What happens here if you're not careful

In the early afternoon at work I drank too much coffee and it caused the library to lurch in a disquieting way every minute or two. I wandered around downstairs for so long trying to gather the strength to shelve a cart of books that one of my colleagues asked if they could give me directions somewhere.

"No." I said. "I'm just gathering strength to go shelve that cart of books." I pointed vaguely towards a distant cart in the long hallway that leads to the elevator. Then half of the library sort of dipped on me, and I felt woozy.

When I finally went upstairs the copy of The Ship of the Line by C. S. Forester, that I put in a featured place on an end cap, was still there, untouched, more than a week after the fact. There really is no accounting for taste. Seventeen Vince Flynn books had been checked out during that time.

This morning I saw on my blog that someone left a comment indicating that they were amused by an old post I wrote concerning paperclips. How on earth, I wondered, did they even find it? It's nice they liked it, but what I thought was: "It all ends in tears."

We come for the comedy and the poetry kills us. Or we come for the poetry and the comedy does.