It is a bit of a cliche and a bit of a cartoon truism that cats like milk. In my interactions with cats I have never had any experiences to call these sources into question. Cats like milk. Nevertheless, I have read that cow's milk is not terribly good for cats and so I have never given kafka, the Library cat, any milk. That doesn't mean he hasn't had any. The cat kafka is inclined to take what he likes if he can. But a cat has a more limited array of tools at their command when they occupy the world of people, and so, sometimes in order to take what they like, something extra must come with it. In young kafka's case, the extra was espresso.
In the early afternoon at the Library I was preparing a milkier cappuccino for an afternoon spiritual lift, and, because one of my colleagues seemed in need of one, I was making a cappuccino for them as well. I drew the two shots of espresso, steamed the milk, and assembled the drinks in my giant white latte mugs. I set one down on one of the break room tables and took the other out to my co worker. While out there I got caught up in some Library business and it was quite a while before I could get back to my drink.
When I entered the break room kafka had his front paws perched on the rim of the latte cup, which was wobbling, and he was steadily lapping up the warm frothy mixture of espresso and milk. As he looked over at me the slight weight shift caused the cup to flip to its side. There was no torrent of cappuccino onto the table because this small cat had managed to consume a large portion of a generous beverage. Still, a small, pale brown river turned the tabletop into a landscape and wetted kafka's paws. He sat down and licked them clean, and then we just looked at each other.
You may think, from these accounts of kafka in the library, that we are always regarding each other over some disaster, but no. As often as not, when we encounter each other, in pretty much any situation, we just look at each other. We grow quieter and quieter, more still, and then, usually at kafka's action, it's over. So we looked at each other as we often do. And after awhile of looking at each other I wondered if all the caffeine would have any strange effects on such a small cat. Then, without warning, kafka leaped prodigiously, balletically, from the table onto me. Using tiny needle claws and a bare dusting of cat magic he was almost instantly perched on my shoulder. He balanced and collected himself. Then he rubbed the side of his face three times against my cheekbone. I could feel the wetness of the cappuccino on my face. I smelled coffee. Then, without further notice, he jumped to the ground and was gone, off into the heart of the library where he conducts mysterious deeds. I barely saw him leaving before he was gone. I picked up the cup, wiped down the table, and made myself another cappuccino.
Saturday, November 9, 2013
Friday, November 8, 2013
Drugs in Library
As a person who has experimented widely with recreational drugs (actually, they weren't really experiments) I would think I would be pretty good at spotting what people are under the influence of at the Library. I'm not. On rare occasions I'll smell something on a patron's breath, or have a sudden frisson of awareness, and think "Oh my god, this person is drunk!" or "This person is stoned!" as if this event is a shocking or amazing rarity, and not something that is frequently true but that manages to constantly evade my notice. My theory is that I am not good at spotting all this drug influence out in the public because the effects of these drugs are so readily and relentlessly mimicked by a public under the influence of nothing more powerful than lunch.
For instance, I find people who are stoned to be a bit slow and dreamy, not focused on the task at hand and then over focused on a small detail of the task at hand. They become mellow and spacey. They can be charming and calming, but they do tend to really slow down one's line. If I were to assume every person evidencing these traits to be stoned I would be spending my whole day exclaiming "Oh my god, this person is stoned!" Being shocked about the same thing 40 times a day is probably a feat beyond me.
And what about drunk people. The sloshed. Every day I see loads of people with impaired fine muscle coordination, increased sociability, impaired judgement, and balance difficulty. They're called children. They hit the Library in droves, like we're giving out free drinks! Are they drunk? I get the impression that's just how they are. But it doesn't stop with the younger set. We get people with various disabilities, strange old guys, daffy ladies, freewheeling over confident bruisers, all evincing a good description of some style of drunkenness. Some of them probably are actually drunk, most of them probably aren't.
And what about that voluble chatterbox there, doing three things at once and talking rapidly to his co-worker like he doesn't even need to take a breath. He is revving pretty high. Is he naturally like that? I just happen to know he isn't. I know he's usually a good bit more sedate than all that. And I know for a fact he's had three cappuccinos today. How do I know this? I drank them myself.
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Old art, new art
I am as vulnerable to the hype of the new as your next essayist. I put on a brave face about staying current. I erratically strive to be your, and anyone's, source for the hottest new undiscovered genius. I try hard sometimes to carry that restless, sizzling energy of a person surfing the waves of zeitgeist. It's cool. Oh how cool it is! I was spoon fed on cool. And so often it is irresistible to me. But my heart is not in it.
Sure, I am a cultural omnivore. I'll try anything. Working at a Library is like standing on the banks of some great, mythical river, where all stories, songs and ideas float through on the relentless current. I scrabble around, dive in, and look for and at everything. But I have neither the discipline, energy or dedication to categorize, to stay on top of it, to be ever attuned to primarily the newest treasures. In my deepest heart I am not a discoverer, an advocate, a culler of the waters. I am a feaster, a sensualist, a devourer of dreams.
I like my culture tenderized, aged, with its edges rounded into beautiful harmony by wind and rain, ice and heat. I like the mellow flavors to deepen. I like its interrelations with everything around it to have time to seep in and resonate. I like a dash of historical context, which, like salt, illuminates the native flavors. I like my culture pulled from the fires of fad and thrilling discovery, where it has either burnt to a crisp and need not be troubled with, or has browned, caramelized, smoked, and then cooled to the touch. Warm now, with it's own magical, carried, internal heat it may lack some of its earlier thrills and dazzlement, but its depths are now endless, its flavors capable of the most profound resonance, and its beauty quieted enough to register in every range.
I am ever on the lookout for some glorious new art, and am always delighted to hear truly passionate suggestions from my friends, colleagues, and associates. As I said, I'll try just about anything, but a recommendation of Piazzolla's Tango: Zero Hour (1986) or the animal paintings of Bruno Liljefors (1860-1939) is racing to the top of my list, whereas a hot tip on the best new novel that is releasing in only a week or two I may or may not get to right away. It can wait.
Sure, I am a cultural omnivore. I'll try anything. Working at a Library is like standing on the banks of some great, mythical river, where all stories, songs and ideas float through on the relentless current. I scrabble around, dive in, and look for and at everything. But I have neither the discipline, energy or dedication to categorize, to stay on top of it, to be ever attuned to primarily the newest treasures. In my deepest heart I am not a discoverer, an advocate, a culler of the waters. I am a feaster, a sensualist, a devourer of dreams.
I like my culture tenderized, aged, with its edges rounded into beautiful harmony by wind and rain, ice and heat. I like the mellow flavors to deepen. I like its interrelations with everything around it to have time to seep in and resonate. I like a dash of historical context, which, like salt, illuminates the native flavors. I like my culture pulled from the fires of fad and thrilling discovery, where it has either burnt to a crisp and need not be troubled with, or has browned, caramelized, smoked, and then cooled to the touch. Warm now, with it's own magical, carried, internal heat it may lack some of its earlier thrills and dazzlement, but its depths are now endless, its flavors capable of the most profound resonance, and its beauty quieted enough to register in every range.
I am ever on the lookout for some glorious new art, and am always delighted to hear truly passionate suggestions from my friends, colleagues, and associates. As I said, I'll try just about anything, but a recommendation of Piazzolla's Tango: Zero Hour (1986) or the animal paintings of Bruno Liljefors (1860-1939) is racing to the top of my list, whereas a hot tip on the best new novel that is releasing in only a week or two I may or may not get to right away. It can wait.
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Being sick
This might not be pretty.
I am still sick. I coughed right after I wrote that. Twice. With that deep, baritone boom that reflects nothing of my high tenor voice, though I do like how it makes it raspy. I think my neighbors down the block might be able to hear my coughs. It is not a Library cough. Or, I should say, today I am keeping it out of the Library as I do not think it will add much to the environment there. Actually, it is a cough I have been hearing quite regularly at the Library for the past month or so. It came from other people. I wish all those other people had stayed home. Maybe I wouldn't have this cough now, or runny nose, slight achiness, or general feeling of just being tired. I don't know. I do know this: I have the sick time appropriate for this situation. I am contagious, though, judging from my four minute research, I am just coming out of the most contagious part of my illness, nevertheless I will still be able to pass this cold along for another few days. And I am doing the right thing by everyone by just staying home.
So why do I feel uncomfortable about staying home?
I'm not sure. It could be because I could work, if I had to, and I like staying home, so, it working out for everyone involved seems... suspicious. I'm not entirely sure who it is suspicious to, but I am pretty sure that person hates me. I have cobbled that person together from pieces of real people I have sadly known. When I call the Library to tell them I am sick that is pretty much the person I expect to answer the phone. I find calling in the hardest part.
Some of that dates back to a different time at my Library, a time when subs were rare, the workload overwhelming, and a person gone sick, or on vacation, just meant more work for everyone left standing. Also, in that time, one needed to talk directly to one's supervisor, who always sounded suspiciously like that person, mentioned in the paragraph above, who hates me. His response was less:
"It breaks my heart you are sick, but we care about you. We want the best for you, and think it is for the best for all of us if you take all the time you need to be whole and healthy again. Shall I take you off the schedule for the next few days? "
And more:
"Okay. Thanks for calling." Kind of mumbled disappointedly, and with less warmth than that sounds like it has. A lot less warmth.
Now I just tell whoever answers the phone. Their reactions vary. My being gone doesn't have the huge effect it used to in our great sea of assorted workers. The main impact is on whatever co-workers might like me and miss me. I just know this from my own experience. If someone I like calls in sick, my day is that much less fun in direct relation to how much I like them. If I don't really like them my day can be better when they don't come. There are also schedule changes when someone is sick, but those are a bit of a crap shoot. That can make your day worse, but usually it ends up making it a bit better.
Do other people feel the way I do about all this? I don't know exactly, but there are a lot of indications of similarities. People come in half sick all the time. Why? Some people hoard sick leave like over-zealous squirrels with acorns. They will never be able to use all that sick time and it pays out very poorly at retirement. Some come because they think they are too important to stay home. But I have never worked with a single person who the waters don't close neatly over when they're gone. So, I think it's the hate person. I think a lot of people are carrying around some kind of hate person on this one. So let me be here to tell you, none of us hate you on this. We get a little mad and irritated around it all, but it is never about when you stay home. It is when you show up. So stay home, have some tea, and catch up on your blog posts.
I am still sick. I coughed right after I wrote that. Twice. With that deep, baritone boom that reflects nothing of my high tenor voice, though I do like how it makes it raspy. I think my neighbors down the block might be able to hear my coughs. It is not a Library cough. Or, I should say, today I am keeping it out of the Library as I do not think it will add much to the environment there. Actually, it is a cough I have been hearing quite regularly at the Library for the past month or so. It came from other people. I wish all those other people had stayed home. Maybe I wouldn't have this cough now, or runny nose, slight achiness, or general feeling of just being tired. I don't know. I do know this: I have the sick time appropriate for this situation. I am contagious, though, judging from my four minute research, I am just coming out of the most contagious part of my illness, nevertheless I will still be able to pass this cold along for another few days. And I am doing the right thing by everyone by just staying home.
So why do I feel uncomfortable about staying home?
I'm not sure. It could be because I could work, if I had to, and I like staying home, so, it working out for everyone involved seems... suspicious. I'm not entirely sure who it is suspicious to, but I am pretty sure that person hates me. I have cobbled that person together from pieces of real people I have sadly known. When I call the Library to tell them I am sick that is pretty much the person I expect to answer the phone. I find calling in the hardest part.
Some of that dates back to a different time at my Library, a time when subs were rare, the workload overwhelming, and a person gone sick, or on vacation, just meant more work for everyone left standing. Also, in that time, one needed to talk directly to one's supervisor, who always sounded suspiciously like that person, mentioned in the paragraph above, who hates me. His response was less:
"It breaks my heart you are sick, but we care about you. We want the best for you, and think it is for the best for all of us if you take all the time you need to be whole and healthy again. Shall I take you off the schedule for the next few days? "
And more:
"Okay. Thanks for calling." Kind of mumbled disappointedly, and with less warmth than that sounds like it has. A lot less warmth.
Now I just tell whoever answers the phone. Their reactions vary. My being gone doesn't have the huge effect it used to in our great sea of assorted workers. The main impact is on whatever co-workers might like me and miss me. I just know this from my own experience. If someone I like calls in sick, my day is that much less fun in direct relation to how much I like them. If I don't really like them my day can be better when they don't come. There are also schedule changes when someone is sick, but those are a bit of a crap shoot. That can make your day worse, but usually it ends up making it a bit better.
Do other people feel the way I do about all this? I don't know exactly, but there are a lot of indications of similarities. People come in half sick all the time. Why? Some people hoard sick leave like over-zealous squirrels with acorns. They will never be able to use all that sick time and it pays out very poorly at retirement. Some come because they think they are too important to stay home. But I have never worked with a single person who the waters don't close neatly over when they're gone. So, I think it's the hate person. I think a lot of people are carrying around some kind of hate person on this one. So let me be here to tell you, none of us hate you on this. We get a little mad and irritated around it all, but it is never about when you stay home. It is when you show up. So stay home, have some tea, and catch up on your blog posts.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Cheese at library
For my birthday I received a kingly, lovely, luxurious and deliriously sweet gift of cheese. A lot of very, very nice cheese. Beautiful cheese. Happy cheese. Fat, glamorous, rippling, swirling, gleeful cheese.
I like cheese.
And I like cheese the way I like music. Blue. My wife bought me this cheese. She knows me. It is all blue.
I took it to work, where I am now living on a diet of mostly these more creamy blues, accented with a bit of bread, mixed greens, apples and coffee. It may be a tad high in saturated fats for an ideal long term diet, but I feel pretty good eating this stuff. For awhile.
Nevertheless I am faced with a quantity of cheese it may be beyond me to eat. Particularly intimidating are the two giant wedges that serve as the centerpieces of the gift; a bleu d'auvergne and a black label Cambozola. Faced with blocks of cheese that never diminish, I decided the time was ripe for me to share with, well, pretty much anyone within 50 yards of me. I put servings of the two cheeses into little cups and headed out.
The results were surprisingly mixed. About half of the people it was offered to turned it down from not liking blue cheeses. Though I have encountered this sort of thing before it still leaves me in a state of shock. Like:
"Come see! There is a beautiful Pterosaur flying into a double rainbow over our parking lot!"
"Hmm, I'm not much of a bird person, but thanks."
"Kindly aliens have arrived and are over by the entrance to the kids' room granting everyone the ability to fly!"
"I don't know. I just got a new car. You go. I'll watch the phones."
"I have some cheese. It is from France. Apellation d'origine controlee!"
"Those snobs! No thanks. Give me a nice Kraft single and I'm happy. Mmm, melted right onto a McDonald's hamburger!"
I was able to recover my composure after a bit, and I was able to pass out all my cups of cheese before I got to the public areas of the Library. I was able to override Dave's initial refusal to eat blue cheese (all credit to Dave on that one, not so much to me. I get a little carried away when it comes to cheese). I hope Dave won't mind this bit too much, but, he is something of a gourmand, and he is also still a bit young. This is what he is still in the process of learning: If someone thrusts a glass of 200 dollar a bottle champagne into your hands, a spoonful of caviar, bleu d'auvergne, you do what you can to consume it. As a Library worker, for good or ill, you will not be bombarded with these moments.
I like cheese.
And I like cheese the way I like music. Blue. My wife bought me this cheese. She knows me. It is all blue.
I took it to work, where I am now living on a diet of mostly these more creamy blues, accented with a bit of bread, mixed greens, apples and coffee. It may be a tad high in saturated fats for an ideal long term diet, but I feel pretty good eating this stuff. For awhile.
Nevertheless I am faced with a quantity of cheese it may be beyond me to eat. Particularly intimidating are the two giant wedges that serve as the centerpieces of the gift; a bleu d'auvergne and a black label Cambozola. Faced with blocks of cheese that never diminish, I decided the time was ripe for me to share with, well, pretty much anyone within 50 yards of me. I put servings of the two cheeses into little cups and headed out.
The results were surprisingly mixed. About half of the people it was offered to turned it down from not liking blue cheeses. Though I have encountered this sort of thing before it still leaves me in a state of shock. Like:
"Come see! There is a beautiful Pterosaur flying into a double rainbow over our parking lot!"
"Hmm, I'm not much of a bird person, but thanks."
"Kindly aliens have arrived and are over by the entrance to the kids' room granting everyone the ability to fly!"
"I don't know. I just got a new car. You go. I'll watch the phones."
"I have some cheese. It is from France. Apellation d'origine controlee!"
"Those snobs! No thanks. Give me a nice Kraft single and I'm happy. Mmm, melted right onto a McDonald's hamburger!"
I was able to recover my composure after a bit, and I was able to pass out all my cups of cheese before I got to the public areas of the Library. I was able to override Dave's initial refusal to eat blue cheese (all credit to Dave on that one, not so much to me. I get a little carried away when it comes to cheese). I hope Dave won't mind this bit too much, but, he is something of a gourmand, and he is also still a bit young. This is what he is still in the process of learning: If someone thrusts a glass of 200 dollar a bottle champagne into your hands, a spoonful of caviar, bleu d'auvergne, you do what you can to consume it. As a Library worker, for good or ill, you will not be bombarded with these moments.
Monday, November 4, 2013
Sorry, no blog post today
I'm sorry, but I'm not feeling well. I won't be able to blog today. It started with just a little ragged sore throat, and I thought I might be able to get a short blog post off today, just about anything, but before I could even get some warm liquids in me I started to get kind of achy, and now I think I'm a little stuffed up. I could probably muddle through a blog post if I had to, but I don't think it would turn out as good as it should, and these early, alarming, booming coughs would only make an already perfunctory blog post harder for you to read. Also, I might be contagious, and I don't want to get everyone else here sick. You should probably wash your hands after reading just this. So, anyway, I think it's probably best if I just, you know, rest up, drink a lot of fluids, that sort of thing. My voice is starting to go anyway, so, yeah, this is definitely the right thing to do. Could you just let everyone there reading my blog know that there will be no blog post today? Thanks. Yeah, I hate to do it, but I think it's the right decision. Trust me, you do not want this. I'm pretty sure I'm running a slight fever. I'm going back to sleep. If I feel better in the afternoon maybe I'll write some rough drafts of blog posts in bed. I'll check back in with you tomorrow. Hopefully this is just one of those 24 hour things.
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Blog futures
As you may know, traffic on my blog is quite light on Sundays.
Surprisingly, my readership skews heavily towards church goers and
football fanatics. It doesn't look it at first glance, but this is a
very turn-the-other-cheek and then see if you can give them a concussion
sort of blog. Anyway, because readership is so light on Sundays, I like
to keep the tone of the blog post light as well. And it is in that
spirit that I say:
In a hundred years we will all be dead.
Yes, we will be dead, but these words, due to the electronic data storing wonders of the internet, will live forever!
So, if you don't mind, I'd like to address today's words to the future people, living 100 years from the time I write this. All you people who will be dead at that time are free to read along if you like, though you may not find my words of particular usefulness and relevance.
Hello people of the future.
As I write this humankind stands on the brink of a precipice. If you are there, 100 years from now, to hear this, it is impossible not to assume that you have come through some challenging times. Good for you! Correct me if I'm wrong, but I am thinking in your era information is very cheap, but hard goods are a bit scarce. That is why I have carefully double wrapped in plastic two cans of pinto beans and a 8-inch knife and buried them in my backyard. I hope they are of use to you.
Thank you for keeping my memory alive!
In a hundred years we will all be dead.
Yes, we will be dead, but these words, due to the electronic data storing wonders of the internet, will live forever!
So, if you don't mind, I'd like to address today's words to the future people, living 100 years from the time I write this. All you people who will be dead at that time are free to read along if you like, though you may not find my words of particular usefulness and relevance.
Hello people of the future.
As I write this humankind stands on the brink of a precipice. If you are there, 100 years from now, to hear this, it is impossible not to assume that you have come through some challenging times. Good for you! Correct me if I'm wrong, but I am thinking in your era information is very cheap, but hard goods are a bit scarce. That is why I have carefully double wrapped in plastic two cans of pinto beans and a 8-inch knife and buried them in my backyard. I hope they are of use to you.
Thank you for keeping my memory alive!
Saturday, November 2, 2013
Listening
I have always tried to be a good listener, and mostly I suppose I've been all right. I like to know things, and listening can be a very good way to find them out. Also, among the people I really like, I am extremely keen to hear what they have to say. But, in the past, I have always suffered from the occasional weakness that afflicts most listeners. I am so intent on what I think and what I have to say that I can fall into merely taking turns, or, sometimes, I hear things through such intense personal filters that I don't really hear them at all. Also, with strangers and people more distant to me, sometimes I just don't care. People are not always fascinating and sometimes all my little listening withdraws into me so I can try to convey, through body language, an urgent need for it all to stop. I just want to go back to my private thoughts.
But lately I have noticed a change.
It's all this writing.
I write some kind of essay everyday. Sometimes it might be a comic little shaggy dog story. Sometimes it's observational, a plea, an idea, my heart. I really like doing it. But it's every day. I need a lot of inspiration. I find myself throwing myself into bits of experience, into conversation in a different way. I'm not looking for material exactly. That's not how it works. I just want to see everything more clearly, and see more of it. It is seeing the world that lights all the little fires.
People tell me mundane things, deluded things, fascinating things, true things, lies, trivia, jokes, complaints, feelings, dreams, plans, disappointments, technicalities, and charming anecdotes. The same things people tell people everywhere. The world here at the Library is full of rhythms, delights, irritations, surprises and much relentless proceeding of the slow minute hands of our clocks. I used to think I was free to throw away what I wanted, but now the little drawer I put all this stuff in, the little drawer that always seemed crammed with visions of the world as it is, keeps getting emptied, and the onus is always on me to collect more. For good or ill it turns out there is only one really good way to do so. Listening.
But lately I have noticed a change.
It's all this writing.
I write some kind of essay everyday. Sometimes it might be a comic little shaggy dog story. Sometimes it's observational, a plea, an idea, my heart. I really like doing it. But it's every day. I need a lot of inspiration. I find myself throwing myself into bits of experience, into conversation in a different way. I'm not looking for material exactly. That's not how it works. I just want to see everything more clearly, and see more of it. It is seeing the world that lights all the little fires.
People tell me mundane things, deluded things, fascinating things, true things, lies, trivia, jokes, complaints, feelings, dreams, plans, disappointments, technicalities, and charming anecdotes. The same things people tell people everywhere. The world here at the Library is full of rhythms, delights, irritations, surprises and much relentless proceeding of the slow minute hands of our clocks. I used to think I was free to throw away what I wanted, but now the little drawer I put all this stuff in, the little drawer that always seemed crammed with visions of the world as it is, keeps getting emptied, and the onus is always on me to collect more. For good or ill it turns out there is only one really good way to do so. Listening.
Friday, November 1, 2013
Cat in stack
I heard a rustling in the far reaches of the Mystery section and
strolled over for a look. Our newest addition to the Library, kafka the
cat, still more of a kitten, but on the borderline, was batting about a
thickish paperback. We made eye contact and I think both of us were
quite pleased to see each other, though, of course, I can only be sure
of my feelings in the matter. After kafka's regarding of me, pleased or
not, he took one more idle slash at the book, and embarked on a short
tour of personal grooming. That last swipe was one of those deliciously
refreshing cat moments where they seem to so keenly express that their
moral universe is entirely autonomous from our own, and, on average,
probably slightly better.
I petted kafka, one soft cat, and picked up the book. It was neatly eviscerated, flayed curiously, as if it were a small rabbit, and kafka was keen to peel back just the top half of it in a weird display of mangler's virtuosity. I was impressed. "Good kitty." I said, petting kafka some more. "Good kafka." The book was ruined, but I wasn't put out. We've got just tons of books here, but only one cat.
I petted kafka, one soft cat, and picked up the book. It was neatly eviscerated, flayed curiously, as if it were a small rabbit, and kafka was keen to peel back just the top half of it in a weird display of mangler's virtuosity. I was impressed. "Good kitty." I said, petting kafka some more. "Good kafka." The book was ruined, but I wasn't put out. We've got just tons of books here, but only one cat.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Halloween
This year's Halloween blog post is dedicated to my co-worker Sue, who died quite a few years ago now, and made an unnamed appearance in this blog post, written long before I had a blog. It is dedicated to her because one Halloween I went and bought some very fancy individual fangs that you molded to your teeth. But it turned out they didn't really stay in properly, and you needed denture cream. Sue gave me her denture cream, which worked perfectly. I am still grateful.
I think of myself as loving Halloween, but it strikes me now that things are not so simple. I love all the pseudo scary decorations, but when they cross too much into the truly scary I lose my appetite for it all. Disneyland's Haunted House perches just so on that edge for me. I was never keen on the part when things jump out, but that they did it all just far enough away, and in a rhythm, pacified me somewhat. The rest of the ride was about perfect. The rise of serious Halloween decorating in my neighborhood has been an intense pleasure to me that expresses that quality of winking mystery and glowy, spooky, comedy.
As a child I loved the candy of Halloween fiercely and still remember pouring over it and cataloging it with a deranged miser's intensity. Now I am indifferent to it, having eaten a vast array of better things that I can usually acquire at will. As an open eyed adult I am easily able to see through the hollow, empty tricks of commercial candy, which only tastes good if you pay no attention to it. I'll idly eat it on occasion in the season, not paying attention to it, but what fun is that?
I have always liked dressing up, but when I reflect on it, I get strong feelings of sadness and loneliness rather than joyous feelings of celebrated parties. I'm pretty sure it's too serious an endeavor for me. It's supposed to be theater but I've never found the right approach. I've always wanted to draw into myself all the way, or fully inhabit the role. It just felt like too much, being and not being something else. And I have never in my life been good at parties.
I have some old film footage of me dressed as a hobo for the Halloween after I turned four. I have no real memories of it, but I seem terribly sad and sweet to myself. Who knows what autonomy I had in the choice of that costume, but there is something about it. Something talking from deep inside that I was dressed as a rootless, homeless wanderer at age four. Breaks my heart.
In art school one year, for a big school party in downtown San Francisco, full of all those hip, cutting edge young artists, I went naked. My costume was artist's model, or Adam before the fall. It was a strange thing to do, a bit of performance art really. Maybe a little, we can put on costumes by removing things too. I have always told myself the story of how alienating and lonely that party was because of my nudity. But writing this now I am strangely understanding something I've never understood in all the long years since then. I always felt that way at big parties like that, lonely, isolated, uncomfortable, abandoned, unable to interact. There was nothing about that party that was different than how I normally felt. Being naked in public was not uncomfortable to me. I was actually fine with it. It was an expression of something I already felt, a way to dress as a hobo. Surreal, dangerous, but oddly present.
Nothing fancy for tonight. My spirit is calmer and deeper. We'll hurl our door open and hand out candy to neighborhood kids. How dazzled they look as all the heat and brightness and strange interior hurtles out to greet them. How dazzled I am by the clamor of festooned arrays of small children suddenly washed up by the night. They seem to have to squeeze out the ritual. "Trick or treat." they usually manage to say. Who knows? Life. But I have some candy for them.
I think of myself as loving Halloween, but it strikes me now that things are not so simple. I love all the pseudo scary decorations, but when they cross too much into the truly scary I lose my appetite for it all. Disneyland's Haunted House perches just so on that edge for me. I was never keen on the part when things jump out, but that they did it all just far enough away, and in a rhythm, pacified me somewhat. The rest of the ride was about perfect. The rise of serious Halloween decorating in my neighborhood has been an intense pleasure to me that expresses that quality of winking mystery and glowy, spooky, comedy.
As a child I loved the candy of Halloween fiercely and still remember pouring over it and cataloging it with a deranged miser's intensity. Now I am indifferent to it, having eaten a vast array of better things that I can usually acquire at will. As an open eyed adult I am easily able to see through the hollow, empty tricks of commercial candy, which only tastes good if you pay no attention to it. I'll idly eat it on occasion in the season, not paying attention to it, but what fun is that?
I have always liked dressing up, but when I reflect on it, I get strong feelings of sadness and loneliness rather than joyous feelings of celebrated parties. I'm pretty sure it's too serious an endeavor for me. It's supposed to be theater but I've never found the right approach. I've always wanted to draw into myself all the way, or fully inhabit the role. It just felt like too much, being and not being something else. And I have never in my life been good at parties.
I have some old film footage of me dressed as a hobo for the Halloween after I turned four. I have no real memories of it, but I seem terribly sad and sweet to myself. Who knows what autonomy I had in the choice of that costume, but there is something about it. Something talking from deep inside that I was dressed as a rootless, homeless wanderer at age four. Breaks my heart.
In art school one year, for a big school party in downtown San Francisco, full of all those hip, cutting edge young artists, I went naked. My costume was artist's model, or Adam before the fall. It was a strange thing to do, a bit of performance art really. Maybe a little, we can put on costumes by removing things too. I have always told myself the story of how alienating and lonely that party was because of my nudity. But writing this now I am strangely understanding something I've never understood in all the long years since then. I always felt that way at big parties like that, lonely, isolated, uncomfortable, abandoned, unable to interact. There was nothing about that party that was different than how I normally felt. Being naked in public was not uncomfortable to me. I was actually fine with it. It was an expression of something I already felt, a way to dress as a hobo. Surreal, dangerous, but oddly present.
Nothing fancy for tonight. My spirit is calmer and deeper. We'll hurl our door open and hand out candy to neighborhood kids. How dazzled they look as all the heat and brightness and strange interior hurtles out to greet them. How dazzled I am by the clamor of festooned arrays of small children suddenly washed up by the night. They seem to have to squeeze out the ritual. "Trick or treat." they usually manage to say. Who knows? Life. But I have some candy for them.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Outsourcing
I have been gearing up for some time now to perform a thundering evisceration of outsourcing in public institutions, not least of all, Libraries. Unfortunately this discussion, as it is, seems to fall under the category of Politics, and just starting to compose something in my head about it causes blood to start trickling out from under my fingernails. Such a thing is not likely to be good for a person, especially me, as I have delicate hands. Furthermore, I have long ago drawn a line in the sand here at clerkmanifesto that says if I start raving about things like "lapdog unions" and "bovine administrators" I'm to immediately pull the plug on whatever essay I'm writing and cut my coffee rations down to seven cappuccinos a day, at least until I can once again be responsible with all that power. So here I am not writing about outsourcing, at least until I have a considerably more reasonable, low key, and smaller scale, way in.
Nevertheless, I was thinking about all this wild anger over outsourcing, and wondering a little at its source. Surely there's a kind of fear of it, I would hate beyond belief to have my job outsourced, and certainly there's all its injustice and evil and blah blah blah. But I felt I was missing something else, some tinder, some highly flammable part of it that I just couldn't get to in all my righteousness. So I poked at it. And then I got it.
I'm jealous. I want to outsource my job!
"Whoa! Wait! You want your job to be outsourced?" You cried out, whether you wanted to or not, because I have full control of the keyboard, including the essential "quote" keys.
No. I don't ever want my job to be outsourced. I want to outsource my job. Therein lies all the difference.
I understand your confusion. Culturally, we speak all the time about peoples' jobs being outsourced. This is perceived as negative, usually, and always so for the person whose job is being outsourced. That person loses their job while some company or contractor takes on getting their job done. The whole process can be seen variously as evil, foolish, shrewd, necessary, inevitable, or any combination of the above. But no one talks about outsourcing one's own job. There is always a line in outsourcing between the swath of displaced people who are dismissed, and a level of management who supervised all of them and stays. This is always the other side of the outsourcing equation, but it is never spoken of. To speak of it rather blows the lid off the whole thing. That is because no one loses their own job when they outsource it themselves. They keep their own job, but pay someone else to do it for them. That never looks good.
Let us say you are the head of prisons in some southern state. Your job is a headache. You've got all these different wardens reporting to you, you're fighting for scarce budget resources, you're desperately schmoozing with politicians to curry favor, but you rarely have anything to give to them. You're visiting your various prisons for really depressing tours, fighting to meet a host of federal prison regulations with wholly inadequate resources, and barely able to enjoy your ample salary because you work all the time. It's an exercise in futility.
Then, one day, a very nice man, who is very rich and well connected comes to you and offers to do all this nasty stuff for you, well within your current budget. You may even know that this is like an introductory offer, like a year's subscription to a magazine for five dollars, but here's the thing. It doesn't matter. When the amount this company charges skyrockets they will be there for you. With political power, capital, and a history of contributions, they will argue for the budget required. Indeed, they'll hardwire it into the budget through contracts, something you could never have dreamed of doing. They'll even argue for a nice fat raise for you! They'll put across intricate laws that funnel more prisoners and more money to themselves, but they will always make you look good. It's irresistible. So you outsource your job.
Now that this has happened, most of what you have to do is meet with the agents of the people doing your job for you. Do you meet them at prisons? No, you meet them at very nice corporate offices in swanky cities, or perhaps even at the best restaurants nearby. You say "Can you give us a slightly better deal on this contract?" Then you say "No, you can't? Well, keep up the good work!" Or you can skip the first part, but either way you'll be collecting your steadily waxing paycheck and playing a lot of golf, or video games, or blogging, or single malt collecting, or running for the Senate, or whatever it is you like to do.
I could certainly go more deeply into this, I'd even sort of like to. But I'd start inordinately using the word evil, and you know the rest from there. And besides, that's not my point. My point is, hey, what about me? I want some of this action.
I go see the Library Director. I am with a very spiffy executive type. We present our case, except the executive type is way better than me at this sort of thing, so they talk. For 6,000 dollars a year the executive's company will take care of my duties, with a 50% improvement in work output guaranteed. It's like getting an extra half time clerk for 6,000 bucks. The executive from Clerk.solutions (tm) also promises to make it so that their fee sources directly from county budgets and not Library budgets. Soon it will be like getting a half time clerk for free!
Naturally, the director goes for it.
Soon I am nominally supervising a team of seven low paid, but very eager, very part time workers who do some vague version of my job. They do vastly more shelving, less accurately, and they are terrible at the front desk, but, strangely, people don't complain much. I only really have to show up a couple days a week, and I spend most of that time giving pointers and blogging and drinking cappuccinos, so, sort of like what I do now with the core "work" part extracted. As the fee for my job (and a half) climbs up over a hundred thousand dollars a year, no worries, clerk.solutions has it all under control through connections, donations, and legislations. Things are going so well that before long I'm just popping in once a week, or once every other week sometimes. My blog only rarely features Library related stories anymore and instead I am able to concentrate on my ruminations on squirrels. With this ability to really focus I bring something very special to squirrel blogging and my readership increases a healthy 3% every four years, which is pretty meteoric for a person writing so much about squirrels.
I get all tingly thinking about it.
When it comes time for me to retire there's no point to actually do so, since by then I no longer even have to bother to show up at the Library unless I want to check out a book. The county deposits money in my account and spending it is pretty much the extent of my duties. I have no problem doing a good job at this even as I age into my nineties and beyond. The clerk.solutions CEO is very rich, and though the millions and millions of low paid employees who work for clerk.solutions live in poverty and have to visit food shelves and apply for disappearing food stamp aid, it's hard for me to get very sympathetic. They could pull themselves up by their bootstraps just like I did and find some way to outsource their own jobs (which is doing the job of people like me!). Maybe they can get a second job and outsource that too. Time is money.
And that's about it. I feel very calm, very reasonable, even a little enlightened. No blood leaking out from under my fingernails now. I mean, none of my own.
Nevertheless, I was thinking about all this wild anger over outsourcing, and wondering a little at its source. Surely there's a kind of fear of it, I would hate beyond belief to have my job outsourced, and certainly there's all its injustice and evil and blah blah blah. But I felt I was missing something else, some tinder, some highly flammable part of it that I just couldn't get to in all my righteousness. So I poked at it. And then I got it.
I'm jealous. I want to outsource my job!
"Whoa! Wait! You want your job to be outsourced?" You cried out, whether you wanted to or not, because I have full control of the keyboard, including the essential "quote" keys.
No. I don't ever want my job to be outsourced. I want to outsource my job. Therein lies all the difference.
I understand your confusion. Culturally, we speak all the time about peoples' jobs being outsourced. This is perceived as negative, usually, and always so for the person whose job is being outsourced. That person loses their job while some company or contractor takes on getting their job done. The whole process can be seen variously as evil, foolish, shrewd, necessary, inevitable, or any combination of the above. But no one talks about outsourcing one's own job. There is always a line in outsourcing between the swath of displaced people who are dismissed, and a level of management who supervised all of them and stays. This is always the other side of the outsourcing equation, but it is never spoken of. To speak of it rather blows the lid off the whole thing. That is because no one loses their own job when they outsource it themselves. They keep their own job, but pay someone else to do it for them. That never looks good.
Let us say you are the head of prisons in some southern state. Your job is a headache. You've got all these different wardens reporting to you, you're fighting for scarce budget resources, you're desperately schmoozing with politicians to curry favor, but you rarely have anything to give to them. You're visiting your various prisons for really depressing tours, fighting to meet a host of federal prison regulations with wholly inadequate resources, and barely able to enjoy your ample salary because you work all the time. It's an exercise in futility.
Then, one day, a very nice man, who is very rich and well connected comes to you and offers to do all this nasty stuff for you, well within your current budget. You may even know that this is like an introductory offer, like a year's subscription to a magazine for five dollars, but here's the thing. It doesn't matter. When the amount this company charges skyrockets they will be there for you. With political power, capital, and a history of contributions, they will argue for the budget required. Indeed, they'll hardwire it into the budget through contracts, something you could never have dreamed of doing. They'll even argue for a nice fat raise for you! They'll put across intricate laws that funnel more prisoners and more money to themselves, but they will always make you look good. It's irresistible. So you outsource your job.
Now that this has happened, most of what you have to do is meet with the agents of the people doing your job for you. Do you meet them at prisons? No, you meet them at very nice corporate offices in swanky cities, or perhaps even at the best restaurants nearby. You say "Can you give us a slightly better deal on this contract?" Then you say "No, you can't? Well, keep up the good work!" Or you can skip the first part, but either way you'll be collecting your steadily waxing paycheck and playing a lot of golf, or video games, or blogging, or single malt collecting, or running for the Senate, or whatever it is you like to do.
I could certainly go more deeply into this, I'd even sort of like to. But I'd start inordinately using the word evil, and you know the rest from there. And besides, that's not my point. My point is, hey, what about me? I want some of this action.
I go see the Library Director. I am with a very spiffy executive type. We present our case, except the executive type is way better than me at this sort of thing, so they talk. For 6,000 dollars a year the executive's company will take care of my duties, with a 50% improvement in work output guaranteed. It's like getting an extra half time clerk for 6,000 bucks. The executive from Clerk.solutions (tm) also promises to make it so that their fee sources directly from county budgets and not Library budgets. Soon it will be like getting a half time clerk for free!
Naturally, the director goes for it.
Soon I am nominally supervising a team of seven low paid, but very eager, very part time workers who do some vague version of my job. They do vastly more shelving, less accurately, and they are terrible at the front desk, but, strangely, people don't complain much. I only really have to show up a couple days a week, and I spend most of that time giving pointers and blogging and drinking cappuccinos, so, sort of like what I do now with the core "work" part extracted. As the fee for my job (and a half) climbs up over a hundred thousand dollars a year, no worries, clerk.solutions has it all under control through connections, donations, and legislations. Things are going so well that before long I'm just popping in once a week, or once every other week sometimes. My blog only rarely features Library related stories anymore and instead I am able to concentrate on my ruminations on squirrels. With this ability to really focus I bring something very special to squirrel blogging and my readership increases a healthy 3% every four years, which is pretty meteoric for a person writing so much about squirrels.
I get all tingly thinking about it.
When it comes time for me to retire there's no point to actually do so, since by then I no longer even have to bother to show up at the Library unless I want to check out a book. The county deposits money in my account and spending it is pretty much the extent of my duties. I have no problem doing a good job at this even as I age into my nineties and beyond. The clerk.solutions CEO is very rich, and though the millions and millions of low paid employees who work for clerk.solutions live in poverty and have to visit food shelves and apply for disappearing food stamp aid, it's hard for me to get very sympathetic. They could pull themselves up by their bootstraps just like I did and find some way to outsource their own jobs (which is doing the job of people like me!). Maybe they can get a second job and outsource that too. Time is money.
And that's about it. I feel very calm, very reasonable, even a little enlightened. No blood leaking out from under my fingernails now. I mean, none of my own.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Six percent pure wisdom
Here are some random things that could be expanded into full blog posts, but probably shouldn't be. Like with the Internet itself I have hidden the quality material carefully amongst the detritus. I will not tell you which is which as I feel it's a win-win for everyone when you mix them up.
No good book has ever been written by two authors of disproportionate fame levels.
The teen librarian isn't really reading those books in the break-room. He's just posing artfully and waiting for another glossy librarian magazine to come and take his picture for their cover. Note how he's always at a flattering angle to the light and looks vaguely heroic.
One cannot trust publishers as they are in it strictly for the money. When looking for something good to read at the Library always start in the unpublished manuscript section.
The higher you go hierarchically in any institution the more overstaffed it will be. Bear in mind even "one" can be over-staffing.
Being legally blind makes one an even better and safer driver.
It takes just two weeks for our Library's number of visitors to total the entire population of the city we are in. Of course, not all 34,000 residents of our city visit us every fortnight. Most of our statistical visits derive from one regular patron who goes out to get stuff from his car a lot.
Our used book sales remain popular because peoples' houses are too big and books are an inexpensive way to stuff them.
Our Library branch's refusal to carry our own subscription to US magazine says to everyone "We are the classy branch in our library system."
One architectural firm has designed every new library built in North America over the last nine years.
My local newspapers have gone to the internet model: they mainly collect the work of other people.
If your cough has persisted for over three years it is no longer a cough, rather it is a way of life.
No good book has ever been written by two authors of disproportionate fame levels.
The teen librarian isn't really reading those books in the break-room. He's just posing artfully and waiting for another glossy librarian magazine to come and take his picture for their cover. Note how he's always at a flattering angle to the light and looks vaguely heroic.
One cannot trust publishers as they are in it strictly for the money. When looking for something good to read at the Library always start in the unpublished manuscript section.
The higher you go hierarchically in any institution the more overstaffed it will be. Bear in mind even "one" can be over-staffing.
Being legally blind makes one an even better and safer driver.
It takes just two weeks for our Library's number of visitors to total the entire population of the city we are in. Of course, not all 34,000 residents of our city visit us every fortnight. Most of our statistical visits derive from one regular patron who goes out to get stuff from his car a lot.
Our used book sales remain popular because peoples' houses are too big and books are an inexpensive way to stuff them.
Our Library branch's refusal to carry our own subscription to US magazine says to everyone "We are the classy branch in our library system."
One architectural firm has designed every new library built in North America over the last nine years.
My local newspapers have gone to the internet model: they mainly collect the work of other people.
If your cough has persisted for over three years it is no longer a cough, rather it is a way of life.
Monday, October 28, 2013
Box in library
I arrived early at the Library today to be told a crate had been delivered for me. I am in charge of supplies at my Library, but things usually arrive in mundane boxes and the supplies tend to get spontaneously sucked into the Library ecosystem rather than directed to me personally. Nevertheless this was a crate, made of wood, and so specifically notable. It was made of rough planks of the sort you might find in palettes, sometimes gapped, sometimes smooth, and sometimes warped and furry. Every join of it was assembled and held together with screws and then reinforced with even more screws. It was festooned with screws. It was addressed not with corporate mass produced stickers, and computer generated labels, but with someone apparently having much fun with a wood burning set, the sort of thing that might be popular in creating a sign of the family name to nail onto the front post of a country home. The wood burning addressing was, unlike the traditional country home plaques, done with a deeply unschooled hand, and though readable, was childishly crude, and thus slightly charming. My name, my Library name, and a roughly accurate address were burned in deep, and deeply uneven, black grooved lettering on two sides of the box. Small sounds seemed to be issuing from the box.
In my experience there is no emergency and no special, unusual task at my Library for which we have at hand the proper tools. However, once you involve three or four of your co workers in a search, or if you merely look long enough yourself, you can usually find, bizarrely hidden, or in a wildly different context, the appropriate tool. Barring that, you will find, in the ramshackle place any large Library becomes, a roughly useable facsimile or substitute for the item you need. We found both. A Phillips head screwdriver was finally tracked down to a station of the book repairers (are many books screwed together these days?). However, the screwdriver proved to be annoyingly tedious with the plethora of screws, which were all small and at least partly stripped. Something vaguely resembling a crowbar, which may have been a slab of metal from some ancient boiler, was located in the garage. Prying the wood apart turned out to be the more expedient solution.
With two planks up I was able to get a look inside. At first sight there seemed to be nothing but straw and shreds of newspaper. But almost simultaneous with the animal smell that rose up, was movement. A small cat, really a kitten still, was inside emerging sloppily from sleep. I scooped it up. I interrupted its nap. It regarded me with irritated interest. It was a he. He wore a black collar with a hammered medal medallion that read "K."
I order supplies from administration. They send things to me in an erratic fashion. Something as simple as pens, or library cards, can, for no particular reason, take months of ordering and multiple requests, but at the same time nothing ever seems to be, in particular, off limits. My three month old request for "Cats (1), gray or black" seemed to have surprisingly paid off.
I got the cat a bowl of milk. My understanding is that you're not supposed to give cats cow's milk, but the cat seemed to like it quite a bit. I pet it. I called it Kafka. Then I had to go to work on the phones. The cat didn't mind. He seemed to have quite a few things to take care of already himself. He went off. I watched him admiringly. He walks like a drunk cat, but teeming with mysterious confidence as he does it. Two people almost tripped over him or around him, but he paid it no mind. Clearly he is not one of those cats who is fast, but rather one who controls the movement around him to express himself. I think he may be the sort of cat who can get done whatever he wants to get done if he ever decides he wants to get anything done. Nevertheless, I think our mice problem may be over.
Not that we ever had a mice problem.
In my experience there is no emergency and no special, unusual task at my Library for which we have at hand the proper tools. However, once you involve three or four of your co workers in a search, or if you merely look long enough yourself, you can usually find, bizarrely hidden, or in a wildly different context, the appropriate tool. Barring that, you will find, in the ramshackle place any large Library becomes, a roughly useable facsimile or substitute for the item you need. We found both. A Phillips head screwdriver was finally tracked down to a station of the book repairers (are many books screwed together these days?). However, the screwdriver proved to be annoyingly tedious with the plethora of screws, which were all small and at least partly stripped. Something vaguely resembling a crowbar, which may have been a slab of metal from some ancient boiler, was located in the garage. Prying the wood apart turned out to be the more expedient solution.
With two planks up I was able to get a look inside. At first sight there seemed to be nothing but straw and shreds of newspaper. But almost simultaneous with the animal smell that rose up, was movement. A small cat, really a kitten still, was inside emerging sloppily from sleep. I scooped it up. I interrupted its nap. It regarded me with irritated interest. It was a he. He wore a black collar with a hammered medal medallion that read "K."
I order supplies from administration. They send things to me in an erratic fashion. Something as simple as pens, or library cards, can, for no particular reason, take months of ordering and multiple requests, but at the same time nothing ever seems to be, in particular, off limits. My three month old request for "Cats (1), gray or black" seemed to have surprisingly paid off.
I got the cat a bowl of milk. My understanding is that you're not supposed to give cats cow's milk, but the cat seemed to like it quite a bit. I pet it. I called it Kafka. Then I had to go to work on the phones. The cat didn't mind. He seemed to have quite a few things to take care of already himself. He went off. I watched him admiringly. He walks like a drunk cat, but teeming with mysterious confidence as he does it. Two people almost tripped over him or around him, but he paid it no mind. Clearly he is not one of those cats who is fast, but rather one who controls the movement around him to express himself. I think he may be the sort of cat who can get done whatever he wants to get done if he ever decides he wants to get anything done. Nevertheless, I think our mice problem may be over.
Not that we ever had a mice problem.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
My birthday
As presaged in a recent post, today is my birthday. What, you might wonder, do I like to do on my birthday? Well, I like to spend it with my wife. But at the Library, around the general time of my birthday, what I like to do is sort of work in the fact that my birthday is coming up. I do this anywhere and everywhere I can. I try and do it real natural like, just like I've been doing in this blog post. Like it's all pretty much an accident that I'm bringing it up, but I wouldn't feel right withholding the information, or, again like here, it's necessary to mention the fact to make my broader point. Co workers, patrons, inanimate objects, I like to share the news in this mercurial way. "Oh" I say to some patron I am registering a library card for "I was born on the 27th too!"
"March 27th?" They ask, thinking maybe I'm saying something remotely relevant and interesting, that is, that maybe we have the same birthday.
"No, October 27th!"
"Oh."
"It's very soon." I say.
"Happy birthday." They say politely.
I get very shy. "Thanks." I respond quietly.
And that's just it. After I've managed to inform every possible living and non living thing about my impending birthday, when people wish me happy birthday I think it's very nice of them and all, but I'm a bit surprised too.
How did they know?!
"March 27th?" They ask, thinking maybe I'm saying something remotely relevant and interesting, that is, that maybe we have the same birthday.
"No, October 27th!"
"Oh."
"It's very soon." I say.
"Happy birthday." They say politely.
I get very shy. "Thanks." I respond quietly.
And that's just it. After I've managed to inform every possible living and non living thing about my impending birthday, when people wish me happy birthday I think it's very nice of them and all, but I'm a bit surprised too.
How did they know?!
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Experience
I am often sharing with you my personal experiences here in an instructive way. But the hard truth is that personal experience is sometimes not such a great thing to take instruction from. Let me share my personal experience on this matter to try to convince you. A patron at my Library is concerned that something they returned has not gotten checked in. They know they put it in the automated return, and now, after days have passed, it still shows as checked out on their card. This is upsetting! From my perspective, it is business as usual, but I have the requisite imagination and perhaps, more importantly, the same sorts of aggrieved anxieties that let me understand how upsetting such a thing can be. So I give a long, pacifying, and eminently truthful explanation. I explain how, very rarely, something can come through the machine and not get checked in. I explain our process for how to deal with that and how, if the item was returned, we really do find it and resolve it fairly, without charges. Finally I explain how if, freakishly, our process doesn't come up with the item, talking to an individual at that point will resolve the issue. Most people are okay with this. But some people have had it, and they vow to only return their items directly to a person from now on. Their experience with the machine return is sullied forever, and any explanation from me that portrays human error in such an instance to be as likely as machine error falls on deaf ears. They have had a bad experience and it looms large, too large, but their statistical field of analysis is too small to make a reasonable judgement. It's as if they rolled a die twice and it showed, by chance, a three both times, and they are now convinced, in the scheme of things, they will mostly roll threes when they roll dice. I see this play out a lot at my Library. There are missing items from the shelf, botched notifications, transit mishaps, all quite rare, but not rare to the people they happen to. It can run that way with positive experiences too, though there tends to be less fuss with those. If, against all odds, I procure something rare and splendid and exactly right for someone, they may not be ungrateful, but they can easily take it all as matter of course, and only I, steeped in the bigger numbers and the constant experience with it, might know just what kind of a jackpot they hit.
These are all small instances of this sort of error of judgement, but these things are not bounded by size. It is hard to imagine that someone like Barack Obama has not been battered by an array of almost unavoidable fallacies from the outsizeness of his success. One need not diminish his vast talents to say that a series of something akin to miracles took him to where he is, and once there, or on his way there, he was more and more steeped in people of insane fortune, wealth, and power. He has rolled seven threes in a row, hanging out with other people rolling statistically flukey rolls of the highest order. What's he supposed to think? My head would be turned too. The happy magic of the dice more and more supersedes the weird, distant, theoretical contradiction of what actually is, reality.
I read, in my march through Michael Chabon's essays, one about the virtues of writing programs. It was okay, and his main point about its virtues was different than what it seemed to be at first. At first the virtues were something about teaching a person to write, giving them time, and, not least, having teachers send your work off to their agent or publishers or something. It got my hackles up just a bit at that start, and I think it had something to do with the piece of it all that he didn't say. That he's a freak, a Pulitzer Prize winning, making a living writing literature freak. How many writing program graduates are pulling that one off?
In my youth I went to art school. It was mostly a very good and interesting experience. I learned much. Maybe one blog post I'll talk all about it. But, no doubt, what I would say about it would be very different if I were some Picasso of our time. How full of destiny that education would be! How essential the teachers! But I am not the Picasso, and I get the alumni newsletters. No one is the Picasso of our time. And no doubt very, very, very few of any of us, from all the many many like schools, pull out a graceful living painting and sculpting for Museums and Millionaires. So with the numbers unsullied by my experience I say "You want to paint, go to art school or not. It doesn't matter. There's a lot of ways to learn a lot of things. It can be great. It depends."
I work at a Library. I've learned as much there as I suppose that I've learned anywhere. It's been interesting. It's been boring. It's paid bills. And you can bet, when I am President of the United States, I will be sure to note how it's the very thing everyone should consider doing. Look where it got me.
These are all small instances of this sort of error of judgement, but these things are not bounded by size. It is hard to imagine that someone like Barack Obama has not been battered by an array of almost unavoidable fallacies from the outsizeness of his success. One need not diminish his vast talents to say that a series of something akin to miracles took him to where he is, and once there, or on his way there, he was more and more steeped in people of insane fortune, wealth, and power. He has rolled seven threes in a row, hanging out with other people rolling statistically flukey rolls of the highest order. What's he supposed to think? My head would be turned too. The happy magic of the dice more and more supersedes the weird, distant, theoretical contradiction of what actually is, reality.
I read, in my march through Michael Chabon's essays, one about the virtues of writing programs. It was okay, and his main point about its virtues was different than what it seemed to be at first. At first the virtues were something about teaching a person to write, giving them time, and, not least, having teachers send your work off to their agent or publishers or something. It got my hackles up just a bit at that start, and I think it had something to do with the piece of it all that he didn't say. That he's a freak, a Pulitzer Prize winning, making a living writing literature freak. How many writing program graduates are pulling that one off?
In my youth I went to art school. It was mostly a very good and interesting experience. I learned much. Maybe one blog post I'll talk all about it. But, no doubt, what I would say about it would be very different if I were some Picasso of our time. How full of destiny that education would be! How essential the teachers! But I am not the Picasso, and I get the alumni newsletters. No one is the Picasso of our time. And no doubt very, very, very few of any of us, from all the many many like schools, pull out a graceful living painting and sculpting for Museums and Millionaires. So with the numbers unsullied by my experience I say "You want to paint, go to art school or not. It doesn't matter. There's a lot of ways to learn a lot of things. It can be great. It depends."
I work at a Library. I've learned as much there as I suppose that I've learned anywhere. It's been interesting. It's been boring. It's paid bills. And you can bet, when I am President of the United States, I will be sure to note how it's the very thing everyone should consider doing. Look where it got me.
Friday, October 25, 2013
Dreaming
When I was around ten or eleven I lived in a hilly Los Angeles suburb called Woodland Hills. My backyard was a plank of mostly crabgrass resulting from an early, unfortunate, and famously ill advised family experiment with weed killer, and was quite suitable for endless games of miniaturized sports like Wiffle Ball and two on one nerf football. This playing field terminated at a pretty steep hill that ran down to our neighbor's backyard below us. A chain link fence, about a quarter of the way down the hill, divided the properties and left us about six feet of hill all to ourselves. This bit of hill was the abode of lizards, bare dirt, and large clumps of a very nice succulent I know to this day only as iceplant. One day, in our endless, desperate, suburban search for self-entertainment, some friend and I decided to dig a great tunnel into the side of that hill. Our plan was to tunnel in and open out a glorious underground abode. It was to be a fort, maybe a wonderland. Visions of a kind of subterranean Disneyland danced in my head. It was one of my earliest and most profound encounters with the wild and ferocious ambitions of my imagination and concomitantly with the way my visions and efforts could sometimes combine with the real world to create an almost pitifully small effect.
We drew up crude schematics expressing vast rooms and underground pools, fun house mazes, bowling alleys and a world of our own. And then, with much excitement, we set to work. I believe we were equipped with two tools. The "good" tool was a hand shovel. The less good tool was some kind of fork-tongued weeding tool, little more than a glorified screwdriver. We worked a long time, our vision fevering us on. We stopped frequently to assess our progress: Hour one, "We are definitely making a dent in the hill." Hour two, "The dent in the hill is definitely growing." Hour three, "You can even set things on the dent." Hour four, "I can sort of be in the dent." And so it went. The first day was the big work day, though we maybe idly picked at it over the next few days. Whether we had progressed from "dent" to "slight concavity" would be a matter for debate. We would have needed to carefully examine the shade lines at noon. Certainly anything remotely resembling a hole never came into it. As to underground lair, don't be silly.
And so I was introduced to a strong streak of Charlie Brown theme in my life. Dreams don't often turn out like you imagine. You are not the great hero of the Baseball field. The football is withdrawn. You cannot make Disneyland under your backyard equipped with a friend and a dandelion weeder. I have, since this digging foray, embarked upon many a grand project, some with all the wild ambitions of that first one. You will not have heard of them. They did not reach the stratospheric heights of realization and acclaim that was intended for them.
Seek and ye shall find. Try and you will succeed. Well, miracles happen every day I suppose. But I am pretty sure at this point that trying, even trying very very hard, only has a very tenuous connection to succeeding. All that try and you will succeed stuff is for accountants, not dreamers.
So do I advocate giving up? Do I advocate despair? No. Actually I feel pretty good right now. I might even feel like I'm getting the trick of it. You do not dream and then try to fill the dream. You dream right into it. You do not write the great "Dreaming" essay that is filled with wonders. You write, about dreaming, and you fill it with dreams as you go.
We drew up crude schematics expressing vast rooms and underground pools, fun house mazes, bowling alleys and a world of our own. And then, with much excitement, we set to work. I believe we were equipped with two tools. The "good" tool was a hand shovel. The less good tool was some kind of fork-tongued weeding tool, little more than a glorified screwdriver. We worked a long time, our vision fevering us on. We stopped frequently to assess our progress: Hour one, "We are definitely making a dent in the hill." Hour two, "The dent in the hill is definitely growing." Hour three, "You can even set things on the dent." Hour four, "I can sort of be in the dent." And so it went. The first day was the big work day, though we maybe idly picked at it over the next few days. Whether we had progressed from "dent" to "slight concavity" would be a matter for debate. We would have needed to carefully examine the shade lines at noon. Certainly anything remotely resembling a hole never came into it. As to underground lair, don't be silly.
And so I was introduced to a strong streak of Charlie Brown theme in my life. Dreams don't often turn out like you imagine. You are not the great hero of the Baseball field. The football is withdrawn. You cannot make Disneyland under your backyard equipped with a friend and a dandelion weeder. I have, since this digging foray, embarked upon many a grand project, some with all the wild ambitions of that first one. You will not have heard of them. They did not reach the stratospheric heights of realization and acclaim that was intended for them.
Seek and ye shall find. Try and you will succeed. Well, miracles happen every day I suppose. But I am pretty sure at this point that trying, even trying very very hard, only has a very tenuous connection to succeeding. All that try and you will succeed stuff is for accountants, not dreamers.
So do I advocate giving up? Do I advocate despair? No. Actually I feel pretty good right now. I might even feel like I'm getting the trick of it. You do not dream and then try to fill the dream. You dream right into it. You do not write the great "Dreaming" essay that is filled with wonders. You write, about dreaming, and you fill it with dreams as you go.
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Library programs
It is de rigueur in modern Library circles to constantly come up with vibrant, new, and innovative Library programs and then vaunt the hell out of them. The programs need not be particularly useful or interesting, though I suppose often enough they are. Their main goal is to create the look of industriousness, vitality, and value to the taxpayer. They are to dazzle and confuse the great Republican eye that currently extends deep into the moderate flank of Democrats and would explode with a dangerous rage if it realized that there is genuine, highly effective and popular socialism carrying along, in a matter of course way, right under their noses, right in the innocent Libraries.
All these programs, useful indeed though they may be, all your WWII speakers and classes on how to use the mouse, the fun with 3D printers and kids reading to dogs, and prizes and book clubs and author visits, all of them are marketing and sales, extras and dazzlements of the eye. They are good works for the overstocked librarians, and they make lovely public relations. And it is all an okay price to pay, maybe even a great price, a win-win price, but only so long as it does its job. Because all of it is mere clothes and fancies, funny hats and politics, but it is not the body. The body of the Library is and will always be books and a place, open to all. If I must, I'll even throw in all the movies and music and, yes, your stupid E-books and internets if you promise to be a little more careful with them. But this is the Library, untethered culture, curated knowledge and art, as much of it as wide open and as free and as good as we can get it. The rest, the rest is baubles, apocrypha, fan fiction.
All these programs, useful indeed though they may be, all your WWII speakers and classes on how to use the mouse, the fun with 3D printers and kids reading to dogs, and prizes and book clubs and author visits, all of them are marketing and sales, extras and dazzlements of the eye. They are good works for the overstocked librarians, and they make lovely public relations. And it is all an okay price to pay, maybe even a great price, a win-win price, but only so long as it does its job. Because all of it is mere clothes and fancies, funny hats and politics, but it is not the body. The body of the Library is and will always be books and a place, open to all. If I must, I'll even throw in all the movies and music and, yes, your stupid E-books and internets if you promise to be a little more careful with them. But this is the Library, untethered culture, curated knowledge and art, as much of it as wide open and as free and as good as we can get it. The rest, the rest is baubles, apocrypha, fan fiction.
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Grape
On Mermaid Avenue II, there is a song, lyrics by Woody Guthrie, music by Billy Bragg, that was never my favorite, but always arrested me and made me pay attention. I am repeatedly struck by its conceit, and it is that conceit, and Billy Bragg's expression of it, that, in the end, makes me kind of love it. The song is Meanest Man, and the conceit is that the singer would be an angry, cruel, terrible man if it weren't for nice people. He'd be a louse and a drunk if it weren't for his wife's kisses and people talking and letters from his friends. He sings it almost like he'd like to be that terrible person, but all these lovely people moor him to humanity, and over and over he is made better once again, by them.
I have been thinking about this song, and it has opened up a little window in the world. Through that window I see a vision of all of us who stand in this life with at least most of our realness in tact, who stand mostly unbroken, standing that way thanks to a series of people who have saved our lives. No gods, not nature, not even ourselves, all of that can be essential, some of it definitely is, but first we need that leg up, that catch, first our lives must be saved, saved by simple, on the ground, actual people. Nothing else will do.
If you are lucky, your parents may save your life, a sibling, a grandparent. Maybe some teacher will save your life along the way, and later the world opens up and, like Billy Bragg sings it, the life saving is all around you.
Surely, for me, there were little catches, moments, pieces of being saved, that let me hobble along; a cousin, a friend's mother, my sister's teacher, just enough to keep me from starving to death. But I was fully 15 years old before I met someone who wholly saved my life. There have been others since then, including the life saver who dwarfs all others, and has been saving my life daily for more than 20 years (see "wife's kisses"). But the first one, the unchangeable first one, who saved my life at age 15, was Grape.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to tell you who I was at age 15, hanging by a thread to the world, too clear eyed and hurt for me to convey here. But let it be enough to say that I was bitter and amazed and unable to walk that simple but unbearable path from myself to the world.
I had known Grape for some years in that way that you know all your classmates. I have some memory of being in a seventh grade English class with him, but there was nothing beyond that. Nothing until, early in tenth grade, he was suddenly friends with an old, fading best friend of mine, and, all at once, he was there, in my world. And he was dazzling. How he was to himself was no doubt very different, just a fifteen year old boy, really, but there, in my world, he was popular, and funny, and idiosyncratic. He was interesting, a seeker, brave and beautiful and part of the world, discovering things before or after or simultaneously with my own discoveries. Yes, essentially he liked me, perhaps even as much as I liked him, and that was life saving, to be able to be liked so much by a person I so passionately admired, but also he was like me. All unlike me, he was dazzling and easy and graceful in the world, woven into the world, so functional and seeming fearless, and yet he was also, soul to soul, vision to vision, like me, full of a resonating harmony and clear eyes and kindness that I could actually believe. Suddenly a bridge stood in the world. I could not walk on it yet, but I could see that there were ways across, from me to the world. And instead of one delicate thread connecting me, there were dozens of threads, his threads, and then others and they wound and wove together and were string, and eventually rope and I was able to pull into that connection, and I could begin the long fight to finding my way back. He gave me that. He gave me the world. He saved my life.
My friend Grape and I remain friends to this day. We have a rich history, and the adventures of our adolescence, and the adventures from the long, halting starts of our manhoods, seem terribly, almost painfully sweet in the nostalgia of it. Full adulthood, lived far apart from each other, and the changes of life in general, have done some fading on that friendship, but it stands true, some chord-ringing shared heart sounding underneath everything.
Our birthdays fall quite close to each other, and we have always made some fuss, one way or the other, about them. Sometimes they have been grand, like our joint fortieth birthday party, and sometimes they have been a bit ragged, with late, rather desperate gifts. I have a couple of past their expiration date CDs to send him this year. I haven't sent them yet, even though today itself is his birthday. And he'll probably send me something eventually too, avocados maybe, half mashed in transit. It's nice, anything he sends, but it doesn't matter. He has already, long ago and through the years, given me an incalculable gift, and it rings out, through my life, and forever.
I have been thinking about this song, and it has opened up a little window in the world. Through that window I see a vision of all of us who stand in this life with at least most of our realness in tact, who stand mostly unbroken, standing that way thanks to a series of people who have saved our lives. No gods, not nature, not even ourselves, all of that can be essential, some of it definitely is, but first we need that leg up, that catch, first our lives must be saved, saved by simple, on the ground, actual people. Nothing else will do.
If you are lucky, your parents may save your life, a sibling, a grandparent. Maybe some teacher will save your life along the way, and later the world opens up and, like Billy Bragg sings it, the life saving is all around you.
Surely, for me, there were little catches, moments, pieces of being saved, that let me hobble along; a cousin, a friend's mother, my sister's teacher, just enough to keep me from starving to death. But I was fully 15 years old before I met someone who wholly saved my life. There have been others since then, including the life saver who dwarfs all others, and has been saving my life daily for more than 20 years (see "wife's kisses"). But the first one, the unchangeable first one, who saved my life at age 15, was Grape.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to tell you who I was at age 15, hanging by a thread to the world, too clear eyed and hurt for me to convey here. But let it be enough to say that I was bitter and amazed and unable to walk that simple but unbearable path from myself to the world.
I had known Grape for some years in that way that you know all your classmates. I have some memory of being in a seventh grade English class with him, but there was nothing beyond that. Nothing until, early in tenth grade, he was suddenly friends with an old, fading best friend of mine, and, all at once, he was there, in my world. And he was dazzling. How he was to himself was no doubt very different, just a fifteen year old boy, really, but there, in my world, he was popular, and funny, and idiosyncratic. He was interesting, a seeker, brave and beautiful and part of the world, discovering things before or after or simultaneously with my own discoveries. Yes, essentially he liked me, perhaps even as much as I liked him, and that was life saving, to be able to be liked so much by a person I so passionately admired, but also he was like me. All unlike me, he was dazzling and easy and graceful in the world, woven into the world, so functional and seeming fearless, and yet he was also, soul to soul, vision to vision, like me, full of a resonating harmony and clear eyes and kindness that I could actually believe. Suddenly a bridge stood in the world. I could not walk on it yet, but I could see that there were ways across, from me to the world. And instead of one delicate thread connecting me, there were dozens of threads, his threads, and then others and they wound and wove together and were string, and eventually rope and I was able to pull into that connection, and I could begin the long fight to finding my way back. He gave me that. He gave me the world. He saved my life.
My friend Grape and I remain friends to this day. We have a rich history, and the adventures of our adolescence, and the adventures from the long, halting starts of our manhoods, seem terribly, almost painfully sweet in the nostalgia of it. Full adulthood, lived far apart from each other, and the changes of life in general, have done some fading on that friendship, but it stands true, some chord-ringing shared heart sounding underneath everything.
Our birthdays fall quite close to each other, and we have always made some fuss, one way or the other, about them. Sometimes they have been grand, like our joint fortieth birthday party, and sometimes they have been a bit ragged, with late, rather desperate gifts. I have a couple of past their expiration date CDs to send him this year. I haven't sent them yet, even though today itself is his birthday. And he'll probably send me something eventually too, avocados maybe, half mashed in transit. It's nice, anything he sends, but it doesn't matter. He has already, long ago and through the years, given me an incalculable gift, and it rings out, through my life, and forever.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Careful what you wish for
If, when I was twelve years old and watching as much television as I possibly could, you were to ask me to devise improvements for that medium, I might have gamely attempted some ridiculous, fully impossible, revisions. Giving me a lot of credit, and, why not, since my twelve year old self could surely use some credit, I would have proposed thousands of channels, two way interactivity, a wild diversity of content, games, ever present, wildly diverse access, and an ability to instantly buy and get anything you see on your screen. I would have, remember the credit thing, roughly proposed, the internet! I would have proposed an impossible miracle, a folly, a wonder. And now here I am with this dream, right at my very fingertips, flooding my brain, and I find there is one thing I never, as a twelve year old, ever would have imagined in my wildest dreams. I would never have imagined, cynical as I may already have been, that it would be, after such a dazzling transmutation of improvements and complexities, so much like, well, TV.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it, as with most things in our culture over the past 35 years, like TV, but so much bigger, and with better marketing. It is TV made gigantic, with us even more deeply wound in, and it thus become impervious in its massivity, untouchable and touching everything, like some horrible and glorious fungus, or virus, beribboning every aspect of our our commerce, our art, our communication, our lives, with the treads of it running from here to the end of the universe. Non operative cancer also comes to mind, or water. Our culture is infused with it so deeply that to extract it now seems impossible. We cannot remove the tumor without destroying the vital organs. To fight this, to rail against this is to rail against our very selves. It is us.
And yet, let's look deep into the heart of this gigantic tumorous virus that we now are. Let's trace those googleplexes of profound and useful and parasitical threads back to its nascent core, it's original, forgotten nucleus, the humble television, the first glowing screen we faced alone and lost ourselves to. A soul sucking device, a time waster, the boob tube, the idiot box. Despite watching that glowing box for hours, addicted, I was aware of its poison, not least because the culture itself seemed aware of it too. And I fought it, like everyone worth anything, I fought the insidious hold of that box. Sometimes I won and sometimes I lost. So when I say that the internet is just TV, writ large, it isn't primarily about those almost superficial similarities; the glowing screen, the communication device, the endless luring chain of self-selling entertainments, rather it is primarily that very feeling of wasted time and uselessness, addiction, manipulability, hard core meaninglessness and fake engagement that yokes them, that says, these, in the end, are the same. They are so psychologically, so functionally, the same in me.
I have written my pieces on the absurd futility of railing against something on and with the very thing one is railing against. And I'd be tilting at windmills anyway, even were my screeds instead appearing in some rare place, innocent and free of the internet, and yet still well published and well read. Even a lance against windmills seems to undersell my predicament. We are speaking of the mighty, the vaunted, the everything INTERNET, dazzling every bit of us. But yes, fine, I admit that I am once again your lone correspondent, Don Quixote, screaming at monsters. It is so. I am a crazy writer who can't even entirely mean it, bound as I am, even as I speak, deep into the very expressions of this beast. I at once create it and fling my body against it in futility. It is a bit of a sad madness. Take pity. Maybe everyone can just humor me a little. Hide your phones when I am near. Stop talking about how great the internet is. A pejorative nickname would be nice too. The apocalypse box? The great nothing? The hall of mirrors? Two way TV? Pretty much anything would help. And when you tell me about some brilliant blogger you found, reading your way in this hall of mirrors, on your two way TV, say maybe "I was murdering my life on the Internet, on the apocalypse box, last night, clicking on nothing, but I did stumble on an extraordinary, genius blog of mass criticism, memoir, and attention that I thought you might like, clerkmanifesto.com."
"I write that blog." I will say with a mixed pride "And I am sorry."
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it, as with most things in our culture over the past 35 years, like TV, but so much bigger, and with better marketing. It is TV made gigantic, with us even more deeply wound in, and it thus become impervious in its massivity, untouchable and touching everything, like some horrible and glorious fungus, or virus, beribboning every aspect of our our commerce, our art, our communication, our lives, with the treads of it running from here to the end of the universe. Non operative cancer also comes to mind, or water. Our culture is infused with it so deeply that to extract it now seems impossible. We cannot remove the tumor without destroying the vital organs. To fight this, to rail against this is to rail against our very selves. It is us.
And yet, let's look deep into the heart of this gigantic tumorous virus that we now are. Let's trace those googleplexes of profound and useful and parasitical threads back to its nascent core, it's original, forgotten nucleus, the humble television, the first glowing screen we faced alone and lost ourselves to. A soul sucking device, a time waster, the boob tube, the idiot box. Despite watching that glowing box for hours, addicted, I was aware of its poison, not least because the culture itself seemed aware of it too. And I fought it, like everyone worth anything, I fought the insidious hold of that box. Sometimes I won and sometimes I lost. So when I say that the internet is just TV, writ large, it isn't primarily about those almost superficial similarities; the glowing screen, the communication device, the endless luring chain of self-selling entertainments, rather it is primarily that very feeling of wasted time and uselessness, addiction, manipulability, hard core meaninglessness and fake engagement that yokes them, that says, these, in the end, are the same. They are so psychologically, so functionally, the same in me.
I have written my pieces on the absurd futility of railing against something on and with the very thing one is railing against. And I'd be tilting at windmills anyway, even were my screeds instead appearing in some rare place, innocent and free of the internet, and yet still well published and well read. Even a lance against windmills seems to undersell my predicament. We are speaking of the mighty, the vaunted, the everything INTERNET, dazzling every bit of us. But yes, fine, I admit that I am once again your lone correspondent, Don Quixote, screaming at monsters. It is so. I am a crazy writer who can't even entirely mean it, bound as I am, even as I speak, deep into the very expressions of this beast. I at once create it and fling my body against it in futility. It is a bit of a sad madness. Take pity. Maybe everyone can just humor me a little. Hide your phones when I am near. Stop talking about how great the internet is. A pejorative nickname would be nice too. The apocalypse box? The great nothing? The hall of mirrors? Two way TV? Pretty much anything would help. And when you tell me about some brilliant blogger you found, reading your way in this hall of mirrors, on your two way TV, say maybe "I was murdering my life on the Internet, on the apocalypse box, last night, clicking on nothing, but I did stumble on an extraordinary, genius blog of mass criticism, memoir, and attention that I thought you might like, clerkmanifesto.com."
"I write that blog." I will say with a mixed pride "And I am sorry."
Monday, October 21, 2013
New People
We have two new staff members. As is common for my Library they are refugees from other branches. Among the Circulation staff there are very few of us who are native to this, the giant, branch in the system. When I experience pride over my co workers it is because we are a rough bunch, with a streak of displacement, malcontentment, and independence. The little Libraries couldn't hold us. Nevertheless, the transition to this large, busy branch can still be a complicated one, and the process of assimilation is strange and challenging.
When I expounded the following analogy to Dave, he characterized it as disgusting, which it kind of is, but there was a certain warm pleasure in his voice, which is part of why we get along.
My Library is like a giant stomach, and when the new people come in, we only have so long to digest them into working the way we want them to, into being the kind of co-workers we want them to be, before they become part of the stomach, and thus become part of who we are.
Our manager shows them around and tells them some random assortment of duties and rules they should know. Those rules are fine, and the new people need to know them. But there are easily twice as many secret rules, and I convey, in the natural scheme of things, as many as I can to the new people. And then, sometimes in a day, sometimes in a few months, it's over, and they are just, for good or ill, us.
When I expounded the following analogy to Dave, he characterized it as disgusting, which it kind of is, but there was a certain warm pleasure in his voice, which is part of why we get along.
My Library is like a giant stomach, and when the new people come in, we only have so long to digest them into working the way we want them to, into being the kind of co-workers we want them to be, before they become part of the stomach, and thus become part of who we are.
Our manager shows them around and tells them some random assortment of duties and rules they should know. Those rules are fine, and the new people need to know them. But there are easily twice as many secret rules, and I convey, in the natural scheme of things, as many as I can to the new people. And then, sometimes in a day, sometimes in a few months, it's over, and they are just, for good or ill, us.
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