Fallow

I have spent much of my day today writing.

"What have you been writing?" You ask. 

Why, blog posts of course. Did you think I was working on a novel or something? I may be old school, but not that old school. More 2007 than 1886.

And so writing all day I have said pretty much all the important things I wanted to say. This is always a good time to come write my Sunday post, the fallow post. There is not overmuch order to it, really what comes up can just come up. Today is a field of weeds for you. If you are fortunate enough to find some wildflowers pick them freely. Tonight we plow this all under and tomorrow we get a richer and fresher soil.

Today it is quiet here and songbirds and flocks of blackbirds poke around under a gray sky. Tomorrow I will be eager to tell you things once again.

Like other things

A few days ago my colleague, Dave, who, for some reason I'm not clear on, is my only colleague I freely name on this blog, brought to my attention the tagline of a book or DVD he came across while emptying a bin: "Like Downton Abbey, but with magic!"  We thought this was pretty amusing. It had been a very long day and we were very eager to be amused. Perhaps what seemed amusing is that "magic" seemed so antithetical to the essential nature of Downton Abbey, and so made its eagerness of association especially desperate and silly seeming. But who knows, there are only so many kinds of things around, and much is like much else. Perhaps it pretty much is Downton Abbey, but with magic. I myself have always fancied that this blog is a lot like Don Quixote, only in English, and Non-fiction, and in blog form. For the record though, I'm not saying Dave is anything like Sancho Panza. You can draw your own analogies here. Since I'm not selling this with taglines, you'll have to.

She is leaving

I try to be circumspect in how I discuss my co-workers, not so much generally, but in the specific. The foibles of a basically decent co-worker are certainly fodder for this blog, but not if they can't be separated some from the actual person, and tempered by that person's virtues even as that person is disguised. Curiously, it is always a delight and surprise to me, but some of my co-workers read this blog, and I have no wish to wound or to expose them.

But some don't read this blog. And some are not quite in that "basically decent" category.

While I suspect it is an immutable law of humanity that all people have some virtues, some people have cut wrecking paths through life. Occasionally those wrecking paths are run right through my work world. They have burned and scarred ground in the history of my library. And while these people are great for stories and staff unity, for the bizarre carnival colorings of our world, we should not lose sight that they are destroyers, and by their very nature have eschewed our protection. On the contrary, if we have any job it is to watch these people, keep them in check, and speak truth to them. Patching the wounds people like this inflict on the public and sometimes on my colleagues, for instance, is as much my job as is registering library cards. And speaking about a person like this with more clarity and lack of forgiveness than of a co-worker who is trying, is, to my mind, not just fair, but right.

And so I come to report today that one of these people is leaving us, retiring. I can see her now through the window I am sitting near, as I am typing, on my dinner break. My association with her is long and I still feel a certain kind of affection for her, a slight touch of sympathy. I am surprised it has survived, though there have been many times in our history where it has gone dark altogether. Like I said, small virtues, a sense of humor, playfulness even, can be readily apparent in her. Also like I said, all have some virtues, but a few flowers poking up through burnt and ruined ground makes for some heartbreaking poignancy while still remaining a long way from healing that ground. She has committed no great or singular crimes that I know of. Whatever evil is there is truly mundane and almost easy to forget, especially in these quieter days, when her fangs have dulled and her effect has been quieted by poor health, a mellowing of age and a diffusion of her personality in a changed Library dynamic. It would not be so hard to take the small virtues, the sins made comical by softening time, and the fact that it is over, that in a way it has been over for awhile, to say an almost nostalgic goodbye. There goes one of our own. There goes someone who has been part of what defined this place for thirty years. There goes someone around whom so much spent drama was once spun. There goes someone who we will never really be able to explain to the workers to come. There is no way to convey that persecuted, Eeyore gruffness of hers, that intensely unwelcoming approach to the patrons, that profound unhelpfulness. Who would believe it? The newer people already don't really understand who she is, not now that there are worse people, worse in a modern way, failing all of us and this place in a way that is contemporary. She is history. Couldn't we just wave as she drifts off into the horizon, shed a (metaphorical) tear for lost youth, different times, and long faded grievance?

But.

She hurt a lot of people. She hurt a lot of people. Maybe none so much that anyone carries so much of a wound anymore. There is that. But. People cried in the bathroom after encounters with her. They were locked in months long pitched battles about nothing, that they could not choose not to fight. She alone in her time filed more grievances than all the other people in my library system put together over that same time period. Thousands of patrons had their days ruined by that needlessly grudging, antagonistic, unhelpful woman. Some feared her. And none of it, not for a second, was for something constructive. It was always to serve some unresolved horror in herself, to protect her from any change, any self examination, and any reckoning.

Do I want her to read this? No. Do I want to hurt her? No. Would I be delighted at her self reflection, apology, and pursuit of redemption? I would be amazed and dazzled. But I do not believe it is coming. And to you great cultural purveyors of forgiveness I say this:

I sit here of sound mind and heart. My spirit is calm and without rancor and whole. Forgiveness is beautiful and powerful and profound, but forgiveness is only disrespected when bestowed unsought and unasked. And contrary to all you may have heard, wrongly given, it does not ennoble and heal the heart from which it issues, rather it degrades it because it plays too light with truth, and no heart can be sound without truth. The uncountable, dazzling thousands of stabs of pain my co-worker has inflicted stand in the small fabrics of history forever, and though I suppose it is possible for every one of them to heal in their victim's hearts, there is no chance of absolution without her, and the book of these deeds belongs open, forever.

My co-worker is leaving. The time when that would have engendered a profound relief and joy is passed. Now the newer people can merely see it is a good thing, and the veterans are merely... amazed. I don't believe I have ever had a colleague leave the Library without my feeling at least some touch of sadness. I have traveled a long way with this one and that touch is not so small here. But as long as there is a single star in the sky it will stand testament to the grief you have sown in this world, just as it will stand testament to the joy.

Flattering spam

I don't just want to be a megalomaniac, I want to be the greatest megalomaniac who ever lived!

-me

One regular feature for a person writing a blog is that we receive some very, very flattering spam. I have so far managed to prevent any of it from appearing on my blog because I think you would be less interested in hearing what iwouldliketostealyourhandbag@violentcriminal.eu has to say. But I am always delighted to know that he or she has "found my very interesting post." and is "certain I will be a blogger much to watch!"

Oh, sure, I look to be the eminently confident, self possessed blogger to you, but when soonhavingpowerofattorneyoveryou@insanesociopath.ru writes a comment to say, about my post on who the people in my neighborhood are, "You sir have given me much thinking in your wonderful post and I will be coming back here often. Check out my own site at..." my heart thrills to know, in reaching out to the world, I have touched someone so much that they would like to sell me shoes or steal my identity. Sure, we value my identity around my house, but it's so nice to know others out there do as well. So to all the nice spammers out there; thanks for letting me know, and I'll be sure to check out all your sites as soon as I can. So nice of you to leave those handy links! Your very general, but also perceptive and encouraging comments, totally keep me going. Bless you.

Old guys, a 5 minute story

Older guys tell me stuff. These guys are anywhere from 5 to 40 years older than me, and I like them. At least, in the context of being a library clerk, I like them. It's a perfect context for me. I'm at home there at that front desk, comfortable, welcoming, and my expectations for fun and freedom are pretty modest, so if someone wants to entertain me I'm all in. Plus, and perhaps most importantly of all, everyone is limited to, very roughly speaking, about 5 minutes maximum with me. All of this seems to engender a certain amount of formality, and, if the chat is going well, a certain amount of not entirely satisfied interest and enjoyment. This makes us happy to see each other the next time we meet. Also, these are people, so terrible deeds and darknesses of all kinds lurk in the corners. But I don't usually get to that stuff in five minutes. I just get highlights: one man's long travels in Europe, bar stories from distant, historical versions of my own cities, a lawyer's work stories. Could they become evil or boring? Sure, but not in five minutes. And I am no great interviewer, but again, in five minutes I don't have time to ask the wrong question or start to tell one of my own stories, breaking the flow. They give me a best of, and I am attentive.

Just the other day I got some interesting snippets from a man just back from Rome (this is a city I love, but I am still waiting to hear from someone who doesn't sort of hate it in the summer. The interesting parts were concerning his Roman cousins there, who were only there for a bit because they hate Rome in the summer too!). This lead to the next man picking up on the Italian stuff and telling me about enlisting in the Navy in WWII as an Italian-American. He said when war broke out they thought of putting Italian-Americans in internment camps like the Japanese-Americans until they realized there would be no one to fight their war for them. He said everyone wanted to enlist after Pearl Harbor, but he was underage so his distraught Italian mother had to accompany him on the bus downtown to sign for his enlistment. He said his mother, weeping, made the recruitment man promise to take care of her son. The recruitment man did promise, the man told me ruefully, a tone that spoke richly to many interesting stories of not being taken care of while fighting in the Pacific. But that was the end of it. People were in line behind him and we had to break off. Would I have liked to have heard all about his being in the Navy in the Pacific in WWII? Sure. Will I? I doubt it. Maybe I'll see him again in a week or a month or two. Maybe he'll tell me another five minute story. I hope so. I'm a big fan of five minute stories, after all, it's the kind I tell too.

Antiques, the cautionary tale

 


I went with my wife to a pretty river town and looked through many huge stores crammed with antiques. Yes, crammed. I really liked them and could see a bit of a path not traveled in myself. Some part of me could have become obsessively absorbed with all this stuff, with its light touches of rareness and history and time travel, with all the collecting and treasure hunting and value. But, as a career, for me, I think it would have failed hard. I am not good at sales, never mastering that essential emotional remove that is required for it. I am far too inclined to go all Daffy Duck and have vivid, feverish dreams of swimming in gold coins as any sale is negotiated. I'm not sure people would really like buying some Victorian doctor's case from a person who starts exulting flamboyantly about being a fabulously wealthy millionaire the second their $175 sale is completed. And besides that problem I suspect I would have formed deep emotional attachments to all my collections that no money exchange could adequately compensate for or reflect on my real valuing of the object. So if I went that route I probably would have ended up more on the hoarder end of the spectrum, which, I imagine, is where most antique dabblers end up anyway. A man at our recent garage sale (here, if you want to hear a small bit about it) told us about how he had to get a second house to store all his stuff. He has a 21 room mansion, he said, to keep it all. He said it could be in a museum, it should be in a museum. It should be a museum. 

But it shouldn't, really. It should be in an antique store somewhere, and he shouldn't have so much money that he can have a spare mansion just to store stuff he buys. Of course, I might not feel this way if he had bought something at my garage sale, and made me a millionaire. A millionaire! But he didn't buy a thing. I guess he just came to tell his Rime of the Ancient Mariner story. Every weekend he leaves behind his multiple houses that have no room for him anyway. He travels up and down the alleys of my city, seeking garage and yard sales at which he can tell his lonely story. It is his ritual and all he has left, if you don't count all the houses and stuff. But also it is his curse, to tell that story over and over throughout the city, and, perhaps, it is his gift, too, not buying, rather telling, telling us garage salers we have chosen the right path. And so we have.

Real truth behind shocking Library reading program story!

"Why," no one ever asks "does your blog never include outrage inducing stories that turn out to be totally deceptive and misleading?"

I love this question. Say more!

"Well, I read your blog and never walk away with a sense of fury about how terrible the world is and a desire to share my now totally confused, frothing misconceptions of reality in a viral way that will have the whole Library world talking about YOUR BLOG!"

You don't? Crap.

Well, thank you for your input. I try to be misleading but truth keeps leaking out like blood from a bad wound. And so I am consigned to be me, and you are consigned to being you. We must try and make peace with it.

But wait! Don't leave! I have a story the Library world is up in arms about! I will tell it more roughly, sort of, vaguely, as it was told to me by a co-worker. Good story, good co-worker, and if all the details turn out to be not exactly true it is all probably vastly more true than anything you can find about it anywhere else in the world. It will enrage you! You will go insane!

So, in Hudson Falls, NY, a kid in the Library there has won the reading contest at his local Library five times in a row now. Do you know this one? Well, it's true, He read more books than any other kid to take the prize five years running. Publicity spread about this because it is an amazing, once in a lifetime story. Oops, no, it isn't. I think the closest we can get to "once in a lifetime story" is that if his grandmother is around she was probably politely interested. The librarian over there was contacted about this five time winner by a reporter for reasons no one will ever know because it bears no relation whatsoever to news.  So the librarian said something about the kid dominating the contest and how it was discouraging the other readers. I believe she used some variation of the ill-advised word "hogging" and said something about switching to a drawing. The mistake here is the "hogging" thing. And there's a good chance there is something about the librarian hating the kid's mother, but unlike the hard facts I have been presenting, the hate part is just super perceptive speculation. Anyway, the pro and anti competitive reading sections of the internet went nuts over this and local news teams (the real villains in most news stories like this, keep your eye on the ball) went into high gear. They interviewed left and right, found dissenting opinions in that very library and puffed desperately on the super tiny flames. Fights raged across the internet, and many scoffing, hypothetical accounts of young, competitive athletes being asked to lose, just because they won too much, were invoked until the fires burned out of control. Everyone pretended to be sensible the whole time, even me.

Finally, as Fox news covered this wild controversy that shook the foundations of competitive bulk reading among children, the kid was asked what he thought. 

"I don't see what the big deal is." He said. "The prize was a T-shirt."

All the wisdom in the world

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
-Henry David Thoreau

I don't know what to do with this quote. It grabbed me by the scruff of the neck while I was looking at books about elephants. It left me wobbly. But everything leaves me wobbly lately; the Finnish book about the guy who leaves everything and travels with a rabbit for a year, elephants listening with their feet, by vibration, and just all this thinking about writing. I wander around the Library, composing in my head, fixing things in my mind that no one will ever be able to lay a hand on no matter how perfect the fix. And everywhere is answers...

Oh, here it is:

I have accumulated all the wisdom in the world. It is packed in my psyche like junk in some hoarders attic. I have all the wisdom in the world.

Now it is time to use some.

No one likes your music (with three links!)

There I am in the hold processing corner, also known as "The dream job location" where one quietly processes requests and answers the phone calls which are usually not that frequent, and, best of all, for me, listens to music. No one really talks about it being the dream job location because of clerk law (or is it fear?) number four: If you show joy in something it will be taken away from you.

Right, so I am listening to music. What is my current obsession? Jama Ko. Yes, that is a link, but you won't like it. Not if you're anything like my co-workers. I get very excited listening and call them over. "Here, co-worker, come listen to this amazing music!" They are polite, and do drop in for a listen. Why not, we're up for any distraction we can get at work. After two seconds they start talking to me. "No, no!" I am thinking "I was expecting you to listen in rapt silence for five minutes!" But perhaps I was not being realistic. There are reasons why no one likes your music at work.

One. 
Listening radius. If I point the little speakers at me and turn the music up I create a little circle where the music sounds clear and sensible and is possible to enjoy. It extends about seven feet in front of me and 15 feet behind me. Beyond that circle it is noise, it is like a dropped peach left in the sun. How could someone just walk by that peach and not recognize my excellent taste in fruit! So what that flies are swarming on it!

Two.
The second reason is that I am at my job location. Sitting there, at the phones, with my music, I am where I am supposed to be and so probably, in theory, I am somehow doing something related to my job. The people I am calling over to me are displaced people. Different rules apply to them. If they're standing around talking to me about anything they could be talking to me about something work related (remember, everything is work related!), but if they have a glazed, stoned look of trance-like ecstasy while listening to electrified lute music they might not be in a super productive looking mode. Even the teen librarian will keep his dancing to said music under 30 seconds, which brings us to the third reason.

Three.
People have other stuff to do. When we have stuff to do it seems really important to us, but if we've chosen not to do much for a bit people doing stuff can look a bit odd and manic and insensible. This creates a music appreciators divide.

Four.
I learned this so recently that there is a blog post about it (here). People are different than me and may have different taste, for instance, in music. Furthermore, even if they like really similar things and are open to new music, people will often be in a very different kind of musical mood than you.

So, in conclusion, I think maybe I should just try and listen to music at work for my own private enjoyment, if I can, just, you know, in the same way I blog. 

But, seriously, have you heard this? 

Notes to some people around here

 

 

Notes to some people around here

I was just wanting to dash off a few notes to people around here. They will never see them, but you will, and perhaps you'll pass them along to the people concerned if you run into them.
 

To the woman watching the youtube videos of octopuses on computer 42 upstairs:

Thank you. I really enjoyed them.
 

To the woman in the office with my supervisor all afternoon: 
 
You are always welcome here.


To the very exasperated lady I helped a lot at the front desk: 
 
Looking like famed British actress Judi Dench could be a source of joy in your life.


To my quiet reference co-worker who now says "Hi." and also now occasionally comes to me with questions: 
 
My virtues really start to shine through after five or six years, and I in no way hold your caution against you. 
 

To the young man with the t-shirt that says "I am immature, unorganized, lazy and loud, but I'm fun!":

Your t-shirt set up an array of expectations with me, none of which were met.


To the gigantic man who returned his internet guest pass to me and said "Thanks, chief.":

You have brightened my day.


To Lao Tzu, who said, in a book by Donald Rumsfeld (ick!), “Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”:

That is totally harsh for bloggers and Taoist poets! 

What is beauty?

Have I mentioned how emotionally exhausting shelving in fiction can be? The books come flying out at me. They overload my curiosity which is wild and does better in calmer places. And I have no resistance to these books. They are all humming and burning with life. I don't even need to read them for half their content to leap out of the books and flood my emotions. The teen librarian over lunch asks me if I'm reading anything good. A nice question, but I don't know. I'm reading six books at home, five books at the Library, four books just while I'm shelving. They're piled up, I can't remember their names three minutes after putting them down. They're all good I guess. If I had to I could track most of them down and prepare a fervent evaluative speech for them, but it doesn't matter, not really. Most of them I only finish by a kind of accident because that also doesn't matter. The whole book or a paragraph or a synopsis is nearly the same to me. And anyway, I am shelving up here. I can't sit around reading these books through. A book seizes my attention and I can give it a minute; the cover, the quotes, the first paragraph, the last, but it's all way more than enough. It's all piercingly vivid. The book floods me with story and perspective and possibility. I stand dazed. I place the book carefully and stare blindly at the bindings, my mind reeling until I can shelve again. And I do, until the next exotic marvel of a volume seizes me by my very heart, pulls me in and breathes one brief, nearly toxic gust of pure magic into my face. My soul sprawls, too small for a world made like this, for the seething wonder of literature. "What is beauty but the beginning of a terror we can barely endure." Rilke said. He should know, just look at that sentence. Jesus.

Policy Genius

I was upstairs doing a spot of genre fiction shelving in between the eleven lunches I am eating today and I was just sort of in a receptive zone, perhaps due to all the food. Yes, a receptive zone, a kind of hypnotic other worldly openness to the firmament. I think that's the only way to account for the kind of profound inspiration that was visited upon me. And when I say this inspiration was visited upon me I say it because I feel it would be wrong for one lone human, one small library employee, to take credit for such velocity of vision. We are vessels for something greater, or can be, or, well, apparently, I am. And I mention all this to try and temper the vanity that is so easily stoked by dabbling in genius. Yes, I said it. Genius. But I am not a genius, probably, depending on how you define "genius". I am just a simple man plying my trade as best I can, a vessel, a conduit, merely someone chosen. Why was I chosen? I don't know. I was just shelving, quietly, earnestly, devotedly shelving and genius was thrust upon me. Did anyone ask me if I wanted this geniusness? No. Sure, I probably would have taken it, but mostly just to be nice, to help the world. I'm just saying I wasn't clamoring for it. I wasn't begging to be a genius. It happened to me, and I accepted it. And I hope you can accept all this in that vein.

So, anyway, there I am shelving along and suddenly this thought comes unbidden into my head: We should have a policy saying that books are to be shelved alphabetically by the authors' last name.

We do? Really? You're sure?

Hmmm. Good policy. Very sensible. Our policy and procedures manual should totally have one of those thumbs up, +1 kinds of things to click. It is one seriously great idea.

How you can be a librarian!

Yesterday, in speaking of the virtues of Little Free Libraries, I made some only mildly snarky mention of institutional libraries taking a cue from them in how we develop our own services, and in doing so also contributing to the improvement of Little Free Libraries. If I were you I would have been thinking "But aren't Little Free Libraries already basically perfect?

The answer to that is "NO!" Thank god someone was thinking about Little Free Libraries being perfect so that I could correct them. It's kind of the linchpin of my whole post here! The fact is that I have been keeping a close eye on Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood and they suffer from one important, little mentioned, glaring weakness:  People dump terrible books into them. The average Little Free Library I look at is about one quarter real books a person might want to read and three quarters books people seem to have been unable to sell at garage sales. I was recently at the Grand Marais Library and they had a version of a Little Free Library on a section of shelves at the front of their branch. This is totally what I was advocating yesterday! Good for them! Unfortunately that shelf of books was possibly the most pathetic collection of books I have ever seen gathered in one place. It looked a lot like the romance section of my own Library circa 1997, but with the more popular "quality" titles removed. I even had the sad, cynical, fleeting thought that it was all like that just to make their slightly dicey regular collection look better by comparison. But really, it was just neglect. The interesting thing is that this all makes Little Free Libraries actually an argument for the value of librarians. You'd think librarians would be all over this argument for their necessity. But often I get the impression that librarians are conflicted about their roles, sometimes more comfortable with their role being objective (it isn't), and less comfortable with their role as curators (have courage, embrace it!). Well, if they refuse to step up, it is fortunate I have become increasingly comfortable with the idea of anyone being a librarian. If books in a Little Free Library look like bookstore rejects they probably are. Go ahead and take a chance on weeding them. Take all those crappy books to your local brick and mortar Library and donate them. People will buy practically anything.  Just don't forget to replace all that drek in that now much emptier Little Free Library with some books you loved. Bam, you're a librarian.

Little Free Libraries

As I slowly work up my first series of bespoke clerkmanifesto books (grafted and redesigned into old weeded, damaged, and discarded hardcover books) to distribute into Little Free Libraries I find I am paying a lot of attention to the Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood. I love these little distilled and pure Libraries and am thinking they are the brightest new representation of the popular Public Library out there in a very long time. Within the grand institutional Library systems, or at least in mine, there has been for decades now an awful lot of yammering, attention, worry, and comparison with and to technological development and Libraries keeping up with the times. There is great obsession with e-books, social media, relevance, and changing media. But I don't hear people bringing up much, on In Service days or in various Strategic Plannings, the challenge presented to us by Little Free Libraries. I don't see a lot of people sitting around wondering how Libraries, with all their late fines and institutional processes, closing times, and building upkeep, can keep up with the nimble, mind bogglingly simple to use Little Free Libraries. I don't see us worrying about responding to that challenge.

It's not so much that I actually see The Little Free Library as a challenge. It's more that if we're going to come up with fake challenges like ebooks I like this one better. These challenges are really just excuses and arguments for what we do next. And if we're hunting around for money, how about instead of a grant for iPad dispensers we get a grant to convert all our money raising bookstores into Little Free Libraries. No, not little mini houses on a post, just some shelves of no fuss, borrowable books. I look around my neighborhood and the wee little book houses are popping up in yards all over the place. Clearly it's what our constituency is interested in. Let's give them what they want, Little Free Libraries even within the Library. And then, with the big shoulders of the Public Libraries, we too can contribute to their growth and perfection.

Garage Sale

We just finished a garage sale at my house. And I would have collected all kinds of hilarious anecdotes from the sale, but I felt like I was trying to get rid of stuff, and it just seemed wrong to have to put a bunch of not-ready-for-the-blog anecdotes into storage in the garage right after clearing it out, so I have less anecdotes, not more, and they're old ones that you've heard already.

I will, however, share one observation from this garage sale, feeling it is plenty suitable for a Library blog.

This. People still really like books. No matter how much I love books, my own extreme familiarity with plenitudes of readily and freely available books and with their care and organization has given me an odd relation to them. I think they are wondrous and intensely necessary things, magic, dear, comforting, and all that, but I also kind of think of them as bulk junk, ubiquitous, underfoot, and relentlessly multiplying often to my disadvantage. So when we have a table at our garage sale with old frayed and stained books I assumed there would be a fairly light interest in them. But no! Displayed horribly in unstable piles on a knee-height upside down plastic tub the books were of great interest to the majority of people who visited our sale, and we sold very many of these books. Not once did anyone say "I'll just read this on my Kindle." or "I can probably find a nicer copy in a Little Free Library somewhere, or in a dumpster behind a bookstore." Nope, they more said "Missing the fourth chapter you say? Eh. I always wanted to read this so I'll just work around it." Very strange to me, but understandable as well. 

I had to get those books somehow. 

Losing my mind at work, the follow-up

Since publishing The twelve signs I am losing my mind at work thousands of people have asked me "Hey, so how often do you actually do those things." Which is a gentle way of asking "How crazy are you and how can I cancel my email subscription to your blog?" Naturally I might be very worried about this question if it weren't for the fact I made it up and the only thing thousands of people really ask me is "Can I get a library card?"

Really I just have a rich blogger imagination. But just because something is in my imagination doesn't mean it isn't real! Or, maybe, I should put that another way. Just because I made up a question doesn't mean it doesn't need answering, and just because I made up a thousand people having a question doesn't mean they wouldn't have that question if things all came together as they should, which they don't, generally, but that's not the point. The point is I will herein respond to how often do I do the following craziness indicator actions at my work.

1. I start getting a bit rough with the equipment.

Daily. But in my defense I feel it wears in the equipment, like, for instance, a baseball glove, so that it fits me more perfectly in the long run.

2. I skip my break so I can get things done.

To my everlasting shame, occasionally. I beg of you not to talk this around.

3. I think everything would be okay if PEOPLE WOULD JUST DO THEIR JOBS!

Implicit in an amazing amount of thoughts and discussions at work, but very rarely explicit in my mind.

4. I start to suspect that the automatic check in machine is refusing to check in certain categories of items, say, craft books, out of some private, unfathomable vendetta. 

Only once or twice a week, which is not so bad, but I really believe it, which is pretty bad.

5. I get so mad at people returning perfectly legitimate items (that happen to be irritating to deal with) that I start muttering swear words, completely unaware I am in a public place.

Standard practice for me, alas.

6. I adjust my work speed at the front desk to try and force certain people in line to go to my co-worker.

Very rarely, and even then only with the seriously horrible co-workers.

7. I start consulting with other crazy co-workers on work issues.

Once every few months, and their response never fails to elicit a quick "My god, what have you done!?" reaction inside of me.

8. I body block browsing patrons out of position so I can shelve more freely.

I have never actually done this, so I am, like, totally sane!

9.  I don't use the last of something so I don't have to replace it.

I'll do this rarely, and then feel bad about it and replace it anyway (see "second thoughts", a clerkmanifesto classic!).

10. I find myself occasionally freezing up and forgetting how the alphabet works.

A bit overstated here, but a sort of version of this happens to me every once in awhile.

11. I am insistently trying to shove something somewhere that all scientific laws are confident that it cannot be shoved. 

Twice a week. And it is not good for my wrists.

12. I stop thinking about everything at my job in terms of prospective blog posts.

Never!!!! 

Ten signs you are losing your mind as a patron

Some days ago I posted the twelve signs that showed I was losing my mind at work (here!). But you are more likely to be a patron where I work (or in some similar place) and so you are probably wondering "Hey, Blogger, how do I know if I am losing my mind when I am a visitor at the Library?"

Good question.

Here are:

Ten Signs You Might Be Losing Your Mind as a Library Patron
(or signs you may have lost it already!)


1. You pay several dollars in fines out of a jar of small change (the more pennies you use the stronger the indication)

2. Your shirt has swear words of any kind on it.

3. You toss something in the trash, miss, and keep going.

4. Nothing particularly bad happened and you "would like to speak to the Manager."

5. You cannot understand why we would need proof of address just to get a library card.

6. You keep running into problems with our limit of 20 DVDs out at a time.

7. You ask questions at the front desk but never stay for an answer.

8. Staff knows you by name, but looks real tired when they say it.

9. You are outraged when we don't, wait, just, You are outraged.

10. That's the third time you've fallen down the stairs.

In a fantasy novel

I was going to write about all the people who come to my library, but I got all philosophical and elegiac, but now that that post is all taken care of (here) I can get to the rather more rough hewn response I started with.

It started when an approximately 25 to 60 year old woman asked me to help her print something from her computer. As we took the long walk over to the computers I couldn't help but notice that this woman:

1. Was closer to four feet tall than she was to five feet tall.
2. Had bulging eyes and the wildly rounded facial features of a frog.
3. Was peculiarly fair, with blonde/white hair and great paleness all about her.
4. Had a body shape distinct from what I tend to think of as human; rounded, elongated, legless,
and yet
5. She was enormously high revving, spoke faster than normal, and was tremendously nimble.

And suddenly it dawned on me: I have never seen a person like this in my whole life, and yet, concurrently, I so regularly see people every bit as distinct as this lady that I barely note them. These distinctive and far from common people I see at the library regularly fit into my daily life, indeed are a deep part of it, but are constantly unrepresented in any real way in any of the media I consume, in any conceptions of the world floating around me, and, oddly, even in my own general conception of what the world of people is made of.

I did have a thought though. Two thoughts. The first is that everyone is like this. We are curiously strange and individual and bizarre, but we constantly generalize and categorize things, people, everything we see in an attempt to understand or feel comfortable or be able to cope and find a common referential ground. The second thought was that fantasy novels and some science fiction and lots of cross genre actually does the best job at beginning to describe actual people on the ground. They do this by describing them as not human! Once I started thinking of people as elves, gnomes, pixies, wizards, hobbits, Vorgons, trolls, Orcs, Dwarves, Witches and so on I found it much easier to get a grip on just how different everyone I see is. From there I could proceed to an important next step. I had to go further and invent an entire race for each individual. From here I could finally see all the humanity as it really was. I did this for five full minutes until, overwhelmed, I had to go hide in the bathroom for a bit.

I avoided the mirror.

Twelve signs I am losing my mind at work

I have tasted the darkness.

Twelve signs I am losing my mind at work:

1. I start getting a bit rough with the equipment.

2. I skip my break so I can get things done.

3. I think everything would be okay if PEOPLE WOULD JUST DO THEIR JOBS!

4. I start to suspect that the automatic check in machine is refusing to check in certain categories of items, say, craft books, out of some private, unfathomable vendetta.

5. I get so mad at people returning perfectly legitimate items (that happen to be irritating to deal with) that I start muttering swear words, completely unaware I am in a public place.

6. I adjust my work speed at the front desk to try and force certain people in line to go to my co-worker.

7. I start consulting with other crazy co-workers on work issues.

8. I body block browsing patrons out of position so I can shelve more freely.

9.  I don't use the last of something so I don't have to replace it.

10. I find myself occasionally freezing up and forgetting how the alphabet works. 

11. I am insistently trying to shove something somewhere that all scientific laws are confident that it cannot be shoved.

12. I stop thinking about everything at my job in terms of prospective blog posts.

What makes this the best Library blog of all Library blogs

People sometimes ask me "What makes your blog the best Library blog of them all?"

And I get super humble and shy, but very interested, and I ask "Who says this is the best Library blog of them all?"

And they say, "Well, in English, by a clerk." And they get a bit lost looking and slightly doubtful. Then they start mumbling a long string of qualifiers "Updated daily, amateur, 2013, humor category, phases of the moon, for Geminis..." until I can't hear them anymore.

So I ask again "But who says this is the best Library blog of them all?"

And they get real uncomfortable looking, like maybe they've made a very unpleasant mistake and really wish we could talk about something else now, but I'm looking at them quite a lot so they say, kind of evasively "I don't know, people say, I guess, or I read it somewhere."

And I can tell I'm almost about to get them so upset that they get mad, so I try and ask all casual and calm-like "So, um, do you remember anywhere in particular you saw this best blog thing? Just, if you happen to remember, I mean. No pressure." But I think my hand might be trembling when I ask, like Boromir discussing the one ring.

And they say "I don't know! Look it up yourself if you're so interested!" And they run out of the room nearly in tears.

So I do look it up, using my internet research skills, and what do you know, my blog actually is the best Library blog of them all. It turns out it's not an opinion thing, but actually scientifically based. And after all that research I find I can answer the person's original question "What makes your blog the best Library blog of them all?" except that the person in question now seems to be avoiding me, so I'll just answer the question for you here. It does turn out though that the question requires some slight modification.

What makes my blog the best non professional, English language, Library blog of them all

1. It's a 34-way tie for first.

2. Many Library blogs are written in ancient languages, and so writing in English I face no competition from all the excellent blogs written in, say, Etruscan, or Carian. I have always blamed the American educational system for my not knowing Carian, but perhaps they had my best interests at heart all along.

3. While my skimpy amount of pictures makes my blog very "2002" and causes a lot of reading, it skews well with the powerful Library traditionalists who think illustrations are for small children.


4. I think I donated $20 to the Fund for Widows and Orphans of Blog Evaluators.


5. Elegiacal plus silly equals rainbows!


6. I am a servant of the Secret Fire. I can't say more about that here.


7. The wiring in my blog foyer is now completely up to code. Note to aspiring bloggers: the evaluators are maniacs for code stuff. Ignoring a  loose cobble on your blog's river path or a sick carp in your Japanese Garden can cost you dozens of points! 


8. It totally doesn't matter to me how I rank, whether I was hundredth best or first best was all the same to me, and, as the Tao says:
 
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Which is why I think I won.