Ethics is a pisser

Ethics is a pisser. 

There's a Bill Bryson book sitting on a table. Is there a problem with it? Does it need to be checked in? I pick it up. There's something inside, a bookmark or whatever. I open it up. The bookmark is two twenty dollar bills! TWO TWENTY DOLLAR BILLS!

I know it can be hard these days to add up so much money, but that adds up to 40 dollars total! I can really use 40 dollars right now. I would like 40 dollars. It would be so happy in my wallet, and here it is, in my hands, nearly mine.

But it is not my 40 dollars.

So I look up the Bill Bryson book to see who it is checked out to. No one. I look up to see who it was checked out to. It was checked out to an older man, judging at least by his pre WWII birthday. And here in his record is his phone number.

I hate calling people!

I call the old man. He is there.

"I'm calling from the library. Did you return a Bill Bryson book today with something in it?" I ask.

"Oh my God!" He cries. "That is where my two twenty dollar bills are!" He is rejoicing. "I went to the bank and have been looking all day! Oh, thank God!"

"Yes, we have your twenty dollar bills here. I'll put it in an envelope in our safe with your name on it."

"You found them and you called me? Oh, thank you so much! You are so wonderful. You are a wonderful person."

"Er. thank you. Anyway, it'll be here for you."

"I'll be in as soon as I can get there. Thank you! You have saved my life."

All right. I guess ethics isn't necessarily that bad.

Happy Halloween

I am so accustomed here, on the top coast of America, to see my favorite season, Fall, race by in a blaze of dying burning color, that I was almost surprised to look up today and notice that fall is still going on. Mid October, windy, flowers still blooming, and the trees all scarlet and maroon, burnt orange, peeled liver, terrible fight of ravens, burning poisonous mushroom, and other such prosaic, cozy paint swatch names. It was seventy degrees today! I found half a dozen golden raspberries in my raspberry garden that had barely produced that many raspberries in the whole of this summer. I ate them. They tasted as much like honey as they did raspberries. More are growing. They tasted like good riddance to summer. They tasted like I laugh at winter. 

I looked into the sky and saw a great flock of geese flying north. The moon rose in the day and a witch flew across it wearing shorts. The local squirrels set down their industry. I think they might have decided to start another family. Why not, the acorns keep coming and coming. Tulips are blooming out of squashes in the front yard of my neighbors. They are curled and spotted and dark and fresh and strong, like a phosphorescent match made of coffee. Dun colored songbirds are slowly turning the color of radiant mustards to blend in better. The black cat that regularly strolls through our yard, ignoring us, but still delighting us, eyes the little birds and relaxes. The leaves of the trees only fall sparsely in the day and then they climb back up into the trees before dawn, when no one is watching.

We saw someone who had pulled their car to the side of our street today. They stood in the middle of the road taking feverish pictures. I understand, but know the futility of it. These colors will not resolve on your camera. They have ventured beyond proper names. They have eaten the city. For a week, every day I have said at some point to myself, ah, today must be the peak of fall. 

But this fall has no peak. We may die forever and never be dead.

And this fall may never end.

The descending levels of hot coffees

Yesterday I wrote about very hot coffee. What happened was I was having a fire in the backyard with my wife and I put some cold press on the stove in the house to warm up, but was talking so excitedly about Disney World that I forgot about it and the coffee got very, very hot. Over the several dozen hours it took this scalding coffee to cool down I watched it pass through many stages of heat levels. And I thought "I would like to describe these descending levels of heat on my blog." So I sat down to do so, but a very different, though not totally unrelated, blog post came out instead.

This sort of thing happens to me all the time. In fact, it is very much in danger of happening to me right now unless I wrestle this whole blog post back to what it's supposed to be. But, before I do, imagine if you made dinner and sat down to eat it and it turned out to be something else! Like, you sear some salmon and serve it with papaya salsa, wild rice, and delicately sauteed snap peas, but as you start eating it you realize it has become Penne with wild mushrooms and a Caesar Salad. This is me and blogging at least three days a week. This is why I try not to get too attached to my original concept. I try to enjoy rolling with it. "Oh, penne, then!" I say. "How delightfully lemony!" But sometimes I keep in mind my original plan and try again the next day. That's what I'm doing now, except a really huge unplanned appetizer (this whole discussion) somehow worked its way into everything, and now I'm a lot less hungry.

Nevertheless here is my descending levels of heat for hot coffee beverages:

10. So dangerously hot it is not safe to be in the same room with it.

9. So terribly hot that you know you can do nothing about drinking it, but you can now gaze longingly at it.

8. Totally undrinkably hot, but you can start to pretend it isn't too hot, and you can blow hopelessly on it and marvel at the heat you can feel just by being in close proximity.

7. Still too hot to drink, but you can't take the waiting anymore and so drink a badly calculated sip and burn your tongue horribly on it and suffer for two days.

6. Too hot to drink, but only causing minor burns if you carefully slurp the drink in small airy bits into your mouth.

5. Really hot but not burning and makes you feel immensely satisfied that you have the power to drink such a hot liquid.

4. Hot/warmish everything is perfect in the world on a cool day.

3. Warm but not warming. You start to feel nostalgic about the earlier thrills of its heat.

2. Warm, I guess. I better hurry and finish this before it's too late.

1. I think there is a shred of warmth left in this cup or it wouldn't still register on my scale of descending levels of heat for hot coffee beverages. Nevertheless I am only finishing the drink out of a sense of duty and take no pleasure in it.

The imaginary science of hot coffee

As a heat averse person who grew up unhappily in sunny Southern California and still mostly has to unstoically endure warmer than you'd think Minnesota summers, one might guess that I am wary of hot beverages. I am. I am very wary. When I go to a mystery cafe somewhere and order their $4 cappuccino I am disappointed if the espresso is poor and badly pulled, or the milk is evil and hormone laden, or the drink's presentation is bad, perhaps slopped in some narrow paper cup, but the one thing that really breaks my coffee loving heart is when the drink is too hot. I don't care how hot regular old coffee is so long as it is absolutely safe to drink without any danger of burning, and I believe that a cappuccino is properly served just barely over the hot side from very warm.

For cappuccino I have a technical, scientific justification for my preference. The glorious microfoam made in steaming milk, that light, liquid, magical stage of creamy frothed milk, is produced strictly in the warm to very warm stage of steaming. As the temperature progresses into "hot", your beautiful, delicious, velvety, exquisite, and perfect microfoam will evolve into that dreadful, stiff, and flavorless foam that is dramatic, pointlessly divorced from the espresso, and difficult to consume. You have had this in many of the bad coffee shops you have ever been to. And there is a very reasonable chance, with the overheated milk and hard foam covering it like a layer of roofing insulation, that you burnt your tongue on it.

I always burn my tongue on it. I hate burning my tongue on it.

Do I have all the research and technical data to back up all the science in this post about hot coffee?

No, no, I just make stuff up here, and I hope that the plausibility of it all will wander over to the land of truth, and there take up residence.

I appear on American Idol!

Sometimes there is a confluence of unlikely mistakes that leads to disaster. I would like to say that at least not all of these mistakes were my own. Yes, I am responsible for never having seen an episode of American Idol. I also horribly misread the audience. But it was surely their error in which an intensely competitive screening process mysteriously broke down and allowed me onstage to perform without my act having been vetted or previewed in any way.

I thought American Idol was a talent competition more like The Gong Show. I didn't know that it was devoted to singing in particular.

I also didn't know that only young people are allowed on the show.

You see, I am occasionally seized with a desire to publicize my blog, you know, expose a larger audience to it. While I delight in my 50 to 100 regular and occasional readers, sometimes I am feverishly possessed by an overwhelming ambition. "What would it be like," I wonder to myself "To have 300 regular readers?" And then I pass out because it's all too much for me.

But sometimes, when I come to once again, I have a plan.

I had heard American Idol has as many as 20 million viewers. What if I read my blog aloud to them? So I showed up at an American Idol taping, said I was there to perform, and was ushered on to the stage.

I think I would have done much, much better with makeup. There was such chaos in me being rushed to the stage that I didn't get any makeup. I'm afraid it made me look sweaty. Of course, the fact that I was very sweaty made me look sweaty as well.

They asked me what I was going to sing.

This surprised me. I told them awkwardly that I was going to be reading from my Library Blog, clerkmanifesto.com. I was going to read about libraries.

"Clerk what?" They asked.

"clerkmanifesto" I mumbled.

I hear they can be sort of rough to contestants on American Idol, but they were fairly nice to me. I looked down at my crumpled sheet of text and had one of those mysterious waves of confidence I experience rarely, but occasionally. "This crowd is in for some kind of treat!" I thought. Then I began reading:

Wabi Sabi Library

Wabi Sabi is a Japanese aesthetic valuing the imperfection in things, the imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. The slow, the weathered, the authentic and the unfinished. I am very enthusiastic about Wabi Sabi and seek at all times to bring the principles and beauty of Wabi Sabi to my Library. This is why when someone comes to my desk and says "I would like to renew this book." I say "I would like for this to happen too. Perhaps if we both concentrate."

It went on from there and if you want to read the rest, by all means, click here.

It only took a couple minutes to read and I was pretty sure, while I was reading, that the large audience was enraptured. It was only when I finished and was met by a most disturbing silence that I realized this was not the case.

"Er. Thank you." Said one of the judges quietly, almost sadly.

Apparently I was the first person ever on American Idol to receive zero votes.

It was a bit uncomfortable. I still feel it was a good piece, just not suitable for, er, most, um, people on the planet. Also I looked all sweaty, which, as we know, was Nixon's downfall in the Kennedy Nixon debates. Or one of Nixon's downfalls.

Nevertheless, after the whole fiasco was over, I did go home and check my blog statistics. I wondered if, even if I didn't get any votes, perhaps among twenty million viewers there were some people who showed an interest in my blog.

According to my statistics I got four hits. But I think one of those four was a regular reader. So, actually, in the end, three people out of twenty million came and took a look at my blog due to my appearance on American Idol. Sure, to you that might not sound super impressive, but it's about par for me re exposure and results. And I'm pretty sure one of those readers, a person from Burlington, Vermont has become a semi regular reader. 

So in the end, you probably wonder, was the humiliation worth it?

I guess so. You know the saying  "A bisel und a bisel vert a fule schisl".

That means "Little by little you get a full pot."

Welcome Vermonter!

Ants not bees

Yesterday I experienced the astonishing revelation that there is virtually nothing to separate my workplace, metaphorically speaking, from an ant colony. Now, fresh in my mind, it is hard not to think about it a lot. I have many questions for myself. And what better place to ask them than here, where with my authorial voice, resplendent with awesome power, I can make up answers to them.

Q. Why ants and not bees?

A. We scurry and do not fly. We are no friend to flowers, or magical collectors of honey, but simple workers in humble pursuit of our unending maintenance. Although, on second thought, we are rather a kind of pollinator of knowledge and information, though not very effective ones, which, it turns out, is true of ants with flowers as well!

Q. Is this a Kafkaesque thing?

A. Everything is a Kafkaesque thing, but that said he was mainly concerned with an individual in Metamorphosis. This is about our nature as community, and it is open to being taken either with phlegmatic appreciation or with horror. When we humans lost ourselves as beings purely of the weave in the fabric of life we became an echo of all the works of evolution. We talk often of Anthropomorphizing,  but it isn't that really. It is we who are chameleons, borrowing everything from the works of evolution before us. We are monkeys and cats, pigs, and, of course, chameleons, and, at work, in institutions, ever and always, colonies of ants.

Q. Do you engage in symbiotic behavior with other animals, the way ants sometimes do with aphids?

A. Yes, we call the creatures "Patrons" and they rotate the materials through our nest, and provide our reason for being.

Q. Do you have a Queen?

A. Yes, but as with ants, you should not ascribe too much or too little to that role.

Q. If you are so exactly like a ant's nest then where are the ant bloggers?

A. Many of the best bloggers in the world are ants, but you must be able to read chemical to read them.

The social life of insects

I work in an ants' nest. And it occurs to me that it is pretty amazing that after 600 blog posts about working at a library (never, not once, ever veering off topic) this, the most absolutely perfect analogy for my job, that I work in an ants' nest, has not, until now, occurred to me!

Indeed, I was planning on writing about some trifling aspect of co-worker communication when I tossed off this analogy to you in passing. I was about to move on, but suddenly my antenna started twitching. I dipped my mandibles into my morning cappuccino ruminatively and knew something was up. All other considerations of blog topics must be put on hold because I must tell you about how my workplace is exactly like an ant colony!

It's as if I were on some minor scouting mission to collect morning dew and ran into a mountain of sugar. One's priorities change.

Yet, oddly, I am almost overwhelmed by how much my job is like being part of a colony of ants. My brain is so flooded with all the truth of it I hardly know where to begin. It is all so screamingly apparent that I don't know what to say. Perhaps if I provide little glimpses, visions that match an ant colony.

There is the way we have our big back room, the hive, and how we workers venture out into the world of the library on various tasks, but always return back here, often with a collection of items, to our nest of workers (indeed the whole of the work areas of the library are divided into cells). There is the way we communicate, mostly one to one, spreading information throughout the nest in a chain reaction, in a mysterious osmosis (do we use chemicals?).  And then it is also how bigger news is sometimes conveyed by a worker returning from the wider world, the public part of the library, and telling a clustered group in something like a dramatic tribal dance. There is the way everything is about the nest, the work, and the unending cycles and collecting and processing, every moment of every workday structured around this. We scurry along our secret, regular back paths. We move things that weigh more than us. We work in tandem hardly even knowing we're working in tandem. We have our castes, instead of soldiers, workers, pupae, queens, we have clerks, pages, librarians, volunteers, managers. New workers periodically appear in the nest where they are carefully nurtured just up to the first moment they can work on their own. Old workers disappear with little ceremony. Always, always, always, the hive must carry on, the work, the life, and we in it.

Every once in awhile I stumble upon an idea for a blog post that really would be more proper as a 300 page non fiction book. And so I have here. Let this stand as an introduction then. I say this without rancor or judgement or aversion. I work in an ants' nest. I am an ant. You might be too.

The delicate balance

A longtime co-worker of mine, who I have always liked quite well enough, has gone up to shelve some fiction before me. I follow in her wake. Not only does it turn out that I am shelving twice as fast as her (which I try not to put too much store in, as my own shelving speed ranges from "My god you are freakishly productive" all the way down to "You know, you have to actually put the books on the shelf for them to be "shelved""), but, more importantly, I am finding that she is completely ignoring and bypassing all the plentiful books that have been looked at and abandoned messily in the stacks, and is just leaving a mess for me. She is not re-shelving or cleaning up anything that needs to be taken care of.

I really don't want to know this about her.

I don't want to see my amiable, pleasant, friendly colleagues, who every once in awhile I must rely on, and who are part of the mosaic of work and place we all at the library make in tandem, I don't want to see them being pointlessly obstructionist or misleading to a patron, I don't want to see them bumping up a full bin so someone else will have to replace it two minutes after they're gone, and I don't want to see them ignoring the simplest of responsibilities that are right before them merely because they're a tiny bit more irritating than their other responsibilities. Furthermore, while we're at it, I don't want to see my pleasant co-worker's Republican bumper sticker, or their crappy parenting, or find out in the break room that their lunch is a shredded human flesh sandwich.

"Oh," They say. "You didn't know I was a cannibal?"

I mumble something awkwardly in response and wander off, urgently willing myself to believe I misheard them. "Yes." I mutter to myself. "What they asked is if I didn't know that they're Catalan, not cannibal. I must have misheard "human flesh" for "Spanish goat dish"."

I find for the most part that I like who I like among my co-workers, and that includes most of them. And the fact is, though I occasionally try to, I have never been much good at looking away or at glossing over. For all I might think I look away, I can give you a pretty shocking detailing of all my co-workers' professional weaknesses, along with a good many of all their other ones as well.

Actually, I can do the same for myself.

In the end the truth outs. 

I suppose I can take it if you can.

Sort of an old joke

I like to make fun of Bob Dylan here. Partly I just find him amusing. Partly I think he's just a wee bit too cool for school and the humility will be good for him. This perhaps is why he is drawn to my blog, like a moth to a flame. Though I admit he never likes it when I imitate his voice. Partly I think he is the great cultural giant of his time and that makes everything around him a trifle too important. One day he'll be dead, and then just you try mocking him! We'd better get it in now, because then it won't be easy. Just look how far you can get now mocking Caravaggio, or Shakespeare, though I hope you might consider giving it a whirl.

But despite my forays into Dylan teasing, I am a great admirer of his work. And to prove that my mockeries are not just a bunch of ignorant churlishness I thought I would show the depth of my Dylan scholarship here and appease, a little, the very, very, very earnest Dylan fans on my blog who feel I may have been a bit too hard on him.

First I'd like to say I've had a sort of silent moratorium on links in this blog for awhile, but it's Sunday, and I feel I can break a few rules, especially the ones I didn't even know were rules until I started breaking them. These links are to music. My list won't be too long and you don't have to hit the links to appreciate this post. You can, if you like, merely admire the list in all its elegant simplicity.

With all that said, here is a list of what I feel to be Bob Dylan's very best little known work. How little known? Dylan is one of the most rigorously cataloged artists there is, and yet I never find these following works listed in any of his discographies. Even if you are not a Dylan fan you may enjoy dazzling the Dylan fans you know by pulling these quite obscure works out of your hat.

So without further ado:

 Bob Dylan's very best, very obscure recordings:

5. Last night I had a dream

4.  The Ballad of Geraldine

3. Lake Marie

2. Shadows on a dime  

1. The Dreamer



 

My secret messages

I have, apparently, been leaving secret messages to myself. I don't know I am leaving these messages at the time I leave them, but messages I am leaving nonetheless.

They are written on post it notes, which, in fact, is how I write quite a few of my blog posts at work, or walking down the street, or wherever I am. And, actually, my messages to myself are blog posts, but just little bits of them, taken out of context.

Today, for instance, I was shelving, and I was also working on a blog post about startled animals whenever I needed a break from the over industriousness of that shelving. I may also have been taking back for some slight, some feeling that the library as an institution had taken something from me. These small balances of justice are crucial when you're not in a very powerful position and you're in it for the long haul.

We are all in it for the long haul.

So I had written about four post it note pages worth of my blog post when I decided all debts were balanced (and then some!) and it was time for me to get some books shelved. I diligently, and with an earnest attempt at perfect accuracy, shelved all my books. Then I returned to my cart to head downstairs. On my cart was my post it pad. It was open to a page that said this:

Why bother with such things when there is this lovely, simple path leading away?

Indeed.

Startled to flight

Have you ever been walking in the woods and startled some small animal, perhaps a wee bunny, or a stoat, or maybe some fluffy songbird whose name you will never know? Alarmed, the little creature flutters or scampers away from you, down the path, to safety.

"Ah" Says the little one to itself "Now I am safe and distant from that heavy-walking giant."

But of course, they aren't, because that is the direction you are walking. And so inevitably you come upon the animal again. And again they rush away. They do not rush into the woods or fly up high and off into the wind. Why bother with such things when there is this lovely, simple path leading so effectively away.

And so the interruption and the fleeing repeats itself so many times you almost feel guilty. But you don't really know what to do either. There is the path, and the path is the way to go.

You walk, the creature hops away, and you repeat forever.

And so it is with shelving in the Fiction section at the library. There I am in the "C's". I push my cart down one side, shelving as I go. I sidle gently past the browsing patron who looks up from their book and shuffles to the side. As I work back up the row the patron sees me coming and clears out before I am upon them directly. They're just browsing, it doesn't matter if they're in the "D's" and "E's". So they pop around the corner and find some new volume to look at. I work my way up my empty aisle but soon I am on to the next aisle. And there is that patron once again. We do it all one more time. And we do it one more time after that as well, working our way through the whole alphabet one disturbance at a time.

I have only found one proper solution to all this, whether with stoats or browsing patrons. I stop and pull out a pad of paper. And I tell you about it, hoping that it takes so long that the issue clears of its own accord.

The ISP ate my soul!

This week I am consumed with the sheer unbridled agony of dealing with Centurylink, a large Internet Service Provider of such magnificent and nuanced evil there is no way to speak properly of it. All the diatribes I compose in my head for them come off as uncontrollably hysterical, or unhinged, or boringly unbelievable. I am so defeated by the possibility of even speaking a sliver of the truth to them that I have given in. My resistance is futile. I succumb. Their model shall be my model.

I know you may have enjoyed the free,  pleasant, easy going, non profit nature of this blog. But, alas, we cannot live any longer in this utopian hippie dream. This blog, clerkmanifesto, shall forever more be run on the Centurylink model.

But don't worry, I will try to make the transition as easy as possible.

We will start by sending to your home four pieces of mail every day announcing all the splendid subscription opportunities to clerkmanifesto. These will all have appealing rates that have nothing to do with anything you would likely be eligible for. If the appealing rates do apply to you they will only be for our economical "Non consonant service". Some people's blog needs are satisfied purely with vowels, but for only $10 more a month clerkmanifesto will bring you all the consonants too! To get that great "includes consonants" deal you merely need to bundle. You know about bundling right?

Just choose two of the following services to lock in your price:

1. Unscrambled letters delivery. This service allows you to read each word without having to unscramble the ttesrel, oops, letters.

2. Prime time viewing access. Do you find it inconvenient to only be able to view clerkmanifesto between one and five in the morning? With prime time viewing access you can view it round the clock! This is a good choice for bundlers who would rather not bundle because it's the cheapest add on choice at only $6.95, so ends up being basically free, not counting communication taxes, specialty taxes, start up fees, the Internet clock drive purchase (it can also be rented), and one time debits.

3. Unlisted blog viewing. With this feature no one will know you read this blog. You don't want people knowing that you read clerkmanifesto do you? People have a way of... talking.

Okay, then. After a long period of mail bombardment you are bound to give in and call to set up a subscription. Don't worry, an incredibly emotionless, vague, corporate sounding person will guide you through the process. Whatever you work out with them will have absolutely nothing to do with any of those 3,000 offers you received in the mail and read on billboards. But after four hours on the phone you had to agree to something. It sounded okay, almost like you got kind of a deal.

At first things will seem to go fairly well, maybe too well. Why are you getting beautiful reproductions of blog posts in elegant, hand done calligraphy, with illustrations, on vellum? Why does Bob Dylan come to your house on Thursdays, with a pizza, and read the Sunday blog post aloud to you? Why does the blog keep mentioning you in flattering ways? Didn't you sign up for Unlisted blog viewing? It kind of ruins it if you're constantly being referenced on the blog. Why do you get these obscure and beautiful liqueurs with little notes suggesting "pairings" ("this Dancing Pines Brulee Caramel liqueur, served at five degrees below room temperature, will be a lovely accompaniment to the post regarding the Samurai and the Zen Cat, sip it gently").

Your first bill will come. You were expecting it to be roughly $2.95. You accepted that there might be communication taxes. So you are slightly surprised to find your bill is for $7,343.93. None of the vast listing of charges seems to reference anything that makes any sense to you, though "clerkmanifesto" crops up in there a few times.

You will give us a call. 

You do know that, like, 45 people read this blog? So naturally you are put on hold. We make you punch in a lot of numbers on your phone, but it's just our nice way of keeping you occupied while you wait for us because we will ask for all the same information when we come on and talk to you.

You will have had a lot of time to prepare your speech and so you will deliver it quite well to the first customer service agent. This person understands things did not go according to your confused ideas of what was supposed to happen. They ask a couple of strange, misunderstanding questions like "Why did you sign up for the liqueur pairings if you don't enjoy liqueurs?" which forces you to repeat sections of your speech all over. Finally they seem to understand that you never actually wanted Bob Dylan to come to your house, even if it is an amazing bargain at just $1,100 a month introductory offer. They put you on hold for a long time twice to work on the problem. Finally, when you think they are coming back on the line to say "I have resolved the problem." they come back on the line to say "I am going to transfer you to a person who can help you."

You will be transferred to a person who has no idea why you were transferred to them, or who you are. You tell your story a few more times to a few more people until someone will finally roll up their sleeves and get to work.

"Okay, let me get this straight. You don't want the 'Bob Dylan reads you the Sunday blog post feature? You're aware that this is a fantastic bargain? He does it at cost because he's such a fan."

"That's great." You say. "But no thank you."

"Check. And you don't want the "Fans of clerkmanifesto Mazatlan timeshare?"

"What? No!" You will say.

And so you will whittle the services down. After much hard work the customer service agent will proudly announce "All right, we have it down to just receiving full access to clerkmanifesto with no add-ons. The monthly fee is reduced all the way down to $415.45.

"No!" You cry out. "It's supposed to be $2.95!"

"Okay." The person says. "It will be $2.95 a month."

You will be stunned at how easy it all was, even though you just spent six of the most miserable hours of you life on the phone. All that is nothing to you now. You can hardly believe it. You will ask them to confirm the price 14 times.

Full of joy you read clerkmanifesto with a light heart. And then a week later $312.91 will be automatically deducted from your bank account. There will be more calls to make. Many many many more calls.

But I say to you; is that so bad?


Where else could you read a blog of this quality?

What do we make of this?

We have a lot of volunteers at my library. Some are boisterous and interactive, but a surprisingly large number of them are very quiet, diligent, persistent. With all these people, coming in for two or six or ten hours a week, an important part of the library's work gets done. There is little fanfare, little drama, and a good deal of steady work. Pretty much every day I come to work there are two or four or six of them emptying carts, putting things in order, collecting items from one of our various printed lists.

So, yesterday, we had a thank you brunch for them. It was very nice. There were attractive sandwiches and pastries- a nice spread, as my people say. The Director came in and talked to the volunteers and told them how vital and important and virtuous and wonderful they all are. I only caught a bit of the end of this soiree, but it looked like it all went very nicely.

And then today I came to work; no volunteers anywhere. I searched around. I thought maybe they'd come in later. No. I've been here now for 5 hours. I still haven't seen a one. I'd usually have seen about eight by now. Zero, nada, nothing. Certain things are starting to back up. There are absolutely no volunteers to be found.

There is a story I have told you about people who donate books to us, and it goes something like this:

The person who donates mid nineties computer programming books, or yellowed, smelly generic best sellers of the 1980's, that is, books that are mainly useless to us, asks much of us. They want their cars emptied of these books, they want their boxes and bags back, they hunger for our gracious appreciation, and they definitely, absolutely want a receipt for tax purposes ("So, shall I put down a value of, say, minus four dollars and eleven cents?"). But get people who bring in books we might use, or at least be able to sell for actual money, and it's all humble graciousness ("You sure you don't want a receipt for these beautiful first edition Dickens?" "Oh, please! It's you who give so much to me!").

This makes me think that perhaps we have crossed a line with our volunteers. Perhaps it was all too much for them. In fact, I think it was. All they ask is that we just not speak of what they give. They simply like to come empty bins for the library. Could we just leave it at that?

I guess not.

Ah well, what's done is done. Eventually, I am sure, they will recover from the burdens of our appreciation. It will fade far enough into the past, and they will return to their gracious virtue.

The Disney argument: The Borghese

Let us start someplace odd. Let us make a sharp left turn before we even take a single step on the road of arguing for Disney. No, we speak here not of the Movies or the Empire or the Corporation, though they are all hard to fully separate out, we are here making an argument for the Parks, the Disney Parks. And in our first argument, as I said, we veer off immediately like a madman.

This is to show you that it is not quite what you think.

Alas, nothing is quite what one thinks. All praise and lamentations.

So we start with this first, ever so simple and straightforward question:

What is your favorite Disney Ride?

Upon careful consideration I assert that my favorite Disney Ride is...

The Galleria Borghese.

Oh, fine, yes, I guess it's a museum, sort of. And it's in Rome, Italy. It is vastly older than any of the works of Disney Imagineers. It is full of famous art. It has no boat, and it has not, and has never been, owned by Disney. It is decidedly not in a Disney Park. It has no Disney characters. It, really, has nothing to do with Disney.

I admit all this.

But, excepting all of that. It is a Disney ride. You have to get a ticket. You go with a group of people. It is entirely designed to dazzle and entertain. The overall effect it is going for is magic. Moods are intentionally created in different theme locations. The best works in the Borghese adapt famous stories, mostly mythological, some biblical, but my fervent belief is that these best works are no more religious arguments, or expressions of belief in their source material, than, for instance, Disney artists working with the story of Beauty and the Beast. OH! And the special effects. I need a new paragraph to explain about the special effects.

The Disney parks create clever environments and simulate reality in entertaining ways with special effects so ornate and sophisticated and expensive that they are one of a kind. What fun to take a boat ride through a burning pirate town that is not really burning, but looks like it is burning. If you want to see something like that you can only go to these few places, these Disney Parks. Well, so it is with the Borghese. All your modern rich people in the world cannot reproduce this 17th Century ornateness. Or they could, I suppose, but are no more likely to than they are to build themselves their own Pirates of the Caribbean Ride. And, yes, these special effects. The greatest sculptor of them all, Bernini, has many of his best statues in the Borghese. There were no animatronics or special lighting and space age fabrics when he worked, but that doesn't mean he didn't create mind blowing special effects with marble. When he makes marble appear as a hand pressing into the flesh of a thigh he blah blah blah art (and indeed, great art it is), but he is also flatly concerned with bowling you over in much the same way that they are trying to bowl you over when they put you in a haunted room and it actually starts to stretch. The whole room stretches!

We can make a distinction for art. And perhaps this is why a Caravaggio painting is better than the Jungle Cruise. But it must be said that all these entertainments done well, done magnificently, have a great deal in common, art or no art: Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, Raiders of the Lost Ark, It's All Over Now Baby Blue, Splash Mountain, a goal by Messi, and Frontierland. All of them engage in a simple enough pursuit of doing something amazing. Some go beyond that in some ways, some don't, but, for this tiny group that fully succeeds, it's an awful lot to share at the outset.

I do like The Galleria Borghese best of all the Disney rides. And in its way it is utterly perfect. But it suffers from imperfections as well. It is located very far away from me. It has no moving seats or any portion that involves floating on water. It also lacks a thrilling little drop. I'm not complaining about this best of all rides. I'm just saying why the best solution is to go on a lot of different e-ticket rides of many kinds. They have a whole bunch of them in Orlando, Florida. Plus they have Pooh. So I thought I'd like to go there, this time.

Library update!

Because of the unseemly array of things that are implied about us, as an institution, when we talk about "Lost" items, we will no longer be classifying anything we cannot find as lost. 

It is such a suggestively ugly word, lost.

These items, at my library, are now to be officially know as "Unfound".

The great blog wheel

Did you know I write a blog post every day?

Not all of them are as good as this one is so far. 

But somewhere deep in my heart I think each one will take your absolute breath away. Nevertheless the Internet can be ever so quiet, and I wonder, what happened?

Sometimes I wonder and wonder, groping blindly through the universe. Sometimes I poke the Internet with a stick. Sometimes I point at the ever slumbering monster of the Internet and cry out "Look! It is so big it can see nothing!"

Sometimes I am steady, and I think "Here, I will tell them this. They will like this."

Sometimes I make up everything, I dream into the silence. You have wandered into a dream.

I think you know this and that is why you are quiet. For what decent person will stomp around in their boots when they walk through a dream. Shh.

Every day I do something different here and everyday I do something the same. Today I have a secret to share:

Every artist in the world, even me, will say that we are not telling you what to do, but that is our lie. That is the lie that lets us carry on.

Every artist is telling you what to do. We struggle only to hold in our hands the resignation that you will not do it.

You just won the blog championship! What will you do next?

For an upcoming milestone birthday I will be going with my wife to Disney World. I am telling you because it could come up in discussion on my blog.

Like, for instance, now.

I have ascertained in my life that the statement "I am going to Disney World" elicits one of two basic responses from all the people I know.

"How exciting! I am jealous. Take me with you!"

And

"Why?"

To the first I say "I know! Right?"

To the second I can only sputter out words like "Robots!" "Magic!" "Pirates!" "Pooh!" and "Glowy!" before I realize I am not making myself clear. I would really have to turn this into a Disney World Blog to answer the question "Why?" A question that I suspect is more than a tad rhetorical anyway.

The fact of the matter is that explaining the greatness and appeal of Disney World/Disneyland is a lot like trying to argue for the virtuosity of Bob Dylan's singing voice, a steeply uphill battle with those not already convinced. Actually, it might not even be a hill, it might be better described as a cliff.

Indeed, I'm pretty sure making a case for Disney to the distinctly unconvinced is entirely hopeless. So, in the next couple of weeks to come I'll probably be giving it a whirl.

What's the point of having a beautiful lance like this blog if I don't go tilting after a few windmills with it?

Pay it forward

Yesterday I was making the joke with one of my co-workers about taking back the the concept of paying it forward. Like so: one of my co-workers got me sick so I am merely wandering around the workplace in an attempt to get someone else sick as a way to pay it forward, or, one of my co-workers startled me in the morning so I have carelessly slammed these two bins together to startle another of my co-workers as a way to pay it forward. The extension of that joke about paying it forward was to claim, in a perverse twist on humbleness, that it is not I who startled or sickened my co-worker, but the original person who startled or sickened me. I am just a middle man.

As you have probably guessed by now we are having an ethical discussion. The tip off is that none of these jokes are funny. Whenever your jokes are not funny you are forced into a psychological and ethical reckoning, which is why humor is so dangerous, and why the phrase "It was just a joke" will never do.

Never, ever.

For the psychology let us say I feel guilty about wandering around sick at work, infecting all the vulnerable people around me under the perverse guise of being too tough to be held down by a light illness. And then too my jokes are a joking-on-the-square hostility towards both those who came to work sick and so contributed to my current condition and that persistent sense, not unwarranted by my work culture, that I would be faintly letting down the team if I had stayed home.

I should have stayed home. 

I think now, though, I am post contagious, so the entire library can enjoy my occasional coughing and nose blowing without fear. 

Unless, of course, it's already too late for them.

That explained we can discuss ethics. 

I know, excellent!

I am, at work, occasionally, a very pay it forward kind of person. This is mostly, but certainly not always, in the good, not evil, version of that concept. I like to put extra slips around, and get a new, empty box, and polish up that patron's record and get a fresh roll of tape, and resolve the issue right here where I am. But I am aware that the virtuousness of all that, the paying it fowardness of it, is supposed to be traditionally predicated on providing a kindness to those other people coming after me. And yet, curiously, it almost never is.

You heard it here first. I am rarely seeking to anonymously benefit some unspecified future co-worker. Unless, perhaps, that person is me. The biggest reason I do these things is from the delusion that, in six hours, or 22 hours, or 70 hours, somehow, I will be the recipient of all these caring preparations. I am attempting to transact a kindness to myself through a series of middlemen. 

They rarely come through, but that is not my fault.

Autumn

Let us begin with the superiority of Fall. No, I'm not talking about my personal preference for 60 degree temperatures and the sound of dry leaves blowing over the ground and all these slow burning colors. And while to me all the deepened flavor of things condensed by age, and the sweet sadness of the season, the virtues of its holidays: Halloween, my birthday, make it the best season to me, I only make my argument for fall's superiority based on language. No other season warrants two names. Winter is Winter. Spring is Spring. And Summer is Summer. But Fall is Autumn, and Autumn is Fall, and the wind blows and leaves burst and everything comes to fruition and dies and all is sweet and fleeting and you must prepare now, but it is all around you for this one orange and rust and gold and crimson second.

And where is Autumn best? Where I live right now. Fall is our careful wine, all deep flavors, made from a whole season, one that normally runs 3 months long, taken and condensed into three weeks. And in condensing it we have only made every aspect of it more articulated, sweeter and more pure. Intoxicating in that way that will not get you drunk, but will make you glow and be full of love.

How, you wonder, do we pay for such an astonishing three weeks, these best three weeks of the year where flowers flourish even as whole trees seem to turn into strange, giant flowers themselves, and death sticks in its hand and amazes everyone once again by being irresistible.

Death is irresistible.

How do we pay for this?

We pay for this with six months of Winter.

But for some things, no price is too high.

How to contract pneumonia

It's not that I don't sort of love my job. I kind of do, occasionally, er, every once in awhile, I mean, on a perfect day, when everything is just so, and I slept enough, and I brought a really good lunch, and my co-workers are being super nice to me, and the patrons think I'm funny, and my house is flooded or something anyway, and I have a very exciting vacation coming up imminently.


But even though I am clearly just crazy about my job, I will not go to it under the absolutely flimsiest of pretexts. The faintest of backaches, sniffles, headaches or family illnesses can cause me to call in sick. I don't want to infect people, exacerbate my condition, alarm my co-workers, provide the community with less than 100%, or create a situation where I would have to miss much more time from work that I currently am. Everyday is a potential mental health day too, because any day I don't work is surprisingly good for my mental health. It cures depression, prolongs joy, staves off illness. So I like to keep a steady diet of calling in for those too.


The only downside to this, beside a recurring fear that when I call in that people are crying out "Again!" and cursing my name, is that it is hard to keep my sick hours properly stocked. Not only is it best to have a fair share of them to work with for normal illnesses, but it would be wise to keep a reserve of a month or two in case of some more serious illness. Getting to the six week mark has been a regular challenge to me.


So, perhaps perversely, I sometimes, rarely but sometimes, dig in my heels and insist on ignoring an illness and going to work anyway. This can help in the sick hours department, but it also helps me see what life is like for all those people I work with who have like 3,000 sick hours accumulated.


Which brings me to our current situation.


I got a sore throat. I felt generally achy and tired. I went to work anyway. I went one day, I went the next day.


My cold developed as it usually does. Today I have a runny nose, a cough. I'm very tired, but I'm not so sick I can't pretend that I'm not. Pretending is probably the operative word here. I went to bed fairly early last night, but I slept fitfully, occasionally drifting into an agonizing two coughs every three minutes cycle. My neck hurt from sleeping so deeply for the brief time I slept. I woke at dawn feeling generally crappy and thinking, most sensibly, about staying home.


"No, no. It's just a cold." I said to myself to see what it was like to be that sort of person. I had to say it like 30 times. I persevered. I prepared for my walk/bike commute while thinking hearty thoughts and sighing heavily. The sky was gray, but the weather forecast said it wouldn't rain until the evening. Who am I to reject the weather forecast that is right nearly 14 percent of the time! I am no meteorologist! So when I left home as it was raining lightly I was sure it was a fluke, maybe a gust of wind carrying in raindrops from some distant state where it really was raining.


"Maybe I should go home." I thought.


Instead I went back only to get a jacket and a hat. I was plucky!

The rain relented enough to lure me past the point of no return. Then it started raining again. Harder, and harder, and harder in a slow, steady increase. I pedaled through the water, my rising and falling knees being the first to truly soak. I had strangely forgotten how unpleasant the sensation of soaking jeans can be as well as how unsettling is that curious feeling of the water oozing its way down my legs into my shoes. 

The whole commute, as I often do, I wrote a blog post in my head. It was titled "How to contract Pneumonia". Well, here it is. Hours later, at work, my feet are still wet and cold. Good thing I prudently saved up all that sick time by going to work. I may need it.