Official Pirate Business

One of the places that has inspired my appreciation for irony and absurdity is 826 Valencia - a writing center in the Mission District of my hometown of San Francisco. 826 was started by Dave Eggers, one of my favorite writers and literary philanthropists. 826 is a publishing house and also gives free writing workshops to high school students. It disseminates volunteers to San Francisco public schools to help children start newspapers, write books and explore the depths of vocabulary and sentence structure.

Perhaps the most intriguing part about 826, however, is the pirate store propped up to fit the zoning requirements of the commercial real estate space. The pirate store sells everything a traditional pirate would want - a glass eye, message in a bottle, scoop your own lard, peg legs, dice, pirate booty, eye patches, dice, and these fantastic pirate signs that are scattered all over the store:

I visit 826 every time I’m home in San Francisco - there is always something new to catch my eye and make me laugh at the pure ridiculousness of it all. The beauty of the store is found in the nonsensical details - like the fish theater - a small room closed off by a velvet curtain, with seats for two, a large fish tank and signs detailing the world Karl, the puffer fish. I like to buy gifts from this pirate store to utterly confuse my friends and secretly hope they find the strange pirate humor as amusing as I do. The store certainly stirs up your creative vibrations and imaginative sense of humor - and it makes every ridiculous pirate prop purchase worthwhile because it helps support the stores mission: children’s literacy.