Refrain

 

I was busily engaged with my computer on the front desk of my library. Whether it was work related or not I don't remember nor care. A library patron came up to me and said "You don't look like you have anything to do, so I'll give you my books to check out."

It's not that I dislike this comment.

It

simply

disgusts

me.

But, I am an old hand here, and excellent at my job. 

"I am very busy." I say clearly and evenly.

I pause.

Then I add:

"But for you... I would love nothing more than to help you today."And the strange thing that makes me so good at my job is...

I mean it.

Explaining my blog posts

 

A co-worker of mine came in for her evening shift and I greeted her with an elaborate Latin nickname loosely related to her actual name. I thought of it on the spur of the moment. She didn't understand what I was talking about. It didn't help that she was born and raised in a far distant land that used even less Latin than we do. Either way, I ended up having to explain the term "Modus Operandi". A librarian nearby patched up my leaky explanation and a rambling discussion between the three of us followed.

As the instigator of all this nonsense, I felt an explanation was in order. "When it comes to language," I explained, "I abide by the Wayne Gretsky adage: 'You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."

A short time later a kid's library book came in on our automated check in machine. It was called "A Girl Can Build Anything". The same librarian from earlier was in the area again, so I held up the book and asked "If a girl built a machine that made it so girls couldn't build everything, would we then weed this book?"

"Good question." They replied.

"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." I replied.

I felt a refresher was already in order.

The wisdom that comes with little power

 

The County is using our large meeting room today for a leadership conference. It is packed full of county middle managers, including most of my library system's branch managers. None of them look like they're having a lot of fun.

A regular library patron asking about this class found out it was about county leadership. They teasingly asked me "Why aren't you in that meeting."

"I only believe in leading from below." I commented.

The teasing continued, perhaps not as mean as it sounds. "Very far below." She said.

So I shrugged: "The only real leadership is the kind that no one can observe."

Just pick one

 

In one of those darling movies my lovely wife and I have watched so many times that now we've had to switch over to watching British Amateur Home Economics Competition Shows, there is a scene I must describe to set the stage for today's column. The movie this scene is from is called "Dog Days". An aspiring musician is taking care of his sister's dog. Reluctantly, on the first morning that he is taking care of the dog, he has to take that dog outside to answer the call of nature. The dog is in no hurry, and he wanders to every possible place to sniff and inspect before relieving himself. The musician becomes increasingly frustrated as the dog cannot seem to decide.

Finally the impatient musician cries out at the dog "Just pick one! They are all the same!"

Set that now into your mythical frame of reference.

Thank you.

Now let me tell you a story, a not uncommon story from the front desk of my library.

At my library we have over a hundred Internet computers available for the public's use. One can log on to these computers with a library card. But for people who don't want or have a library card, or for paranoid patrons who fear their Internet activity might somehow link to their card, we have generic Internet passes freely available. They sit piled up on our various public desks, and we give out hundreds of these every day. 

Most people just come along and swiftly grab two or three of these passes (just to be sure?). But it is not uncommon for a library visitor to come stand over our passes, poking their fingers at them, and studying them carefully as they block up the desk.

"Can I help you?" I ask.

"I'm just trying to find a really good one." They say, as if it makes any sense.

Just pick one! They are all the same!

Coda:

In the movie "Dog Days", near the end the musician has bonded very closely with his sister's dog, and on their last morning together he takes the dog out for his evacuations.

"Don't rush it." He advises. "It has to feel right."

Sometimes I feel pretty peaceful at the desk too. And as the library patron endlessly sorts through our passes, carefully reading through every one, I only think: "That's right, get a good one. Logging on with the wrong Internet pass could affect the whole experience.

Too much winning

 

In my adventures in following soccer, I have mostly experienced losing. My chosen National team was losing the World Cup simultaneously with my interest bursting onto the scene. My newly discovered club team circa 2014 swiftly emerged as the best in the world at that time and won everything while I still only partially understood what was happening. And then followed increasing heartbreaks for a decade. In this past year my chosen club team won nothing. Even following excellent teams, when it came down to it at the end of a season or tournament, I mostly had to wallow for days in the bitterness of catastrophic defeat. When one thinks of it, that's how sports are. In any single year or tournament, out of twenty or thirty teams, only one team can win.

That's a lot of people losing.

Sports, like the lottery, is all about losing, all while we dream big. It's the losing that is what's normal.

Until Argentina kind of stopped losing... anything.

A few years ago the major South American tournament, that had eluded Argentina and Messi through his whole career, came along.

And they won!

It was amazing.

It was glorious.

It was everything I had been suffering for in soccer all those years.

 Or almost everything.

Because next came the World Cup. The real prize. And Argentina won that too. The greatest triumph for any player or team in all of soccer, maybe even in all of international sports!

And it was heaven.

Soccer accomplished! 

The debt of all my pain paid off in full, with interest at a good return!

And then a month ago the Copa came again. The final was just last night.

And Argentina won again.

So, I guess that was nice. 

I mean I already have so much money, so to speak, with all the lottery wins.  I'm not complaining, it's just that it would have been so great for Colombia, who lost. And to be honest I don't really know where to put another one of these trophies of my winning team. They're kind of heavy, and have a tendency to pile up. But I guess I can pick it up and maybe throw it in the back of some closet somewhere?

Surely I'll need it eventually?

Revised policy on killing people

 

I have long been opposed to Capital Punishment. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of people whose death I have no problem with and might even coldly appreciate. But I cannot come up with a circumstance in which I trust any State in any way to bring that death about.

However, I have held onto the idea that there could be a good person, quietly and grimly, with skill, presence, and justice, who could do the bitter work of ending the life of an evil person who could not reasonably be stopped in any other way.

Unfortunately, I think I read too many novels.

People of profound judgement who can quietly engineer a natural looking heart attack for a deeply corrupt Supreme Court Justice who is defiling the constitution are, and it pains me to admit this, almost certainly non existent. As are the ingenuous operatives who could create a natural looking car accident that takes out a person committing vast crimes against humanity, say a Putin or Netanyahu. I know that the nature of these extraordinary vigilantes are such that we would not clearly see what they have done. It would look like the hand of god. But as I have observed recently in this space, that is the point. We haven't even seen the hand of god killing people whose death would lighten the world. How easy it is to conjure up from history, recent and long ago, a premature tragic death that is only a loss for the world. But as to the many people whose death could benefit so many?

 Crickets.

And so if we don't have these angels of justice out killing people where it needs to be done, what do we have? We have idiots who shoot the wrong people or miss, or simply set it all up wrong so that it could never have any positive effect. We have crazy people. Mean people. Deluded people. Inept people. Insane people. Or all of the above, killing people left and right to no tune but agony and destruction.

People who head on out to kill other people, it is impossible not to conclude, simply suck. 

And so I unconditionally withdraw my support.

It was pretty theoretical anyway.

And though my heart may still clamor for justice at any cost, I bow to the reality of human nature. Perhaps means other than assassination are equally hopeless to solve our gravest problems. But if we are going to fail justice either way, through execution or craft, we may as well do it with less collateral damage.

Trust

 

I was reading an online discussion on the "Libraries" subreddit. Someone had asked about printing and what different libraries do about the costs of their printing. The questioner's perspective was that they weren't making any money with their printing payment system, and they weren't sure, but they might even be losing money.

Responses from across the library world varied. Some people were pretty salty about any implications that a library might want to not lose money on printing. After all, libraries are funded by the community to provide useful information, environments, and even services to the community. Many people weighed in on the disaster of free printing, citing the people who invariably abused the largesse so badly that it could even break down the printing system by overwhelming it. Other library staff complained about the misery of dealing with a paid system and the increased strife, costs, and labor involved. And still others put forward their system's allowance of a limited amount a free printing tied to a library card.

Because I think my library system's solution is a shining beacon on the hill, I was surprised not to see it mentioned at all: We charge for printing, but it's an honor system. There are lock boxes next to the printers. We have prices. It's up to the library users to police their own usage.

The World is dangerous and mad. Terrible things are afoot. Nothing works. Corruption is running rampant. Human decency is choking on its rage. People are losing their fucking minds.

But, believe it or not, the world still runs mainly on trust. 

All the good parts, that is.

But who am I to talk?

Did I write a comment in the library subreddit to explain our wondrous solution? No.

I'm sure nearly everyone there in that library world would be perfectly nice about my comment.

But out on the Internet at least, there is always one asshole...

We could live in paradise

Fishing around in the recent history of clerkmanifesto I came upon my recent series where I was making the case that any city was improved by replacing its roads with canals. In my mini doctoral thesis I set the bar at a level I thought was pretty high for myself: I explored already lovely cities like Paris, Nice, Rome, and Kyoto, and coldly tested them. Were they actually better with canals?

They were.

But briefly looking them over I wondered if there wasn't more to explore in my thesis. Yes, an already beautiful city can be made even more beautiful if we get rid of cars and even roads, but what about an ugly city?

I live in Saint Minneapolis. I like it very much here. There are many lovely places here, and I have even documented some of them in this very space. The urbanist channels I follow regularly extoll Saint Minneapolis and their points are excellent. Saint Minneapolis is constantly regarded as one of the best biking cities in the country. And I'm sure it is. There is a good case to be made that it is one of the best urban areas in our entire country!

That said, and with all due city loyalty, I have to admit:

Saint Minneapolis is a pile of hot garbage. 

Relative to the rest of the country it may be better hot garbage. Though that's pretty sad. Relative to a nice European city it is just simple hot garbage. And relative to a reasonably unfettered "Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" imagination of hope and light, it is a shining beacon of cruelty and injustice.

But I am not here to get into all that.

I just thought: There are some really ugly wide streets all over my city. Could they be improved by canals?

And then I went to steal pictures from Streetview of nearby areas that I regularly visit and am familiar with and know to be pretty ugly. But opening up Streetview, it was worse than I thought! I have dealt with up to five lanes of brutal traffic running through all the commercial areas I enjoy for so long that I think I have learned to partly tune them out. I know that Snelling Ave. and Lake St. are miserable roads hostile to aesthetics and human experience, but I am pretty good at looking the other way. That's where the coffee shops are. That's a place to walk to. That's where I live. So I learn to tune it out more that I would imagine.

What I'm saying is: these Streetview images were shockingly ugly. The small line of nice shops, or the useful trees, or the library building, were like ten percent of the scene. The roads, parking lots, and cars took up like half of any image. Did I think simply putting in a canal here could improve this mess?

Well, my plan was to try.

So I got rid of cars, and parking lots, and put in a canal. And...

Ah civilization. It really is that simple.

My point is made again.

 

Fun is what we do in the absence of anything else

 

At the desk:

A library patron was looking for a book that was supposed to be on hold for him. There was a cart of unshelved books sitting nearby. He asked one of my colleagues "Can I just take a quick peep at this cart?'

My colleague replied "Yes."

I added, unbidden, "But there's a 14-second time limit."

A library patron came to the front desk. My desk partner asked, "Can I help you?"

The woman said, "I just wanted to use this stapler."

I held up a paper clip and a staple remover. "Would you like a staple remover or a paper clip?" I offered.

And then finally it came time for me to do it all alone. I was relieving a co-worker at the front desk to work an hour shift by myself with the public. After telling me about all the difficult people they had to deal with in their hour, my colleague departed, saying "Have fun."

"There's nothing else to do." I replied.

The genius

 

I haven't spent much time on the photography side of clerkmanifesto lately. Nor have there been any of my strange music videos, or AI video, or any other of my visual art bits. Indeed clerkmanifesto has been in its classic, old-school mode lately- just a bit of prose wandering around what I am thinking of, and an assortment of stories from my life at the library. But while in this space fancy pictures have gone on hiatus, at my library there are 70 elaborate framed photographs of mine on display, right in the beating heart of this busy library. 

And they are popular! 

For any hour I spend at the front desk I will see wide varieties of people wandering around and taking a good long time to look at them. Small groups and families avidly point out little details in the pictures to each other. And it is a regular occurrence to have someone come to the front desk strictly to exclaim over them and sing their praises. Sometimes it's to me, sometimes I just overhear it all.

It's a heady experience for an artist whose acclaim has scrupulously kept to the mild, hard-not-to-doubt-yourself side of things for 40 years.

As so often happens I am reminded of something from a romantic comedy. I feel like that undertaker in the greatest romantic comedy of all time, Moonstruck. It's near the start of the movie. Cher is doing the books for the local mortician in his back room. As the mortician leaves the viewing room he overhears two women talking about him and his great skill in doing the makeup of the corpse for the viewing they're attending. They call him a genius, and as he comes into the back where Cher is, he grabs a bagel, takes a bite, and proclaims "I am a genius!"

Cher comments on the cream cheese he just got on his tie.

People come up to the front desk and ask excitedly "Who made these pictures?"

"No one knows." I say. "But he is a genius!"

This hardly fazes them. "Well, they are such fun! Tell him that they are great!"

"Oh, he knows. He knows."

Feast or famine

 

In the sheer chaos of understaffing, new hires, sub training, random sub appearances based on their availability over our need, and a generally disorganized, laissez-faire approach to how we do things, I walk into wildly varying staffing situations at my job these days at the library. Currently our circulation staff, working right now at my library, numbers twelve people. This is a lot! But at 5:00 that number will drop to three, one of whom I suspect might call in sick, leaving us a staff of two, one-sixth of what we have now. 

The nice young man in black and white checked pants helping someone to my right is someone I have not seen since we trained him in half a year ago. A temporary worker walking by was pointed out to me by a longtime co-worker who has returned this very day to take back his old hours. Did I know the person pointed out to me? No, I can't remember. She seems vaguely familiar. He then told me her name, but I have already forgotten it. The chances of me ever seeing that co-worker again seem too low to go to all that difficulty of remembering her name.

Briefly remembering a name might not seem difficult to you, but I have only survived here through a meticulous conservation of energy.

Maybe the oddest thing is that around here two people get about as much done as twelve. I don't know how that works. I'm not saying it from the perspective of two better workers getting done the work of twelve poor ones, but rather something about the strange, pulsing inertia and momentum of a larger library like this producing times where the work is done equally by twelve or two people. If we had twelve people for a sustained period of time we would be very caught up and our large staff would increasingly have to find involved, largely meaningless things to do. Likewise, if we were always down to two people, we would fall into a state of desperate, limping chaos. But these gluts of workers, and these shortages of workers, at least as they occur for a day or two, have functionally the same effect on the efficiency of this library.

It seems very mysterious. But maybe it's just me.

Maybe everything every day is wildly different, but I...

have become...

unflappable.

The Tonight Show joke

 

It's not that I don't tell jokes here.

Some of my posts here are nothing but jokes. But my jokes are particular. They can be surreal, formal, deeply involved puns, dry satire, or circumstantial whimsy. But it is extremely rare that I write an official nighttime talk show monologue joke. You know, like the kind that Johnny Carson would read in his opening remarks. Or, sorry, I don't watch regular TV, so, like Jimmy Kimmel, or Jimmy Fallon would. It's one of those topical jokes that is a not-very-funny take on the news of the day.

I have told this joke to a few people today and, while at best, they mildly chuckled, ultimately they did agree it was suitable for an evening talk show comedy intro. It goes like this:

Amid calls that he step down as a candidate because he is too old, confused, and out of touch, President Biden, expressing his firm commitment to staying in the race, sent a strongly worded telegram to every Democratic member of Congress today.

Although come to think of it, this is a little too perfect. No doubt some version of this joke has been made on late night talk shows, regarding too old politicians, dozens of times already.

 

Volunteers

 

I was coming back into the staff area after an hour at the front desk. Two super nice older lady volunteers were finishing up with emptying our usual endless lot of book bins. This is always a big help, and I was overcome with feeling for the nobility of volunteers.

"I've been here for years." I proclaimed. "But I'm just a mercenary, coming to the library for my job. You two come here and empty all these bins just to be nice. You are the real heroes around here!"

They laughed and then joked with me. "Oh, they secretly pay us a ton of money under the table." One of them said.

"Well it can't be as much as they pay me!" I exclaimed. "I don't even know what to do with it all so I just buy more and more County Commissioners."

But after we finished with the joking back and forth I suddenly was overcome with doubt. 

"Just to make sure," I said, "I wasn't being sarcastic or anything. I meant it."

One of them looked kindly at me. "We know." She said.

Death, taxes, and debates

 

The debates came up with one of my co-workers out at the front desk of the library. "Isn't there supposed to be another one?" I asked.

She didn't know and wanted to, so I looked it up.

"Yes." I informed her. "There's going to be one more presidential debate on September tenth."

My colleague groaned.

I said "I know. It would be so much better if they both died of old age before then!"

This got me going. "John Lennon dies. Prince dies. Martin Luther King dies, but when you really need someone to die it just doesn't happen!"

My co-worker, probably because of being a long time Beatle fan, agreed with me. But if she were more of a Lord of the Rings fan she might have quoted Gandalf at me:

"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement."

To which I might have replied: 

"I'm not so much judging. I'm merely suggesting that god might want to get a little more involved here."

Actually, it's probably for the best that she's a Beatles fan.

They're art

 

My art show is up at my library. I like how it's going. 

The show itself is full of dozens and dozens of pictures of my library richly festooned with cartoon characters, wild animals, biblical and movie references, and only slightly unsettling alien invasions and monster rampages. 

But if you've spent anytime here on clerkmanifesto you surely will have seen most of the pictures that are in my show.

Despite my niggling disappointment that not every single person who walks into the library loves my pictures, or even glances their way, fairly speaking this collection is pretty popular. Families circle around the pictures pointing out details to each other. I heard that a neighborhood Facebook group heaped detailed praise upon them, and even some of my co-workers, who I would have thought had had enough of all these pictures by now, have said some enormously kind things to me about this show.

But above all, little kids get very excited about my pictures. And honestly it is wonderful to see them running around pointing their little chubby fingers at various featured bits, and crying out to their little child gods in delighted exclamation.

But curiously every time I see the children laugh joyfully at my pictures I think of a scene from the movie Love Actually. 

I can't find a clip of it and I've only seen it 30 or 40 times so I'll have to sort of paraphrase it. The character who is in love with his best friend's new wife is on the phone at a maybe high-end, London art gallery that he works at. His art gallery is showing large photographs of Christmas themed nudes, like, black and white pictures of naked people with tiny Santa hats over their nipples. A group of school girls are looking at these pictures and giggling. Our character on the phone briefly interrupts his call to admonish the girls:

"They're not funny." He says. "They're art."

Why do I think of this scene?

I have decided it's a kind of reminding joke I tell myself. Whatever the faults there are of Love Actually, this is a fine little comedy bit about the pomposity of art, packed, neatly, into a tiny scene of the movie. I have been inclined to believe in the endless hunger and ambition of the things I have made, but I have finally grown less interested. Making one smudged little three-year-old cackle is enough praise for any work, large or small. 

The rest is gravy.

Bitter holiday political banter

The elder branch manager of my library was leaving the library on the evening of July the third. "Don't forget to leave milk and cookies out for Captain America." He said. 

Oh what's the point? He just leaves behind a bunch of constitutions that the Supreme Court says we can't use anymore. 

The road to fascism

 

One of our relatively new branch managers came by the front desk of my library to see if there was anything good for the children's room sitting in our donation bin.

"You know that new Supreme Court ruling doesn't just apply to the President? It applies to you too." I offered cheerily.

"How so?" She asked warily.

"As a branch manager, you cannot be tried or prosecuted for any crime so long as you claim it was done in your role as a library manager."

"Good to know." She observed wryly.

"In fact," I added. "If you wanted to take home that board book you're holding, no one could ever stop you."

She briefly glanced at the board book. I think it maybe had a picture of a truck on it.

She didn't say anything, but I could tell she was already beginning to grow mad with power.

Our future leader

 

All the drama at my library this week has to do with indulgences. A difficult library patron has taken to asking desk staff to take his food to our back room to microwave it for him. I have not been involved in any of the drama, though last week he did ask me to microwave his food for him.

I said "No."

He wasn't happy, but it has gone far worse for others. Apparently he was hostile to two of my colleagues at the front desk when they told him they could not warm his food for him. The circulation manager was brought in as tensions rose, and, infuriating all my co-workers, the manager resolved the situation by warming the mean person's food for him and delivering it to him at his computer.

Aside from the more common sense idea that we don't cook patrons' food for them in our staff areas, we actually have a much publicized library policy that we don't allow warm food to be eaten in the library anyway. But before it ever got to the point of this person raging against his food not being warmed, another of my colleagues had warmed his food, as a point of least resistance to his aggression. This only led to him being more furious when he was refused in the future, which led to the manager compounding the problem by passing the problem forward.

There are times when a careful, limited indulgence can resolve a situation. But nearly always, when someone is asking for something wholly, or even slightly unreasonable, indulging them doesn't resolve the problem, it merely delays the problem while also doubling its size.

And like with a child, only indulged to avoid the difficult work of addressing the issue, one ends up with the worst possible thing:

A President.

Workers' paradise

 

Yes, the library I work at is mismanaged. The people in charge at every level act like royalty. We are increasingly understaffed. No one is paid fairly. And our standards are going to hell. Also, many of the library patrons are extremely unpleasant and increasingly hostile and aggressive. New hires barely know their alphabet, and the old hands are increasingly crabby and bitter.

And sure, I can tell you a few examples of all of the above from my own experience, but really I wish you could simply hear the steady litany of complaints from all my co-workers, as I do, all day long, every day. Nothing could be more convincing. Though a bit much to take, they are almost eloquent in their frustration and disgust.

And so it is that my co-workers leave. They leave for all and any of those many above reasons. They leave this library branch. They leave the library system. They leave the County employment. And some of them even leave the country!

Gone, gone, gone!

And then you know what happens?

They all want to come back.

They all want to come back to work at my library!

Aha!

This, my library, is a fucking workers' paradise!

Either that, or everything else out there is unbelievably horrible. 

Carefully engineered comedy routines

 

A library patron returned a book to me at the front desk of my library. The book had been in a little bit of a tussle with some water. The library patron was quite willing to pay any penalty for this, but as is my wont when patrons go all George-Washington-and-the-cherry-tree with me, I am inclined to forgive if possible in appreciation of the honesty, and to try to re-enact the fable.

I sent the patron on their way and stood up the book, titled "Insomnia", on the desk to hopefully dry it out to a useable condition. Eventually my desk partner, Dan, noticed the book and asked me about it. 

I explained briefly about the situation, holding the book up, and asked him if he had read it. 

Taking the bait, Dan said "No. I haven't. Have you?"

"I was up all night with it."