191, things change.  That patch, all the way down to Flagstaff, has to be one of the best roads in the world.  191 runs right in between Arches and Canyonlands National Parks (though the former is more visible).

1320 - We stopped at McDonald’s in Moab because we didn’t want to lose any time.  In the McDonald’s was one of those most frightening-looking toddlers I’ve ever seen.  I thought I took a picture of him over Dan’s shoulder, but Dan now informs me the photo only captured his shirt and part of the table.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the kid altered the angle of the aperture with his mind.  I hope I never run into him again.

In related news, Big Macs are still delicious.

After that, we rounded one bend, red boulders all around, and saw this glaring white paint splattered across a cliff: HOLE N” THE ROCK.  I guess it’s human nature to look at a God’s gorgeous creation and think, “You know what would make this cliff even better?  Giant, white painted block letters, and a trailer selling worthless trash.”

Nothing says "class" like trailers, painted sandstone, and Mr. Potatohead.

Considering the scenery in eastern Utah, I’m somewhat surprised by the lack of cool small towns.  Moab is about the closest it gets.  One one hand, it is Utah.  On the other, it’s some of the most beautiful scenery and a Nauvoo for outdoor enthusiasts.

1504 - Somewhere south of Blanding, Dan and I get into a lengthy and heated discussion regarding whether the Four Corners monument is arbitrary or not.  Dan has been there, I have not, and he claims it’s out in the middle of nowhere, and it sucks, and only idiots would think it was cool.  I point out it’s the only place in the United States where you can stand in four states, and therefore it does have some value, even if the value is man-made.  Dan also claims the monument isn’t even properly placed, which I later discover is a load of crap.

Crappy monument or not, here’s the litmus test: if you had the choice of being teleported for 10 seconds onto the Four Corners monument, or onto another patch of random high desert 50 feet away from the monument, which would you choose?

We each angrily stew for a while after that.  These are the sorts of things you talk about after 24 hours of driving and a Christian book conference.

1529 - If you were to drive through an evaporated ocean, it would look like Monument Valley.  Monument Valley is vast and iconographic.  It’s the land you think of when you think of the Southwest.  It’s also, to me, a bit terrifying, because it’s so big and barren and it doesn’t look like you’ll ever get out.  One minute, the freeway is dropping down into a steep-cliffed valley, and the next there’s just miles and miles of red stone, with the occasional monolithic mesa.  At one point, I think, I’ve been here before, but then realized I was just recalling the running scene in Forrest Gump.  The desolation seems to last forever.  We also almost die when a car is making dangerous passes coming the other way.

Much less scary in photos.

1750 - Monument Valley spills into Kayenta, Arizona.  I get the feeling I do every time I’m in a place like this, like when I cross into Oregon from California or Idaho, like everything is more familiar, even though I’ve never been on this road in my life, and I’m actually, technically, in another country.

We’re barreling down the freeway, and there’s this burnt out concrete oil company building on the left, out in the middle of nowhere.  It’s covered with graffiti, and as we pass by I turn to Dan:

“Who’s that graffiti artist?  The famous one?”

“Banksy?” he asks.

“Yeah.  I think there was a Banksy painting on that building,” we consider going back, but we want to keep forward momentum.

Throughout Navajo Nation, there are lean-tos on the side of the road for selling trinkets to tourists.  It’s a weekday, so these are empty.  We fly by another one, and we see those familiar black figures painted on the side.

“Another one!” Dan says.  But we don’t stop this time, either.  A few hours later, the regret hits us.  We drove by Banksy artwork, and we didn’t take pictures.  Maybe we were the first people to see them, and we drove right by.

I found them on an internet search the next day, and it’s doubtful they were actually Banksy’s work.  You can view them here.  We spotted the fourth one down, but the one on the oil building isn’t shown.  If anyone is driving through those areas again, I’d love to have photos.

The rest of the drive is uneventful as we climb into Flagstaff and dive back down toward Phoenix.  We listen to episodes of CBC’s Wiretap with Jonathan Goldstein.  When we get in, it’s late, and Dan considers staying for the night, but decides he wants to see his kids in the morning, so he finishes off the last two hours to Tucson alone.  Except it’s more than two hours, because Dan gets caught in two sandstorms, where he has to pull off the freeway because he can’t see two feet in front of him, and hope he’s not suddenly plowed into from behind. He finally got home around 1 am on Thursday.

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As far as loving my fellow believers, I can’t say this trip affected things one way or another.  Booksellers and publishers aren’t exactly emblematic of the American church as a whole, and despite much of the apparent reactionary anger from Evangelicals toward a new American political foundation, the conference seemed fairly apolitical.  Sure, there was the obligatory Oliver North release, and there were a smattering of books offering tips on how to survive the end-times, but overall, for the publishers who will survive this mess, there was a muted optimism.

Arm yourself with The Truth...then kick some Muslim ass.

Like mainstream retail and publishing, I think everyone is waiting for the moment the ground opens up, and we’re in a new world with established rules.  Internet sales and marketing is still a frontier where the boundaries haven’t quite been established.  On one hand, internet advertising is the only advertising where you can tell exactly how many people are viewing your ad (from impressions), how effective your ad is (from clicks), and where your buyers are coming from.  On the other, very few people seem sure how to actually make money.

Christian retail’s struggles may be linked to the raucous town hall meetings, the anger over socialism and health care.  Ironically, it’s the conservative Christians being left behind in a changing landscape.  To many of them, the internet is unsubstantiated chain emails about how the government will soon have access to individual bank accounts.  Everything’s moving so fast, and it’s understandably unnerving.

Those of us under 40 are used to the pace, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t alarm us.  We’ve reached a point where we’re just jockeying for position.  In the end, I want to figure out how to operate in this new landscape, both for this site and for my well-being, but that doesn’t mean I should do so without trepidation.  Many of us are like passengers on a train, only we don’t know where it’s going.  We’re planning for what’s ahead, but we’re not considering whether we should even be on the train in the first place.

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For further reading, check out Dan’s perspective on the event.

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