Time is not sequential

A man comes up to me at the front desk. He has three items out. He wants to know when they're due. He needs more time with them. I renew them. I print out a receipt with a list of his items and their new due dates. I hand him the receipt. I tell him the new due date. Perhaps there is a short exchange concerning the lovely weather we are having.

"Can you print me out a receipt with the new due dates?" He inquires politely.

"Yes." I say. "I will need to go back in time and give it to you in the past."

He looks into his hand and finds the receipt there already. He laughs. He thanks me.

I am the master of all time.

Flow and sugar

As time passes I find that I am more and more drawn to things that are a little more difficult. Don't get me wrong, I am not so evolved that I'm going to sit around half the day reading James Joyce and Virginia Woolf before heading off to do laps across the Mississippi. It's just that I have increasingly noticed that some things go down too easy, so easy that they don't register and end up seeming meaningless.

Look at this blog for instance. I could just write a blog. It would be very easy for me, but it would feel like nothing, weightless. What is that, writing a blog? So I made it a daily blog. That gets us almost there, but still feels a bit light. So I write the greatest blog on the Internet. That has heft and an aching heart. It is just the right sort of challenge. I can feel it as I do it, but it's still easier than writing a novel or learning Dutch.

Maybe, like so many things, this is best expressed in coffee. Every rare once in awhile I make a cold press with a lot of maple syrup, or a chocolatey mocha, or maybe I buy some latte somewhere full of caramels and vanillas and white chocolates. I cannot say any of these aren't delicious. I take one sip, and, if it's a well enough made drink, my mouth fills with a sweet pleasure. Yes, certainly, I like it. So I go to take a second sip only to find that I have already consumed the whole beverage.

What happened?

Let's call it the amnesia of easy pleasure. Yes it was good, but without effort. Without at least a small demand of engagement on my part my mind wandered off from the whole experience. Something like my usual cappuccino though is different. Warm, bitter, creamy, complicated, I have to listen for it. I have to be with it to drink it. I have to consider each sip. Is it ecstasy? Yes, of course, but an ecstasy of presence, attention, motivation, feel, and time. Taste is just a part of it. Cappuccino causes me to be there.

Recently I heard someone defining "flow" for musicians as playing at the outer edge of one's ability, but still in command. So it is for me with coffee, or blogging too, really. Any further out than their inherent challenges, and it is too bitter, a struggle, and part of the effort becomes just working back to a basic enjoyment. Closer in than their inherent challenges, sweetened, and my mind wanders and drifts away at the touch of any wind, ephemeral. I am blown over the surface of life. But with flow, in the modest consciousness demands of my chosen endeavors, time blossoms out beneath me, and I can no longer hold onto anything else. So I fall. I fall into one thing that is all I can hold, no more, no less. 

And nothingness disappears.

Music at large

I don't ask for much. I merely wish the the radio was as good as the random music playing in my city.

In a dedicated fit of anachronism I listen to the radio when I drive alone in my car. It is transmitted by radio waves and received by my car radio. My car radio includes no CD player, no Internet radio, no 8-track tape player, and no 78 rpm wind up record player with a giant brass speaker. I am left at the whim of the air waves. I see no point in addressing the talk radio portion of the equation. It's as expected, a long, bitter hunt for transcendence that comes just tauntingly often enough, usually via Public Radio, to keep one going on its drip feed. But music, music, what could be easier than music?

I can walk into any coffee shop in this city and there is an astonishingly high chance, let's put it into the 90 percentile, that there will be something truly interesting playing quietly into the space. My god, I was in a Walgreen's a few days ago that played half lost pop semi classics of the early to mid sixties (Cathy's Clown!) that was entirely fascinating. This afternoon I write from an ice cream parlor/Cafe and in the time I've been here, through 10 or 15 songs (off the beaten path Sinatra and Louis Armstrong) there has not been a one that hasn't been worth a close listen. But, importantly, neither has there been one song that I've heard too often.

On the contrary, any time of the day or night it is within the realm of possibility that I could rotate through the entirety of my radio dial and find... nothing. Nothing!

What's going on?

I don't want to go into it. It's all too bitter, and I don't want to disabuse you of your love for the world today. Go ahead, love the world.

But I will say this: there are very few jobs easier than disc jockey, and when you have a very easy job, like librarian, or President of the United States, or disc jockey, it is incumbent upon you to step it up, take chances, defy management, and risk everything. Without that you're just stealing. Yes, you are stealing all the joy, the life of the music that is the birthright of us all, but perhaps more importantly, you are stealing the very dream at the heart of your job, just so you can keep the image of it.

Illumination

On Sunday we talk. Do I always have to remind you of that? I don't know. For the time being I seem to be more comfortable with that reminder. It sets the space. And I get a little worried that a third of the way through my Sunday post you'll get all "Wait, when is he going to start illuminating the universe?!"

I only illuminate the universe Monday through Saturday.

I know you know all this, but I am also aware that in the hurly burly of life six days is a long time, long enough to be lulled into a deep rhythm.

Universe is illuminated
Universe is illuminated
Universe is illuminated
Universe is illuminated
Universe is illuminated
Universe is illuminated
Wait, wait! Why isn't the universe being illuminated?
Is my computer broken?
Am I missing something???!!!
How do I contact the blog author in an emergency?!!!!
Is the world ending?

No emergency. It's just Sunday.

So I say it. I don't want to cause anyone distress.

Living in the fiction stacks

I was shelving out there in the mystery section, except I might have been reading over the cover of a mystery set in ancient Rome, thinking about taking it home to read, or making just an ever so quick note about an upcoming blog post. But, whatever. Cumulatively I was shelving. My two hour stint was moving along nicely when a patron came around the corner into my aisle. I moved myself and my cart as far to one side as possible for her to pass, but she wanted me to pass.

"Which way are you going?" She asked. "Are you coming through, or going back?"

"Oh, no." I explained. "I live here."

The bad good Samaritan

A patron approaches one of my colleagues.

"Can you page someone?"

To my mind this is a bad start. There is something faintly suspicious about people who start by discussing solutions and then work backwards to the problem. There's something controlling about it. "Can you waive fines?", "Do you know CPR?", "Are you authorized to call 911 in the event of a shooter in the library?". The natural starting point seems to be elsewhere in all these discussions.

"Yes, I can page over the intercom system." My colleague says politely. "Is there a problem?"

"Here." Says the patron, handing over a slip of paper. "This is the make and model of a car in the parking lot." We continue backwards. We have not yet reached any pertinent information. We merely circle.

"Is there some kind of issue with this car?" My eminently patient co-worker inquires.

"The driver's side door is open." The Samaritan says. Even now, as we get to the crux of the matter it is reluctant, incomplete, and forces my co-worker to ask for more.

"Wide open?" She asks. "Broken into? Torn off?"

The patron clicks her tongue. "The door did not close properly."

"So, like there's a seat belt in the way, and it's not flush?"

"Yes. It's closed, but not fully closed."

I take this to be a case of the bad good Samaritan. These are people who so love the feeling of being good and doing good that they make opportunities for themselves to be helpful where none really exist. They do good deeds that help no one and only serve to inconvenience others.

"Hello." A patron says to me.

I look inquiringly, with my most helpful expression.

"Do you have a lost and found?"

"Yes we do." I say brightly. Easy question.

"I found this on the floor." The patron says earnestly. "I think someone might be missing it. I don't know if you can track the person down from this, but perhaps you can put it in your lost and found." The patron hands me a small slip of paper and walks off, the Lone Ranger, good deed done.

I look at the paper. It is a Target receipt, two months old, for toothpaste and cotton balls. Cash paid.

Aaarrgh! If only that patron hadn't handled it so much we might be able to get a decent set of fingerprints off of it and track the owner down! They must be worried sick.

Oh well, I guess they were trying to be helpful.

Did my colleague, I imagine you are wondering, announce over the intercom system about the car with the door slightly ajar? No, she went out to check on the car and leaned on the door to fully close it. That's why they pay her the big bucks. 

And me? With the receipt? Did I carefully file it in the lost and found?

No. I threw it away. That's why they pay me the big bucks too.

I'll take the rain

I have been watching, day after day, from the sealed up eighth floor of a large building, rain fall. Grey, drenching, sheeting, swirling, constant, raining, rain. And I have been watching it with absolute, unmitigated joy. I have watched my beloved Minnehaha Creek try vainly to flood under it. I have watched wet ducks and geese live unperturbed in it. I have watched it gloss the whole world. And all along I have rejoiced. I have loved every second of the rain.

Every half hour, though, some new person has come into my room and complained about the rain, complained like we are all naturally in on this suffering against the rain's assault.

We aren't.

Usually I defend the rain once. The complainer usually trots out farmers, danger, inconvenience, and floods. I then just wait for them to be finished so I can go back to watching the rain fall and fall and fall into the creek and the parking lots and the distant gray forever.
 
Today, for the first time in awhile, I had to leave my rain watching aerie and muck about in the wide world. The rain fell and blew onto me. As I drove, my car vainly strove to  wipe its eyes fast enough for me to see. On foot I ran across parking lots. I dashed between overhangs. I was splashed by gusting winds.

I could start to see where all these complaints were coming from. This was the rain they were talking about. I could, I suppose, if I had to, complain about this rain.

But I didn't have to. And I didn't want to. And I won't. This is my 8th floor rain, dear to my heart. I remembered. I looked into the dark sky.  I relaxed. I walked wide open, and I got wet. Very wet. And I let it rain.

Newspaper days

In some strange way I recognize that much of my relationship to the Internet is no different than how I related to the Newspapers of my youth. Newspapers were and are so comparatively limited, and the Internet is so vast, one might not think there would be so much commonality between them, but truly there is. What do I do on the Internet? I check the few things that are important to me, the sites that report on my hobbies for instance, whatever they are at the moment, I check headlines, weather, a cartoonist, a writer. It can all be done in 15 minutes and is a near mimic of my Newspaper habits of old.
 

How did I read the paper? A glance at headlines, a look at weather, when I was younger box scores were poured over, but always Peanuts, Doonesbury, then later, Bloom County for awhile, Calvin and Hobbes. If Miss Manners had a column that day it was a good day in the Newspaper. Maybe the opinion page, but mostly I only dug deeper if I had nothing else to do, wanted to draw out the morning, the time.

What difference is the Internet to me? Sure, it's wider, it folds in more resources; mail, reference library, TV, and it's everywhere, but it doesn't really seem to update any quicker than a Newspaper. In the end, if I really want to, I could be in and out of the Internet in the same way in those same 15 minutes.

I don't mean for this to be a big griping post about the Internet, though I have written my share and will no doubt write more, nor is this a great nostalgia for the Newspapers of my youth. Perhaps what it's really about is how things change slower than we think, or how things can look so very different on the outside, but you lift up the hood and the engine driving it all is astonishingly similar to all the ones before.

I would love for the Internet to be so packed with my favorite content that I could not hope to exhaust it before it is all new again. There would be 200 great daily comics. There would be people as clear and funny and fun as Miss Manners spilling out of the woodwork. The weather report would be inexhaustible, and columnists, my people, known on the Internet as bloggers, would be so interesting that I could not bear to miss a single day of them despite not having nearly the time for them all.

But it is curiously not so. I find no cartoonist the equivalent of Schultz or Breathed, though there are a few I like quite a bit, albeit many of them post only weekly. If I am flexible I can find one or two funny enough Miss Manners equivalents. The weather is the same thing I can find to this day on the Newspaper weather page, no deeper, just, uselessly I can find 20 versions of the same thing in different graphics. And bloggers, the daily columnists of the Internet, I am a little embarrassed to say that in a year of looking I have not found a one. Except me. Who I read every day. It doesn't take long.

Milk in coffee

In the great Nero Wolfe mysteries, by Rex Stout, our tough guy, competent, clown of a narrator, Archie, is a big milk drinker. It is one the many charming affectations and eccentricities that rhythmically, naturally, and charmingly punctuate the series. There is our tough, savvy, New York City private dick drinking the beverage of babies and small children. Milk. 

I haven't had a glass of plain milk in years. My one great drink obsession is coffee. And coffee is a quintessentially adult beverage. Classic, tough, savvy private eyes normally enough drink coffee like it's water, or scotch. But underpinning my coffee drinking, essential to it, expressing its variations and quality, is milk.

I love milk.

Setting aside the absolute coffee purist, the black coffee drinker, the espresso, straight up, thrown back drinker, and I am happy to set them aside because I am not them, I believe a great coffee drink rests on three legs: the bean, the brew, and the milk. And I am beginning to believe the greatest of these is milk, simple milk.

I have lately much been out of my native element, forced by the exigencies of life to seek dreadful coffee in waiting rooms and nefarious coffee kiosks. I have uniformly found that this poor coffee is made palatable or, alternately, undrinkable by the nature of the milk that can be added. With non dairy creamer it is utterly undrinkable and I will go without no matter what the cost. With a couple of those little hyper pasteurized plastic containers of half and half it is distinctly unsatisfactory, yet drinkable to the desperate, which of course I am. But find me a pint of whole milk somewhere, maybe rBGH free if I'm lucky, throw in a 50 percent portion to that lame cup of coffee and... it's pretty good.

In your big city, or the one nearest to you, you should these days be able to find at least one truly great cafe. Look behind the counter. A dollar will get you ten that their milk comes in glass, is organic, from grass fed cows.

My dream coffee? The best I've ever had has been in the city, but for my dream coffee I believe we'd have to go pastoral, out where the cows spend languid days grazing on a lush variety of grasses. There's still a dew on the flowers, a small chill in the morning air, birds. We pull my espresso, same coffee, same machines, but for the milk, ah for the milk. We walk over to the happy cow and milk right into the pitcher. We steam it up. Creamy. Not too warm. It goes gently into the crema, the espresso. Cappuccino. Heaven.

Conformity

Not so many years ago, that is, in the grand scheme of things, the people of my library community decided to throw twenty million dollars or so into building a new library to replace our old one. Technically speaking it was a remodel, but one so dramatic that it is fair to look at it as a new building.

I had something close to a front row seat at the design of our new library. Watching all the interesting ideas, the fancy ideas, and the Very Useful But Expensive ideas get cut away left me initially feeling that our new library, with a 50 percent increase or so in budget, could have really been something.

But it couldn't. It wouldn't. It wasn't.

First of all, money is always like that, it always says that the next level, the next add on, the next amount spent is what it takes to get that which is really desirable. And there is always another level.

Second of all, we were building a generic, of its time, cookie cutter, modern, medium-large library. That might make it sound worse than it is. And it is and it isn't worse than it is. When my new library was built it looked fresh and slick, modern and inventive. Indeed, it's still new enough that it still does look that way. It's white and minimal, clean and faintly techno. Its pallet is formed by accent colors that are bravely contemporary, that is, if corporate design and the color of Target store products can be said to be contemporary, which, sadly, I suppose they can. In five years it will look dated. Maybe in ten we can paint it over to chase past glories. It is also a library profoundly similar to every library of its type across the country. It's as if hundreds of architectural firms are pretending to diligently and inventively work on all these exciting new library projects, only to secretly send off the basic parameters to one wildly overworked and unhealthy architect working in a basement somewhere in Toledo, Ohio who draws up the same basic plan for every single one of these libraries.

And everyone is happy. Sort of.

The more I looked at libraries across North America the more I saw of this not entirely unpleasing slavish conformity, but it was an encounter with a beautiful coffee table book of great libraries of the world that really brought it all home to me.

I think the book is called The Library: A World History, and I saw it come through new when I was processing requested items. I immediately ceased all my work in order to familiarize myself with this new book, feeling, as I do, that it is very, very, very important that I know what's on every last page of every book in our library. Just, you know, in case it comes up with the patrons. The book is basically made of beautiful photo essays of some of the most glorious and grand libraries in the world, old (mostly) and new (an equally interesting few). So, anyway, I am paging through this book, enchanted, when suddenly, there, in a giant two-page spread, is a picture of my library!

My jaw dropped.

No, really, it did. I gaped. Of course, it took only a second or two to see that it wasn't really my library. The scale was wrong. The library in the picture was twice as big as my library. And, naturally then, it was full of minor differences; shelving, content, placement, thousands of details. Yes, actually it was very different, but the basic design, layout, and aesthetic were amazingly similar. My library, or rather its prototype, its platonic ideal, it turns out, is in Berlin, Germany! It was built in 1979, thirty five years ago! My super up to date contemporary library is practically plagiarized from a 35 year old building.

I am not in the place to floridly expand today's post into a vast essay on the nature of architecture, culture, genius, and provincial but not too provincial libraries. For my own happiness I strive to keep things here in appetizer sized portions, joke size, poetry size, rock song size, Mona Lisa size.

So I will cut to the chase.

You have heard the rhetoric about creativity, its celebration, its advocates, the grand tales of its history. We tell our collective story as a story of creativity. But that's just dreaming. Down here on the ground we are in love with conformity. It rules everything we see and touch and do. It is the roast and the potatoes, the mead and the vegetables, the bread and the cheese, everything laid out at the banquet.

Creativity is just a spice.

Full of falcons

The Sunday post. Draw up a chair. Well, no, I know they are too enormous to move. Everything is over-sized here in this room, I have even seen falcons come flying through, but the plush, eight foot tall golden chairs are comfortable just as they are, and the immensity of the stone walls and stone floors are made enchanting by the great roaring fire in the hearth, by the vast rugs that soften everything. Don't look too long though into those carpets. I think they are haunted, their beauty is endless, and you will be lost in them forever. You will start to see that the red is not red, and you will go deeper and deeper and not come back. This will not do because we are toasting fresh bread for you in the fireplace. We have butter. Listen to the sound of the rain falling. Yes, it is perfect here. Perfect.

Unfortunately there is nothing wrong with that.

Front desk notes

Our library front desk is peopled by two workers. Today, one of these teams cleverly left notes on the computer desktop for the next shift. I think I am three shifts later from these notes, but there they are. I really do like the idea and so am providing my own desk notes, little helpful hints for the seven to nine shift that follows us. But I thought you might find them of interest too.


Notes from the five O'clock crew.

Good evening seven o'clock crew!

It is likely a man with a ponytail will be by to ask if he is being followed. Don't concernedly ask about it. Just say "No, but I will keep a careful eye out."  Expect eleven or twelve visits in your two hour shift.

Trending upward:

Patrons checking out DVDs and telling us how they feel about each actor in the movie.
Patrons who couldn't figure out how to return their books and so want to give them to you.
Patrons who you think should be on disabled status but you can't bring yourself to do it because you think they'd be horrified if they found out.

Trending downward:

Patrons who have proper ID for a new card.
Available rental copies of the new Hobbit movie.
 
For some reason a staff member keeps coming out and straightening the "Form Line Here" sign. Watch for patrons jostling it.

There are three books on American Presidents under the desk that a teen couple swears they are coming back for. I am so convinced they are not coming back that I will give you five dollars if they do. Nevertheless I am not so convinced that they are not coming back that I am willing to break my promise and check the books in.

And that is all from the five o'clock crew. I will check in on you periodically from seven to nine as taking care of the check in machine gets a little lonely sometimes.

The biggest website

The public computers have been catching my eye again. I thought I had seen everything there was to be seen. I thought I had issued my full compliment of blog posts on the nature of what our library public looks at on the internet.  But with my eye drawing back to those glowy screens once again it has become clear that there was something I had missed.

At the local library, on the Internet computers, people play simple games obsessively. They shop. They attend to Email. People even occasionally do research on our computers. They watch Korean boy bands. There are cats and GIFs and hobbies and celebrities and hilarious injuries, useful information and endless, endless marketing disguised as entertainment. Most of these things all these people do on the Internet are mundane and familiar. A rare few are strange and compelling. But only recently has it struck me that there is one other very common thing people do on the Internet. It was hiding so fiercely in plain sight that I have gone years without seeing it, but now that I have seen it, I see it everywhere. I never see it spoken of, perhaps because it is not flattering to the Internet, and the Internet is above all most concerned with feathering its own nest, but I have become so aware of it that I am not sure that it isn't the single most common thing people do on the Internet. Here it is.

They stare blankly at the screen at a complete loss. 

The oversold promise surrounds them and they have nowhere to go. How does one choose from a million paths?

The loudest wins. We invent interests. We follow where we are told to go. 

But sometimes instead we break down and stare into nothingness. We are inscrutable. We disappear between the countless stars.

 If staring into nothingness were a website, it would be bigger than Google.

Eyre affair

I am perched in a window, four floors up. I am not at work or at leisure. I am in the in-between world for an indefinite amount of time, living on sunflower seeds and handwritten blog posts.

I knew I was coming to this nether world so I brought the most comfortable book I could think of, The Eyre Affair. I've only read it eleven or twelve times. There's life in it yet, tiny, overlooked details to spot from out my long acquaintance, the joy of watching its vast underworkings, the beautiful rhythm of the familiar ride.

Some books sweep me away on a wave of tone and leave me infected with a fever of voice, a strange music cadence, a flooding sense. I love the delirium of these books and how it feels like their very language is seeping for days into every sentence I touch. But I perhaps love even more the kind of book Jasper Fforde so perfectly expresses: a magnificence of plot and character and a relentless sense that our world is being commented on, teased, and explained within. All of it is sewn so neatly together that strain as I might to spot the tiny perfect stitches I end up bewildered. This makes me think of my favorite paintings, where one can peer into the cream of brushwork or the blots of marks and color, down where it is all paint, and then step back and it is a world, an arm, a tree, and it seems hopeless to fathom how it was done. You go from one view to the other and cannot spot any trick or plan.

To my regret The Eyre Affair and its sequels and attendants will not be getting withing spitting distance of Canon. I can see how and why that is just from the enthusiastic quotes plastered across its paperback edition covers. All the giant East Coast Media is there singing its praises; the New York Times, their Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, the papers that we carry at my library even though they are from way out of town. It's like these reviewers know they've got something special, but they're not entirely sure what to do with it. So they hit the comparing sauce, and they hit it hard. Just the front and back covers gets The Eyre Affair compared to:

Monty Python
Harry Potter (Twice)
Stephen Hawking
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Bridget Jones
Nancy Drew
Dirty Harry
The Hitchhiker's Guide series
Lewis Carroll
Woody Allen

This all may seem like an illustrative shorthand. And clearly it must be fine stuff for cover marketing. But at heart, what they're really doing is passing the buck. 

The Cowards.

Here is my back of the book quote:

I have never seen anything like this book anywhere, and yet every last piece of it feels like an improvement on something I have loved in the past.

Koan

For two days I have been thinking of that story about the elephant. I can't remember it very clearly and have completely forgotten its source, but that doesn't stop it trumpeting around in me. It's the one where a group of different people have a compromised view of an elephant and each one is convinced the elephant is something it's not; a person touching the skin of its leg thinks it's the bark of a tree, a person at its trunk thinks the elephant is a snake, the person petting the elephant's ear is all like "Whoa! This feels so weird, and all this hot breath on my head is freaking me out!"

The story, as I recall, does not relate what the elephant is thinking. My guess is that, in keeping with the story, the elephant, confronted with all these pesky, invasive, smaller creatures, must think they are mosquitoes. This means everyone in the story is confused and misguided.

But we, reading it, are not confused and misguided. Neither is our omniscient narrator, nor the original author. We are like gods, albeit unruly ones, looking down at it all, saying "Ha! That is an elephant not a tree!" and "Those are so obviously people, not mosquitoes!" and "Pick me! I know what the moral of the story is!"

Ah. But what if we're all standing too close to the fable and are just characters who have gotten it all wrong again?

What if the story keeps going out into another story, forever?

On recommendation

Somewhere in all the vast catacombs of this blog I have written about book recommendations. Said post about recommendations is out in that labyrinthine archive somewhere, and if you merely read carefully through my 400 blog posts of the past 14 months you will surely find it.

I will wait here while you do so.

I will have a cappuccino. I don't mind waiting. It's nice to just sit here and enjoy the air in my blog. It smells sort of like peppermint here today.

I will listen to John Cage's immortal 4'33" (official blog soundtrack at reader request) and wait until you are finished searching.











Ah. You're back. You found it. You reread it. Splendid.

But just on the very, very, extremely and unusually remote chance that you did not read it, I had better briefly and inaccurately recap the referred to post. The post said that book recommendations are difficult for me because I tend to be unprepared when the requester asks me for a request out of nowhere. They also tend to be difficult because the requester's frame of reference can sometimes be so alien to my own. And finally, they are difficult because I tend to be out in the stacks, far removed from my resources and my carefully (well, roughly) assembled lists, and the moment a patron asks me for a request, the clock is ticking. I have about twelve seconds before they lose interest and decide it's not worth it.

We did our best to solve all those problems, and then some, in that blog post, but there is an opposite problem. And that is what we will work on here today.

What if I see the requester all the time? What if they're a sympathetic co-worker? What if their frame of reference, their taste is full of commonalities with me? What if I have all the time in the world to mull over lists and be reminded of favorite books, or music, or movies, and constant opportunities to tell them? What if the request door is hardly ever closed and I don't have just twelve seconds to work with, but twelve years?

I have found it is just as easy to go wrong in this situation as it is in the first one. My inclination has been to flood the person with wildly enthusiastic suggestions, mostly hoping an occasional one will stick. I have only just begun to understand that this is all wrong. Floods sweep away everything. This situation requires care, control, patience, and restraint. This situation must be taken seriously. This situation must be treated respectfully, craftily, and thoughtfully. Above all, this situation requires a plan of action.

If I am talking with someone and it becomes clear that I can think of eleven fantastic books that I know they would love, I should not recommend them. I should put them on a little shelf in my brain, and I should think about them. I should think about what I love best, and I should think about what I think they would be most likely to love best. I should make one choice. And then I should not recommend it. I should hold onto it. While I am holding onto it, for days, or weeks, new things will occur to me, new recommendations. I should measure them against my one choice, always keeping the strongest, curing it, smoking it, holding it with care. And still I should not recommend it.

Then one day, this person will complain about having nothing good to read, or they will wish there was something, or they might even ask, directly for a recommendation.

Yes, now, carefully, I should say, yes, there is one very special book I have thought of, one alone, and I should quietly, seriously, earnestly recommend it and it alone.

They probably won't read it. I should not give up. I should not go to choice two. I should not even have a choice two. I should not ask about it. I should not recommend it again. But I might want to get a copy to have around. Books this good are, surprisingly, even in a big library, often checked out. I should keep my copy. I should say nothing.

Then one day, this person will complain about having nothing good to read, or they will wish there was something, or they might even ask, directly for a recommendation.

In the same way as before, quietly, seriously, I should recommend my book again, with no reference to having recommended it before.

If they say they tried it and didn't like it I should not recommend a new book. I am going to need to do some rethinking. I am going to need to start over. If they make vague positive noises I should continue to wait and I should not press. If they get very interested I should let them look for and request a copy before I give them my own, to keep.

But always, before moving on to a second recommendation, I should get either a negative report or a positive report that they read the book I recommended. If I have to spend twelve years quietly recommending the same book without result, so be it. It wasn't meant to be. Failures and successes though I will take into account, and I will begin the same process, ever so carefully, once again.

The paper towel process

I'm on my way downstairs after shelving a cart of Genre Fiction. I stop to talk to Dave for a bit, and a man approaches to inform us that the Men's Room is out of towels. I assure the man that I will begin the exhaustive process to replace towels in the towel dispenser. The man departs. You, however, are still here.

"A process?" You ask. "What is this exhaustive process?"

It is generally speaking a 17 step process to replace paper towels during non janitorial coverage times. It is an optional task (come to think of it, I think all tasks might be optional around my library). But I'm a giver. So I will replace the towels, and I will carefully detail the 17 steps for you in case you ever need to replace paper towel rolls in an institutional building.

But before I start I want to say that I would love to answer the burning question: "Why does it take so many procedural steps to replace a roll of towels?" Unfortunately this is too big, strange, and complicated a question for this post, so we must stick with our tale of the 17 steps, which are as follows:

1. Find a knowledgeable co-worker or manager who is up on the current (always slightly transgressive) schemes for towel replacement. You can skip this step if you've replaced towels in the past few days, but beware of any more days having gone by than that, as the towel replacement scheme changes without notice, roughly once a week.

2. Remove the towel dispenser key from its current hiding place (learned in step one).

3. Get the master key ring from the cash register. It has the downstairs janitor closet key. The janitor closet is now, according to step one, stocking a small supply of towel rolls.

4. When the master key ring turns out not to be in the cash register where it's supposed to be, go to the meeting room where a librarian is using the master key ring.

5. Do a small task for the librarian in trade for possession of the master key ring.

6. Open the janitor closet and search for the towel rolls. There won't be any. Don't panic. It wouldn't be much of a 17 step process if you obtained a towel roll in step six.

7. Go back to your consultant from step one. They will be only momentarily disheartened at your news. They advise going to the upstairs janitor closet.

8. Report to front desk that you have the master key ring so they won't panic when you disappear in to distant lands with it.

9. Go upstairs and attempt to unlock upstairs janitor closet with your janitor closet key. It will not work.

10. Go to the important nearby manager who has The Knowledge. He will explain, like it's the most natural, sensible thing in the world, that the upstairs janitor closet uses a different key than the downstairs janitor closet. The upstairs key is held at the reference desk.

11. Acquire the upstairs janitor closet key from the reference desk.

12. Open the janitor closet door and break the mysterious emergency supplies seal to take one roll of paper towels.

13. Go into the bathroom, unlock the paper towel dispenser, and, following diagrams, insert the new paper towel roll.

14. Return the upstairs janitor closet key to the reference desk.

15. Return the master key ring (with the downstairs janitor closet key) to its standard location.

16. Return the towel dispenser key to its secret hiding place.

17 Go tell everyone that you're going to write a blog post about your adventures.

And that's it. If you follow all the steps carefully it's a lot simpler than it seems.

The post that uses gravity

So, Sunday is casual day around my blog, but the curious thing is sometimes that can be a bit unnerving. I carry all these little blog ideas around in my head, and most days, when I sit down to write a post, I have, informally, all these pieces in place, little models of what I'll say, maps, charts, a diagram. I may spin off and start talking about anything, but I usually hit one of my arrows, and my arrow says to me "Go left." and I, being very agreeable as a writer, say "Okay, sure, why? Is there a good surprise?" And most of the time there is.

But on casual day I just find the nearest hill and go to the top of it, dragging my rickety go-cart, the one I built out of scrap lumber and old lawnmower wheels. It has a rope steering wheel, more like reins really, and no brakes other than a 2x4 that can be pulled on to drag against the ground. I climb in and start rolling slowly down. At first I barely move, but the hill quickly drops off and soon birds are scattering before me in bewildered surprise. I would like to look at the birds, but that would be crazy because I have to be scanning constantly for trees and rocks to dodge, I have to anticipate, I have to go left, left, LEFT!! and I'm in the air and I'm in a bush and I'm bleeding and the right front wheel is wobbling frighteningly. The steering has stopped working and straight ahead is a telephone pole. I lean, just miss it, careen across an old logging road into more thorny bushes. Then there is sand. I spin, and, like that, sideways, I stop.

I touch my cheek. Yes, it's smeared with blood, but not too much. And suddenly it's so peaceful and quiet everywhere. And I think, maybe there's not much sense to casual day, but, it's pretty invigorating, I mean, when you live through it.

Which I guess I have.

Repeats repeat

I believe the saying is "You can't step in the same river twice." But you and I know that for all its iconic wisdom there's a bit of splitting hairs in that quote. And you certainly can't split the same hair twice, because then you're quartering it. What's a person supposed to do with a quarter of a hair? My point is that, sure, you can't step in the same river twice, but unless you have the expanding, massive consciousness of a god, it's going to seem a lot like the same river.

And so writing a blog post about the very same exact thing I wrote a blog post about two days ago should turn out to be futile, repetitive, and boring.

And yet this post is already so wildly different than the post I wrote two days ago that I can't help thinking that maybe one doesn't have to have the expanding massive consciousness of a god after all. Maybe with something as lovely and complicated as a river it takes very little to re-engage with it and have everything go completely differently.

To tell you the truth this is more how I hoped it would be. I was thinking a little while ago about how sometimes I'll have a very nice idea for a blog post, and how when I remember that I already wrote that very idea it sort of puts the kibosh on my new ambition. But you never set foot in the same river twice, or, fine, it's the same damn river, but sometimes you set foot in and a bunch of fish dart away from your foot in panic, and sometimes you set foot and there is a crash of distant thunder, and sometimes you set foot in and you realize there is an owl in that tree, just sitting there.

Well, this isn't a river, but I'm hoping you take my point, even if it's for the second time...

And counting.

Emergency room

We are spending the night in the Emergency Room. Life! You might like to know all the exciting stories behind it, but that's not what I'm here for. 

If I were you I would be curious.

But I'm not you. I'm in an Emergency Room writing to you. And that is different. It lets me imagine whatever I like. What I imagine is that you have a series of questions. But don't worry! I am going to answer all the questions I am going to imagine you having.

1. What is it like at the Emergency Room?

It is very loud and busy, and yet seems wholly populated by tons of people who work here, and hardly anyone else.

2. Is this what you pictured for an Emergency Room?

No! I pictured all the loudness and busyness, but all of that busyness surrounding people whose arms were just torn off, or who are bleeding from their dazed heads, or who are being wheeled on a gurney IN A GREAT HURRY by a group of very focused people.

3. Does the Emergency Room remind you of the library.

Yes.

4. Could you elaborate?

Practically everything is like my library.

5. How so IN THIS PARTICULAR CASE?

Are you still mad I'm not telling you the exciting stories behind my visit here?

6. No. How so in this particular case?

There are computers and monitors of various sorts making strange noises and displaying inscrutable information all of which probably quickly becomes mundanely intelligible when you work here or have been here for a bit. The staff seems to be mostly socializing, yet seems to basically get the job done. Those who can communicate well and understand others are like gods, those who can't... aren't. I read and write here in my spare time too. Everyone looks like one of my former co-workers. There are way too many workers for the job at hand, except, just in the time I've been writing this, there are way too few, and no one can ever fix that problem. You can overhear a lot. All the answers and things to be done are on the computers. The staff all sort of complain about each other.

7. What's your room like?

Aside from all the hospital stuff it's a theme room, like one of those hotels with theme rooms that I always think I might like to stay at but never get around to because they never seem quite nice enough.

8. What's the theme?

Underwater world, with wall to ceiling murals on all walls, all of being underwater. There are a few sea plants, a few fish, a few bubbles, and the sandy ocean floor. It's pretty nice.

9. How are you doing?

It's not for me, but I've been better.