The big news

 


There's nothing wrong with email's ability to disseminate information. There's a pretty good chance you are reading these words via email and look how knowledgeable and informed you are.

You are incredibly knowledgeable and informed!

But only about the important things.

Nevertheless email cannot begin to compare to the power of word of mouth when it comes to the really big things. The news about our library director resigning flew through the back room of my library like a swarm of bats, thousands of bats all startled in a single, dramatic moment. It was unmissable. Even if one was on one's email at the precise second the news broke, the act of clicking on the read button of that message, or even reading its subject title, would have lagged badly behind the almost physical burst of information as it tore through the staff.

In the eruption of this earth shattering news the staff was instantly formed by the force of it into small, local groups to furiously discuss the prospects, meaning, causes and details of this major library news. No one was talking about anything at all other than our library director's new job and who our new library director might be. And nobody was not talking. Every other consideration, gossip, discussion, and work issue was swept into nothingness by the magnitude and interest of this vital news that was bound to affect every one of us.

This flurry of fascinated, overwhelming obsession lasted for about ten minutes, at which point every drop of juice, even every hint of moisture, was sucked out of the news and all that was left was a dried out, dessicated husk.

So we went back to chatting about all the other things, and since then we have hardly discussed it again.

Old people joke

Once upon a time at my library we got phone calls all the time. All the time. You had two options, you could come in to the library, or you could call us, and a lot of the time calling us was much the better solution as you could do it in your underwear. But slowly technical automations came into the system. You could take care of an occasional library thing by yourself simply by punching numbers into your phone. This didn't make a huge difference for us as staff, but it presaged the Internet, and the Internet made a huge difference. But you know that story. Soon so many things could be done on the Internet that eventually hours could go by at the library without our phone ringing at all.

But that's not to say it never rings. And though hours can go by without it ringing we can still get a burst of ten calls in half an hour. But because that is so the exception at this point I am not really prepared for it when it happens. And I find that I take umbrage at that flurry of phone calls. The vast majority of these issues could easily be resolved by all these people on their own. They are calling on my time, and adding to my workload all so I can do something as simple as read them the names of items checked out on their record. I am interrupted from important work and/or goofing around in order to renew books for them even though there are several simple ways for them to take care of that themselves. I have to give them basic information they could get by reading their receipt, using the Web, or simply by having pushed the correct number on their phone. I may even have to transfer them to another person at the library just because they couldn't be bothered to listen to the quite simple instructions on our phone system. 

Oh yes, I can get quite irritated at them.

But then, fortunately I remember, and calm down: Hey, these people lived through The Great Depression, they fought in WWII. How could it hurt me to be kind to them?

Jealousy

It is an unavoidable fact that most of the patrons I see when I am working at the library are in some state of leisure. They are here wiling an afternoon away with a cozy book, or picking out movies to watch at home later that evening, or even just surfing the Internet as they wait for the drugs to kick in. All this wanton recreation makes it a ripe environment for the induction of jealousy on my part. After all, I wish I could just sit around anonymously reading for hours and hours, but I have to shelve these books. I would love to look up more gelaterias in Rome on the library's serviceable public computers during some idle early evening where I have nothing to do, but I don't have nothing to do. I'm working!


For the most part the nature of our clientele has helped to save me from the bitter yoke of jealousy. It is vastly easier to look at our most regular idlers and think "They have no place to go." than it is to think "Ohh! Landed Gentry!". As much as I might feel a pang of envy at the free time of our library visitors, I feel an equal, perhaps even greater comfort in my gainful employment and stable and happy place in the world.


And perhaps that would work anywhere. If I were serving out gelato to the tourists at one of those Roman gelaterias I was referring to, there would be an endless stream of vacationers enjoying the blissful wonders of a brilliant city, all passing before me as I made the small talk, and effortfully plunked out their immensely tasty treats ("Per favore, try the Gorgonzola gelato. It is strange but bellissima!"). But I would be able to tell myself in that situation "Yes, they are on a vacation in paradise, but look at this place: Rome. I get to live here! Plus I am Italian!").


Yesterday I biked through my neighborhood to work. I saw people having a leisurely brunch at an adorable and amazingly popular new art deco old converted diner car café. It was 70 degrees out with a slight breeze. People were out on the deck sipping fruity cocktails as I trundled my way to work on my heavy city bike. Yes, I felt a mighty pang of jealousy, but I also understood, maybe they were hurrying through their little quick business brunch, or were otherwise racing along so that they could get to work. And then they glanced up to see me biking past.


"Oh." They would think. "What I would give on a beautiful day like this to just be able to bike around all day like that guy."


So am I saying the grass is always greener?

No, I'm saying our uninformed stories about strangers are usually wrong, so we might as well write the ones we can live with best.

Kittenland

I have felt sour lately, and crabby. Can you tell here? Perhaps I have passed it off as pure hilarity, and it's not so bad that there isn't a steady vein of humor in it. After all there aren't exactly horrible reasons behind the strain in my life. Much of it simply comes from having to save up all my vacation time for a luxuriously glorious, five week Fall anniversary trip. But life is compressed when one shows up to work everyday for months and months and months. There is never quite enough leisure to let any of the mundane tensions of it all fully unwind. More and more I always feel like I am hurrying, racing to meet some deadline, squeezing some last thing into its ever disappearing slot, endlessly on the run.

Today was a brilliant Spring day. I would have loved to walk to work because I am more in the world when I do that. I walk in blog posts and in air. I see everything around me. But there was no time. I had to grab a bike and cut that half hour out of my commute. So I did.

Biking makes anyone 60% more of an asshole. I don't know how it does that, but it is the special power of bicycling, along with its clever energy efficiency and pleasant sense of freedom. The world is blooming, tulips are thick in the front yards of my neighbors' houses, framed by plush purple bushes, and, best of all, graced by the flower trees. Great trees fat with fragrant white blossoms are peaking in my neighborhood, radiating light, exploding with joy and promise. If only I could see them. But I am racing by on my bike. Speed and urgency blind me. I have to be at the University in 28 minutes.

Then it happens. I am pedaling. I look to my left and a kitten ambles out of the side yard of some house. A cat crosses the street up ahead. Every house on the block has a white tree in an exotic and overwhelming bloom. The whole world smells like flowers. The wind comes and the trees snow petals onto the perfect young green lawns. So many flowers fall that the street starts to turn white with them. The street is a cloud. The trees are giant flowers in the sky. Where am I?

I am late for nothing. For ten seconds I am freed from everything. There is no work to get to, no doctor appointment tomorrow morning, no bike underneath me, no nagging lack of sleep, no schedule, nothing is required. Nothing will ever be required.

Ten seconds in forever. I have pierced the heart of time and it is all flowers. I am in Kittenland.

Not about me

A couple of days ago I was telling you about the recent unevenness in my work assignments at the library. I mentioned how in a bizarre quirk of fates and under some erratic management I was scheduled during a ten hour day without a single moment at the front desk. I am writing you from the tail end of that very day.

I worked both hard and not so hard today as is my custom. I answered a lot of phones ("WHAT ARE YOU SAYING? WHAT'S THAT? I CAN'T UNDERSTAND YOU ON THAT PHONE!") and mucked about an awful lot with my friendly automated check in and sorting machine ("NO! IT DOESN'T GO THERE! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? ARRRGGGHHHH! STOP! STOP!). I shelved ("WHO PUT THIS HERE! WHO ON EARTH PUT THIS HERE!!!!!"). I handled all of our closing announcements ("THE LIBRARY IS CLOSING IN THREE MINUTES! EVERYTHING SHUTS DOWN AUTOMATICALLY! YOU WILL LOSE ALL YOUR WORK ON THE COMPUTERS! YOU ONLY HAVE SECONDS LEFT TO GET THINGS CHECKED OUT! HURRY!!!!!!"), and as the most experienced circulation worker in the library I consulted with my colleagues on special problems ("HE'S COMPLETELY CRAZY I TELL YOU! THAT'S YOUR EXPLANATION RIGHT THERE! HE'S MAD AS A SACK OF SQUIDS!!!"). But in all of that I did not spend a single minute at the front desk of my library. It was weird. But I felt that I held up pretty well under those unusual circumstances. Really it's the patrons I worried about; I'm afraid they suffered the loss of my calm and reassuring presence.

Egalitarian

I would not have guessed that I would have managed the impartiality of library work as well as I have. I have a lot of strong opinions about things, but it turns out my utter contempt for the batman movie Dark Knight Rises, for instance, or my bitter disdain for Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, goes into abeyance when I am fulfilling my role as your library guide. I have opinions. I'm even happy to share them, but I understand that the library is an open forum for information. I understand that it is essential that I observe a certain neutrality.

I don't judge your checked out items. I will never refuse to check out materials. I don't treat the physical copies of books by right wing commentator Michael Medved with any more disrespect than I would treat a copy of Tortilla Flat. Unlike my feelings about the culture at large, I feel a kind of basic trust in the library. It can all be here. If we strain to let as much into the library as possible the light of beauty and truth will shine through it. That enlightenment will not be obstructed by the impurities of liars, or by the abusers of muses. If the whole world can be the library then the fruit of it will be better than the sum of its parts.

And so I wade through the materials, sorting, guiding, and shelving. Some is horrible, like for instance the Dylan biopic I'm Not There, and some is gorgeous, like Dylan's Desire, but they cannot be disrupted on a case by case basis, for each element in the library effects every other element. The best and worst make a whole.

And so I weed only on the basis of condition, never affection. I treat no item more roughly than any other. I will try to salvage any damaged item, regardless of its content. I will protect and defend on an equal basis, and I am happy to do so.

Except for the Berenstain Bears books. I don't give a shit what happens to those.

My tools

One of the main purposes of the schedule at my library is to spread the variety of work among us clerks and pages, keeping us fresh and involved in all aspects of library circulation life. I may be assigned, in any given hour, to work on the phones, to projects (such as ordering supplies for the library), to the front desk, to shelving in a range of areas, or to tending to our mighty check in machine. But for mysterious reasons, ones that are difficult to see as personal, though that's always my inclination, my schedule seems to have lately come off the rails. Working on the machine is a constant for me, but now sometimes suddenly spikes to consuming more than half my day, all while others of my colleagues are scheduled on it little or not at all. I may not see the phones for three days running and then be scheduled on them on a single day for three hours. Tomorrow I am at the library for ten hours and am freakishly not assigned to the front desk at all.

On the whole I find this erratic scheduling irritating. There are no stations of my job that I don't have at least a passing affection for, but they all tend to be a grind when worked in large doses. Usually that large dose is anything exceeding two hours, an amount of time I am encountering most work days now.

Fortunately I keep a grand arsenal of tools to deal with all the difficulties and injustices of my job, whether those be intentionally visited upon me or whether they be accidents of fate. These tools very much come in handy as I face this particular crisis.

My elaborate tool set consists of the following:


1. Work harder.

2. Work less hard.


Luckily, in choosing among my tools I have a simple, inviolable rule I use to guide me:

 
When at all possible, employ tool number 2.

In plain sight

For nearly a quarter century I have been living in these darling twin cities (fraternal, not identical, but they still live together and dress alike). And through all this time I have occasionally passed, on a prominent corner in a busy but very dodgy part of town, a book store. The windows were covered, usually, with dusty posters and signs of bitter complaint about the Light Rail that was going in on their doorstep (and which has since arrived, causing what seems to be no damage in the 12 year construction process on either the neighborhood or the shop, but not conferring all that much advantage either) . It's a bookstore that looks large, old, and slightly rundown. There is metal grating on all the windows and "Sorry no public restroom" signs to encourage you to prepare for any visit. Their name is Midway Books.

This name without frills, and its exterior presentation, conjured up no glorious, magical bookstore images in my head. Instead, for a quarter of a century I pictured that inside there would be a spread out, misused space, somehow dark, dusty and sunblasted all at once. It would feature a large collection of new and slightly outdated magazines and newspapers on unappealing metal racks, a section for new, glossy paperbacks and hardcovers that somehow still looked faded, including far too many copies of bestsellers- several of which will have grimly outlived their brief bestsellerdom, and a junky, unsorted section of used books which would look like all the new books, only ten years later.

And this all fit perfectly with the neighborhood, a strange one that's hard to come to grips with. Its broad streets are always choked with tangled traffic. It never seems to update, even as it occasionally is besieged by massive construction projects. Is it forever a Twin Cities commercial area of the fifties, or is it stuck rather in the seventies? How do these shops stay in business? No one seems to go in. You can't tell what they're about from the outside. They never seem to change; once a vacuum store always a vacuum store. But there they are forever, with their beaten down "open" signs hanging in grimy, vandal fearing windows, staffed with real live clerks for at least nine or ten hours every day.

Did you know that I can now take a light rail train nearly right to the door of Midway Books? I love our light rail trains. It's a mere 15 minute walk from my house to the train. I switch trains at the (former) Metrodome stop over to the Green Line and that takes me to the middle of a busy street within sight of the bookstore. It is 2.79 miles as the bird flies from my house to Midway Books. But on the train I can get there in a mere hour and a half!

So do you have all that? Because now you need to know that everything I thought about Midway Books was wrong.

My wife found a book she wanted online and it turned out that, of its few copies for sale anywhere in the world, the cheapest was a copy of it on the shelves at Midway Books. So around lunchtime on a Wednesday we went there on our first ever trip.

We parked in a complicated, slightly broken down parking lot the bookstore shared with a liquor store and maybe a gun store or something. A man roamed through the lot looking in dumpsters for aluminum cans. I made grim, judgemental comments about Midway Books based on my delusions listed above. We passed several not very clean looking false doors to the bookstore while young people on the sidewalk appeared to be up to no good, whatever that might mean. Nothing disabused me of any of my notions until we opened the entrance doors and stepped in...

to a wonderland. 

Midway Bookstore is a dream of a bookstore. It is dense and comfortable, serious and full of interesting things. At the library I work at people donate hundreds of books every day. Every rare once in awhile something is interesting, historical, valuable, iconographic, or mysterious. It is so exciting and unusual when we get something like that that we share it around in a fever. And yet at Midway Books that was pretty much the only kind of thing they carried, all crammed into towering stacks and high shelves and deep bins. I don't have much in the way of examples because I was overwhelmed by it all and not taking notes. I do have one random one though. We were mostly looking in the art books. We were not in the rare book section, or rooting through locked cases. I pulled out a copy of Norman Rockwell's autobiography. It was a first edition and signed by him. I'm not saying I have to have that book for $125. I'm just saying that a book like that was typical in that store.

My wife got two books she seemed to love. Then we went to bagel place a quarter mile from where I work that I've ignored for 21 years. Their bagels were fantastic, as good as any I've ever had.

I'm just saying, I don't know anything.

How it's done

I do best when I don't take writing clerkmanifesto so seriously. Because the thing is that it takes itself so seriously that it needs no help from me.

I'm just saying I'm an innocent bystander here.

I have heard myths of legendary 20th Century writers who had to get drunk to write, but then wrote mighty prose on manual typewriters. I had a drink tonight at the Craftsman Restaurant. I can't remember the name of the drink, but there was a number in it. It was made with Cava and Sherry and lavender infused Gin and hibiscus and Elderflower Liqueur. They served it in a wide martini glass. I only spilled a little of it once, which is above average for me. It wore off awhile ago, so we will never know just how great this paragraph might have been. But that's not my responsibility.

I'm just in charge of showing up.

Uh oh, who am I?

Yesterday afternoon I was out at the front desk with one of my pleasant co-workers. The horrifically smelly man, who we institutionally refuse to deal with in any way, came, as he does, to the front desk to use our phone to call a cab. This is a sometimes elaborate process because, I suspect, many cab companies and drivers refuse (I think understandably) to allow him into their vehicles. Also we have to burn the phone after he uses it, which is smoky, toxic, and time consuming, but totally worth it.

Anyway, as this gentleman was on the phone, dressed in his better set of grease and urine soaked togs, a woman came up to him and nicely handed him something. I believe it was a bill, though I could not see the denomination. The man thanked her and she left.

After the smelly man was cleared out, and we had dealt with the needs of a line of patrons, and the entire area had been cleaned in a 50-50 solution of carbolic acid, my co-worker turned to comment on events to me.

"Now I feel bad!" My co-worker exclaimed.

"Why?" I asked.

"That woman gave the man money. I feel guilty now, like I should give him something."

"Oh, don't feel guilty. You know what I was doing? I was sitting over here hating that woman for giving him anything at all."

Working at work

I was talking with a co-worker at the front desk of my library. We were talking about work. This brings up the question: Does talking about work at work count as work?

Yes. It does.

You know what also counts as work? Broadening the very idea of what constitutes work. I am here to tell you that that is a lot of work. I'm exhausted by it so often that I have to take little breaks, though usually, if I can manage it, they're working breaks. Which is exhausting.

In this conversation with my co-worker, about work, I said, in response to something my co-worker said, "I consider that my job here is to not feel guilty about whatever it is I'm doing." It was, like many things I say, pretending to be a joke, but barely even pretending because, working as hard as I do, I don't usually have the energy to do all that pretending. And so here I am collecting righteousness once again. I look around me and find that for many of my co-workers it comes naturally. They engage in mind boggling varieties of strange activities and seem completely oblivious to the very possibility that it might not be work. And I find that hierarchically the higher you go the people get even better at this immaculate self justification. But not me so much. I don't really have a very strong innate facility for considering my actions productive. I really have to work at it.

An Internet aphorism

Every once in awhile I consider the Internet, which is more that I can say it does for me. Then I come here and sum it all up for you. Of all the comments I have received on clerkmanifesto I can't recall anyone ever mentioning one of these Internet summations to me, as in "Boy, you really summed up the Internet good the other day!"

I take this to be a result of the natural reticence of people on the Internet. Or it might be people are nervously sensing my bitterness. But it could be that I haven't gotten the wording just right yet. So for today's aphorism we'll try to cover a small series of minor differences. Are you ready?

Oh. You were?

Well, you see, I kind of had to do the long introduction otherwise it's just a twitter post.

I'm glad you understand.

Okay, here we go.

I'm kind of nervous.

Okay.


The Internet is a resource where all the world's information and ignorance is compiled randomly together in one place.

Or,

The Internet is a place where all human knowledge and all human ignorance are gathered together in one convenient location.

Which, conversely, could be:


The Internet is a place where all human knowledge and all human ignorance are gathered together in one inconvenient location.



Please don't feel you have to study the differences.


Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.

Cocktail hour

Stop me if I've already written this one before.


It's okay if you need to go back through the 1,200 post history of clerkmanifesto and check. While I am delighted and even honored that you (at least occasionally) read my daily missives on the state of the universe, if I had one, well, not criticism, let's say wish, if I had one wish it would be that you re-read all my posts in a state of rapt attention. And this is such an excellent opportunity for you to do so while you are going back and checking if I've written this one before.


Oh, right, what's this one about?

Yes, yes, how can you know if I've written this before if you don't know what this is about.

It's about the intensity of socializing in the back room of my library.



It's about how it's pretty near always cocktail hour at my job. Look at it right now! There are the little groups clustered by the book carts involved in deep conversation, there's three people in consultation over at the transit bins, and look at those two back by the request processing area, just chatting and chatting and chatting and chatting. Oh my god the chatting we do! The real question here is not how we get any work done, the question is how do we talk so much and still breathe!


I may get a detailed account of a long past vacation. I might receive an exhaustive synopsis of a movie. I can get a highly involved account of what books someone is reading, or an exciting stream of soccer gossip. I can hear about lunch, kids, evening plans, patron interactions, and the weather. And I'm not saying that I'm not something of a talker myself at times, but, I mean, seriously, this is our workplace! I simply can't in good conscience talk all the time.

 
I've got blogposts to write!

The conundrum

Sometimes I wander the Internet. I don't know what I'm looking for there. Do you? Well, you. Look who I'm asking this of. You have found it. But I am out there looking for my own clerkmanifesto. Maybe that's what you'll be exiled to do as well, as soon as this one is over for the day.

Amid the festive desolation of this vast Internet I kick the tires and poke around in the weeds. How can something so large be so small? At its best I listen to the music of famous and talented people. At its worst I sink down to the comment sections of machine stamped articles where only the names have been changed. And there my heart is taken from me. My blood is stirred. And wild, angry responses to the careless and misguided comment of strangers flood into my mind.

I roll up my sleeves. I sharpen my pen. And only at the last minute, I remember:

These aren't people. This is the Internet.

America

On the rare occasions I peruse the geographic statistics of where people are reading my blog I find that a third of all my readers are from a place called Samara, in Russia. The fact that these people are all Internet manipulations, computer bots on some vaguely nefarious and meaningless pursuit, and do not reflect any humans, is a notable contributor to why I so rarely consult the geographic statistics of where people are reading my blog. But I admit my ignorance on these matters. It is theoretically possible that these Samaran readers are not all part of the vast sea of automated and pointless Internet, and that, for all I know, there is a small town in Russia where everyone hangs on my every word, learning English through the study of my essays, and thinking of my great body of work much as I think of it.

How do I think of my work?

I'm too shy to say. You'll have to ask someone in Samara, Russia.

And so, with all of this in mind,  I have decided to explain America to my devoted readers in Samara, Russia. If you are not one of my many Samaran readers, and hail from the same country as I do, you can just knowingly nod along as you read.

My wife and I were at one of the great malls of America, perhaps even the greatest mall in America. It clearly thinks it is because it has named itself "The Mall of America".  It is a place where many, many, many things are for sale (more than you can imagine, but somehow all slightly less appealing than you might imagine as well) in a weather sealed, multi-level, enormous indoor environment. As we walked along one of the great balconied lanes of this mall a large American woman came walking the other way towards us. Her T-shirt boldly caught our eyes:

"Amount of fucks I give..." It read on the first line.

Then there was a picture of a Nun, who was flipping us off, followed by the final insouciant line:

"None."

Now you might imagine my point is that this is America because of all the not giving, if you'll excuse the expression, a fuck. But that is not my main point. What makes it such a beautiful expression of America is in the confident, untouchable nature of its closed system: No matter what one's reaction to the shirt, and how could one not have a reaction to so wildly obnoxious, aggressive, and offensive a shirt, the shirt has that reaction covered.

"What a rude shirt!"

(She does not give a fuck)

"You have offended me, a Catholic, and the many Nuns I know who have selflessly toiled for the poor."

(She gives no fucks whatsoever!)

"That is one hilarious shirt. Right on sister!"

(You think that changes whether or not she gives a fuck? It doesn't. She gives no fucks and never has.)

It's like Buddhist, but angrier. And you can shop in it.

You could run a large American Corporation in it.

You could probably even run for President in it.

One liners

I found a collection of one-liners that struck me as so amusing that I jotted them down on one of the hundreds of scraps of paper I carry in my jean pockets. Then, as there wasn't much else to do with them, I shared them out with various of my co-workers and with an occasional lucky library patron as well.

I started with:

A friend told me I've been acting too much like a flamingo, so I put my foot down.

I like that one even if somehow it's not quite perfect, and I keep wanting to try and edit it. People laughed though.

 No one got this one, and maybe you or I wouldn't either if we were hearing it instead of reading it:

I, for one, like roman numerals.

but either way it's frightfully clever. 

I was also fond of:

Dark humor is like food, not everyone gets it.

which just goes deeper as you think of it.

But there was one of these one-liners that I'd written down and just kind of held onto. There was something a touch uncomfortable about it, and I didn't want to say it. But maybe because of that I ended up having to try it out to see how it felt:

People say I'm condescending, (leaning in) that means I talk down to people.

Perhaps it was just a tiny bit too close to home. One doesn't want people to think 

"Yeah, I can see that." 



Ah well...


They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian;  Well they're not laughing now!

Just what is a library

Today the semi annual Friends of the Library book sale had its opening day. Many little old ladies staffed the tables outside our community room, which was now so chockablock with books of all kinds that the actual sales transactions had to take place outside the room. As the opening bell neared, eager library shoppers queued up in a line that filled our lobby and spilled thickly into the library itself. It was all a moment of chaos, holding, and eager anticipation. I innocently wandered into it in order to put out some bus schedules. Job done one of the little old ladies staffing the sale and waiting, along with everyone, greeted me, as we are old acquaintances.


I leaned towards her conspiratorially. "Don't worry." I said. "I won't let any of them know that the whole rest of this building is filled with all the same items, only those ones are all for free."

In memorium

I have consistently posted at 6:30 a.m. pacific time for so long that this might throw you, but here, from my archives is a reposting of a two or three year old story about Prince. As you surely know, he died yesterday, and a little piece of the International identity of my Twin Cities went with him. 

We are the smaller for it.



The original post was part of a series, and it was called:

Prince at the Library

Sure, this is titled Prince at the Library. It's for the sake of consistency. I'd like Famous People at the Library Week to have a kind of matching look. All the portraits, for instance, are done with clickable black sharpies on copy paper. And all the titles are "So and so at the Library" But the real title for this one should be:

How I Gave Prince His Secret Name at the Library

Our story begins quite a few years ago. Back then, instead of a front desk, we had a big Circulation Desk; check ins, check outs, registration, non reference help, fines, all in one, sort of an overcrowded, desperately behind, open kitchen. I was there. Typically doing seven things at once, some of them directly job related, when a small man walks in.

Now, a real advantage to famous people stories, especially ones with pictures at the top, is that one need not waste much time describing the person. Nevertheless it is traditional to include a descriptive observation or two represented in contrast to expectation. "His mustache was darker than I expected." or "She had really long fingers. I wonder if that's why she likes to wear gloves so much." These are nice. They add texture and authenticity. Unfortunately, with Prince, he looked pretty much like I would've thought. Here. Picture Prince. Okay. Then there you are. But I can at least say this: I made him as Prince very quickly, but partly this was because he was the sort of person you look at, famous or not. He drew your eye.

He needed to register his Minneapolis Library Card into our system. He had the card, picture ID with his current address, no problem. No problem at all. Well, one problem. This all was during the time when Prince had just changed his name to that symbol. Just as I have no good way to put the symbol in here, I had no good way to enter the symbol into our patron registration program.

"What do people call you?" I asked.

"Prince." he said "And when they do I refuse to answer. So mostly they just say 'hey' to me, or tap me on the shoulder."

"Hmm." I responded.

Several clerks gathered, a supervisor, but as a solution eluded us they all sort of drifted away.

"I have to get going." Prince said "Can you register my card or not?" He wasn't being petulant. It was just straight up and reasonable.

"How about if" I answered with dawning inspiration "I just put in 'The Artist Formerly Known as Prince'?"

Prince tilted his head a bit and looked earnestly at me for a bit. "That could be useful." He said "That could be very useful." And I suppose it was, just about everyone started using it for awhile. I should check our database sometime, and see if it's still in there.

Not for the weak of stomach

This is the letter I hope we receive one day at my library. But then, perhaps, we already have:





Dear Branch Manager:


Usually I avoid your entire fiction section because of the man who sits there everyday, smelling of an unspeakable rot and peeing and defecating on all your chairs. But today, after lunching on a large burrito, I was really in the mood for a good mystery, so I ventured over hoping for the best. As I was perusing some old Rex Stouts I became so absorbed in them that I forgot to breathe in only through my mouth and reflexively breathed in through my nose! Alas that your epically smelly patron was within a mere 40 feet of me. His putrid odor slammed into me like a runaway locomotive of raw sewage. I gagged, and then, I'm afraid to say, I threw up my lunch (and a few older bits as well) in a wide arc, all across many dozens of mystery books and covering a rich portion of flooring as well.

Anywhere else I would be mortified. I would report it immediately, and, if at all possible, I would do everything I could to clean it up myself.

However, at your library, I get the impression this sort of thing does not concern you or your patrons, and I can only assume the quart of vomit I left in your fiction section will go completely unnoticed. It might even improve things a bit. I hope so.

Yours in all cordiality,


...

Enlightened

Oh, hi. Welcome to my blog. Usually there'd be a joke here, but I've decided to be more spiritual. I thought maybe it was time for me to move closer to the soul of the universe and everything, so no comedy here, nope. I'm on a spiritual quest. Sorry. I'll just mostly be ruminating on the graceful nature of clouds and occasionally expounding on what we can learn from the humble rocks and trees.


Oh, look, there's one of my co-workers. No, I can't talk with them about our annoying colleagues or about how problematic the patrons are. Why? Because I believe those people all have sunshine in their hearts. Let us take a deep breath. Maybe we can help coax their sunshine forward. Did you know Siddhartha once said:


"I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value."


I'm pretty sure he said it in German though. But that doesn't mean I can't learn something from it. Jesus once said:


"The world is an open book, and we are an open book to the world."


Or it might not have been Jesus. It might have been St. Augustine, or possibly Oscar De La Renta. The important thing is that I'm a better, more considerate person today, kinder, purer, and more full of love. It wasn't easy. I have been tempted by the small things. But I have found the place where I am free of want. I am at peace.


I did have one question for god though:


Do I get some kind of prize?
















No, I mean, seriously.