Best cheatin' song, ever

I know I do my fair share of handwringing about the homeless in this city, the down-and-outs’ land of milk and honey, but I have to admit that I am often deeply touched by their gallantry. When I was noticeably pregnant, they were always the first to jump up and insist I take their seat, while not one triathaloned toned businessman ever did. Even when these expensively suited men were seated in the front seats, which able bodied passengers are required BY LAW to relinquish to the elderly and handicapped, they would remain firmly planted, intently studying their smart phones or laptops, self servedly oblivious. At times like these I would become desperately homesick for the South, where no self respecting, vigilante minded redneck would ever let this behavior stand.

The other day I was humbled by their chivalry again while I was riding my bike to work through the heart of the Tenderloin and the chain popped off my gears. Two men loitering and passing a bottle back and forth on the corner ran up and expertly replaced the chain on the gear and provided me with a very patient and informative lecture about how to shift properly. They also waved away my attempts to pay them. Thank you to them! Their act almost made up for the confrontation I had with a drunken crazy ranting man the night before at the bus stop who demanded to see the contents of my backpack and chased me about 50 feet before a coworker and a muscular Samaritan came to my aid and scared him off.

The Mail Bag

To relieve the tedium of sorting through the volumes of email the library receives I often listen to music on Youtube. I have been on a Dark end of the Street kick lately, and all of its countless covers. This song, banged out in 30 minutes by Muscle Shoals songwriters Dan Penn and Chips Moman, who wanted to write “the best cheatin’ song, ever" has been covered by practically everyone: Percy Sledge (great, but a little too adenoidal), Linda Rondstadt, Aretha Franklin, Cat Power, Dolly Parton, the Committments. Besides the original, by James Carr, my favorite is an obscure version that was used to such heartbreaking effect in Steve Okazaki's brutal documentary Black Tar Heroin: Dark end of the Street. After listening to the lovely, haunting version about 30 times, I noticed that the singer shared the name of a coworker of mine. I asked her about it and she said, “Yeah, that’s me. I’m old friends with Steve Okazaki.” My life has been full of these eerie coincidences lately, especially regarding repeated random people sighting. The fat man who is always sitting on the same curb smoking a joint that I pass on my run no matter the time, the woman who is always in my Bikram class, no matter how I switch my schedule up, the older woman with the Louise Brooks bob I run into almost every shop I go into. Either I am under surveillance, am starring in my own personal Truman Show, or, most likely, that all of them, and all of you for that matter, are just phantom, increasingly recycled computer images in the artificial matrix construct of my mind.

Speaking of cray cray, here is a sampling of some of the emails I received the past week:

Angry crazy
“How dare you use my tax dollars to purchase books from China, a totalitarian regime that forcibly rips out babies from the wombs of their mothers?”

“Why do you never have any programs promoting straight, white males? Will you not be satisfied until you systematically destroy us? 99.9% of all patents are filed by straight white males. When you destroy us you destroy civilization! I gag at your insane liberal agenda.”

World salad crazy
“where do we water your imagination paper on the computer?”

Insane in the membrane crazy
“If 71% of the people polled don't know or even care what about what happened in Ireland in 1823? It was actually Sister Bridget Mulroney that had a cup of Marijuana tea with his later brother Jesus H. Christ.....Anyway It was also in Dublin Ireland. It was the 15% Solution. It not only tastes good it smell real good Private Joke.........No, because I was a living sacrifice too! I have the scar om my comatic skull with the Same Gun that Dan White used!!!”

Get on up! (Like a Sex Machine)

I have so many tales of patron exploits to report but stringing all of these stories into coherent sentences just makes…me…so…tired.

Here's one that has being making me laugh for a couple of days. A patron was sleeping the sleep of the dead at one of the CD listening stations in the audiovisual room, a long string of saliva petrifying between his lower lip and the counter. When a staff person gently approached to wake him the patron jerked awake, full body convulsed a couple of times, sending a stack of CDs flying everywhere. His eyes rolled wildly around and he blurted, “GOT ANY JAMES BROWN?”

To me, one of the most stressful and dreaded duties at the security staff-less branches was enforcing the no sleeping policy. Dozing patrons were only to be approached with the most extreme caution – I once saw one lunge and take a groggy swing at a librarian who tried to wake him up. No matter how gently you tried to awake them their reactions were completely unpredictable and usually terrifying. I understand why - many of the sleeping patrons are 'in between places' and I would be touchy, too, if I had just been released from prison or were living on the streets and had people constantly trying to prey on you when you were at your most vulnerable, asleep. But, as much as I feel for their plight we can’t have the libraries looking like the Ft Worth or Dallas Greyhound bus stations that my brother and I would spend a good part of our Sundays in when we were children being shuttled between our divorced parents. The stations had rows of snoring homeless sleeping it off in front of the little black and white individual TV sets that cost a quarter for 15 minutes of grainy pictures with rolling static lines and sobbing runaways on the pay phones. Every time I looked around I saw a small child getting smacked by his or her parent. God those places were grim.

Hot, dope sick love

Spring is in the air, and as everyone knows this is the time of year a young junkie's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of feeding a black tar heroin habit, finding a non-collapsed vein, and LOVE! Here is a picture of two of our friendly neighborhood junkies going at it on this lovely spring day. I apologize for the quality but I walked past them about 10 times trying to get a good shot without being too obvious about what I was doing, not that they would have noticed over their frenzied groping and moaning. I guess I need to work on my stalkerazzi skills. I also regret not being able to include the old homeless men waving and basking their stumps in the warm spring air right next to them – the sight of which is a known aphrodisiac. At least it is for me!

Burnt Fingers

Long ago I read a book about a French-Canadian girl who was a servant in a pioneer home in Maine. In the story, all the busy body old crones in the vicinity advise a young mother of a little baby girl to take a red hot coal from the fire, show it to the baby and then press it into her baby’s hand so she would learn to fear the fire and always steer clear of it. The tenderhearted mother can’t bear to do this to her baby, the darling of the family, and sure enough the baby’s clothes catch fire after she reaches into the hearth to touch one of the pretty red coals. She dies a horrible death of full body burns.

This story made quite an impression on me and I’ve been wanting to decommission our fireplace ever since the babies achieved mobility. This solution works particularly well since it provides more space for our book hoarding, a problem that has reached levels worthy of a DSM IV entry and is most likely causing structural damage to our building. Note the plastic cover affixed with Velcro dots, which should prevent any pint sized Collyer brother type tragedy.

Team FoxyLibrarian!

When it dawned on me that it isn’t standard practice to still be wearing maternity clothes 2 years after giving birth, I bought a NIKE Sport Kit and have been jogging - at a stately pace, but jogging all the same, damnit - during my lunch hour. The most inspirational and enjoyable part of the run is the cheers and words of encouragement shouted at me by the homeless crew that loiter and hang out by the library, steaming themselves like dumplings on the warm grates. They pretty much spend their day there carousing, smoking and making undeniably humorous commentary about the passersby.

Say what you will about them but they are a jolly, convivial bunch, they don’t panhandle near the library’s entrance and in general clean up after themselves. They have also earned a special place in my heart by always making sure to tell me how beautiful I was in the latter stages of pregnancy, when I was anything but, and to this day always inquire about the baby. I don’t know what hellish childhoods/ circumstances brought them to homelessness, but they have retained a rough gallantry which is incredibly touching. When I was pregnant, men like them were always the first one to jump up and offer me their seat on the bus, while many a well dressed professional would be intently staring into his laptop, purposefully oblivious. Also, most can tell a damn good story which goes a long way in my book. Life would be much duller without them.

Plate o' Shrimp

Perhaps ‘tis the season, but lately I’ve been feeling this wondrous feeling of synchronicity, the likes of which a person experiences in the meth honeymoon stage, or a rapidly cycling manic upswing, or schizophrenia. The twins had a play date with their identical twin boy cousins and yet another set of identical twin boys – six in all. I left a comment Facebook picture : the Van Buren Boys!, in reference to the Seinfeld episode when Kramer wards off an attack by the New York street gang the Van Buren Boys when he accidentally flashes the Van Buren gang sign. (Eight fingers up, since Van Buren was the 8th president. He was also the first president from New York).
Not an hour later a patron approached the reference desk and asked who the 8th president was and I blurted out "Van Buren! Van Buren was the 8th president!"like some autistic savant, which unnerved my colleague and the patron. I mean, what are the odds?
About six months ago a patron asked me to find a book for him. He said that it might be by a local author and could only describe the cover, a drawing of a baby in a bassinet. The worst part about it was that I knew I had seen the book somewhere, but no matter what I tried– searches on Amazon, Google, numerous databases, consultations with colleagues - I failed to unearth the title. Long after the patron left I kept at it until I finally came across it: Dirty Jobs by Christopher Moore. My failure to find the book for the patron ate at me and I always considered it the reference question that got away.
The other day a man came in looking for a book. "All I can tell you is that it’s about a man’s wife dying in childbirth and…"

I pointed at him and said with dead certainty, "A Dirty Job".

Although I had never read the book, and had only the slightest idea of what it was about, I just knew that the universe was giving me a do-over. Sure enough, that was the book he was looking for.

The Devil Takes a Wife

I was helping jog a patron's memory about a certain Kurosawa film he wanted to see and came across this cultural tidbit in the Wikipedia entry for Dreams.

There is an old legend in Japan that states that when the sun is shining through the rain, the kitsune (foxes) have their weddings.

That's dumb! Everyone knows that when the sun shines when it rains the devil is beating his wife. It's just plain science.

Click here for an interesting cross cultural comparison of the meaning of sunshowers in folklore.

Urban Literature

Regrettably, I think there's nothing funnier than pun heavy/parody porn titles like John and Kate F*ck Eight or The Curious Case of Benjamin’s Butt. (Other favorites: Shaving Ryan’s Privates, Schindler’s Fist, & The Grudge F*ck). Nothing reduces me to helpless laughter faster. I wish that I didn’t have such a childish sense of humor but since I do I knew it was going to be a challenge when a patron called and wanted me to read the long list of urban fiction books she had checked out. Even though years of handling out-of-left-field, peculiar questions from the public have given me plenty of practice in maintaining my composure, I still haven’t reached my ultimate professional goal of being completely unshockable, as imperturbable as one of those world weary priests or cops who have heard and seen it all. So, I grit my teeth, and in the carefully modulated voice of Nurse Ratchet and Hal the Computer began making my way through the list. “Desperate Hoodwives, *69 and Thong on Fire can be renewed, but Riding Dirty on I-95, G Spot: An Urban Erotic Tale and Thug-a-licious…”

At that point one of my eavesdropping colleagues, whom I will never forgive, let out a loud, “HA!”

This set me off, and I had a full blown giggling fit and had to put the patron on hold. After slapping myself a couple of times on the cheek I was able to resume the phone call. I am so thankful that she called and wasn’t there in person because the last thing I would want to do would be to offend someone because I share the same humor as an adolescent male.

The Tragedy of Obsolescent Formats

Most of the local population has discarded their old VCRs after upgrading to DVD machines, and VCR players are becoming hard to find. The library still has a couple of VHS viewing stations, which primarily seem to serve as a comfortable place for patrons to come down off of drugs and alcohol as they while away the time until their next SSI disability check arrives and they can re-up. (OH I KID, I KID) Often patrons will come in and ask to view their own personal VHS tapes, but there is a strict policy that only tapes belonging to the library can be watched, so they are turned away. I thought this was because the library feared liability issues with damaged tapes, but now I see the wisdom of the policy after a patron came in wanting to view a big stack of his VHS format porno. This guy really had no shame, because after a lot of indignant huffing he then demanded that the librarian look up places around town where he could view his tapes.

“How quickly the world owes him something that he didn’t know existed ten seconds ago”

I got a nasty call from a disgruntled patron who lives on the other side of the state (this system issues library cards to every state resident, don’t get me started) outraged over the lag time he experienced when he used the library’s database subscription to Rosetta Stone. The problem lay in the fact that he was trying to access it using a satellite modem. Rosetta Stone is an incredibly data intensive, interactive program, one, by the way, that would cost him almost $500 to subscribe to personally FOR ONE LANGUAGE, while our subscription offers him access to 10. He ended his stern lecture with, "I'm VERY disappointed," like I was his kid who gotten drunk and wrecked the family car on prom night.

The drawbacks of satellite modems are quite well known. Here they are spelled out in Wikipedia.

Satellite Internet also has a high latency problem caused by the signal having to travel 35,000 km (22,000 miles) out into space to the satellite and back to Earth again. The signal delay can be as much as 500 milliseconds to 900 milliseconds, which makes this service unsuitable for applications requiring real-time user input such as certain multiplayer Internet games and first-person shooters played over the connection. Despite this, it is still possible for many games to be played, but the scope is limited to real-time strategy or turn-based games. The functionality of live interactive access to a distant computer can also be subject to the problems caused by high latency. These problems are more than tolerable for just basic email access and web browsing and in most cases are barely noticeable.

There is no simple way to get around this problem. The delay is primarily due to the speed of light being 300,000 km/second (186,000 miles per second). Even if all other signaling delays could be eliminated it still takes the electromagnetic wave 233 milliseconds to travel from ground to the satellite and back to the ground, a total of 70,000 km (44,000 miles) to travel from the user to the satellite company.

My favorite part of this section?
The delay is primarily due to the speed of light being 300,000 km/second (186,000 miles per second).

So, save it for Rosetta Stone, your internet provider, God or whoever else you think created the laws of the universe, you bellyaching crybaby, you ungracious, unreasonable, self-important, malcontented jackass. While you’re doing that, the library will try its best to bend the laws of physics so you can look like a total tool trying to learn conversational Mandarin at the beach on your laptop.

Death of a Patron

Today I found out one of my patrons died. He was a regular so I had been wondering why I hadn’t seen him in a while. A couple of months ago he was stabbed to death in one of those seedy residential hotel rooms and then his body dumped like so much trash into a dumpster behind the building. The murder remains unsolved, and the police have been unable even to locate next of kin. One of my colleagues got the news when the police finally released his name to the papers in the hopes someone in his family will come forward to claim the body.
He was a little guy, but more Bantam rooster than runt, with a swagger that I couldn’t help but find charming. He took great care with his appearance and always dressed in a dark suit. He might have passed for a slick lawyer were it not for the sorry condition of his teeth, including a missing front incisor. (It turns out he wore a dark suit because he was a livery driver.) He was unfailingly courteous and had interesting, rather high brow taste in movies, which he enjoyed discussing with whoever was on the reference desk. Our last conversation was about Kristin Lavransdatter.

When I brought up some pictures of the movie on the screen he leaned in to look closer. “So many beautiful women in the world,” he said wistfully. Of course this comment took on rather sinister meaning when the circulation staff, who always knows the dirt on everyone, let me in on the fact that this patron was on the Megan’s Law website for forced oral copulation with a 14 year old, a crime for which he served jail time. The circ staff told me that when he would visit the library after being released from prison he dressed not in dark suit but in short cut off jeans and a white tank top like a Polk Street hustler. This most likely was just a hangover from a survival strategy in prison – a man of his stature would have been a helpless target for rape.

What a sad and tawdry ending to a sad life.

School trip

Two patrons decided to resolve some matter by fisticuffs in the atrium, right in front of a visiting class of elementary school children. If I had witnessed a fist fight at such an age I would have most likely burst into tears, but the children were delighted and immediately began pounding their tiny fists into the palms of their hands and chanting, “Fight, fight, fight!” Security broke the fight up. As the class trailed out I heard one of the boys who was clutching his new library card say to his friend, “This has been the best day!”

A lump of coal and a switch

A boy, 8 years old according to his record, called the library to renew his books. He was telling me his library card when I heard his mother call to him in the background. I don't like it when people try to talk to me when I'm trying to use the phone, but telling one's mother, who was only trying to help, to shut the hell up on Christmas Eve is really asking for a big lump of coal and a switch in the next morning.

Bum's Rush

Bum's Rush
There’s a vegetarian restaurant in town that is owned and operated by a Hare Krishna like religious sect that let’s just say has made its way on the list of several cult watch groups. The restaurant’s walls are decorated with photographs of the group’s charismatic leader performing humanly impossible feats of strength, or posing with Mother Theresa and Princess Di, or holding forth before crowds of thousands. The female followers who work in the restaurant are mostly white bread hippy types, but wear saris, bindis and long, braided hair. They all float around the restaurant with blissful, blank smiles that can only come from serious protein deficiency and/or the consequences of taking 2000 or so acid trips back in their heyday. It’s rumored that back at the compound they all live in stark, sexually segregated barracks. Celibacy is required of the followers, but some apostates reported that the Leader would invite some of the younger, attractive women back to his private chamber for grueling all night performances of girl on girl action. I also notice that at the restaurant the women seemed to be doing most of the hard labor around the restaurant. Needless to say, this restaurant is completely cash driven.
I occasionally go there because options are limited around here and they make a decent salad. The last time I was there seated I was suddenly overcome with the smell of open sewage and Ripple. I looked up and a wino was shuffling slowly past me toward the bathroom, his pants completely and utterly soaked with diarrhea. All of the diners were choking. I was afraid that the restaurant would be all welcoming and compassionate but instead one of the workers ordered him out immediately. "Go to the library, brother! We are not equipped to deal with that." He thrust some napkins into the wino’s hands and shoved him out the door. He then lit some incense which of course they had on hand and the smell slowly dissipated. Although I was grateful to finish my meal, I wasn’t too happy about the staff directing the man to the library, because we certainly aren’t equipped to deal with that mess either. We certainly don’t need that kind of ‘business', especially when there are plenty of shelters within walking distance which are. This is the kind of bio mess that makes our custodial staff have to go out on stress leave.

Plausible

You indicate that I still have the book Havana Nocturne checked out. It was originally due Nov. 2nd, but I put it in the return bin outside of the library on October 24 at about 8:10 a.m. I remember it clearly because a homeless man was throwing up right next to it (yuck!)

Like those in the dentistry, law enforcement and proctology professions, we hear a lot of bad and outrageous lies at the library, but this email had the ring of truth to it and sure enough, the book had not been scanned correctly and was sitting on the shelf.

Any Given Sunday

A man, one of those filthy, wild eyed street prophets so common in this city, marched into one of the sleepier branches in the system dragging a young woman behind him. She was considerably younger than he was, and seemed dreamy and out of it. This is a branch patronized principally by acid burnouts on disability, throwaway kids and various other drop outs and casualties of the Summer of Love. He asked for the key to the bathroom and pulled his companion into the bathroom with him. After a minute or so the sounds of their ‘lovemaking’ began to fill the library. Even the catatonic homeless began to stir and look quizzically about, just like the patients in Awakenings after they received L-Dopa. A staff person raced over and began kicking the door and threatening to call the police. A minute or two later they emerged, and the man began running around the library yelling, “I just had sex with my child bride! I just had sex with my child bride!” He did a couple of laps and then ran out the door, abandoning his child bride, who then sat down to wait in line for the internet.

This happened on a Sunday, which reminds me of a story my cousin told me. He was in college and a bunch of his friends were sitting around and one of them began to describe how his family had returned from church one day to find their yardman doing something unspeakable (i.e., sexual) on the lawn. One of the girls in the group, an inoccent from lower Alabama, opened her eyes in horror. "On a SUNDAY?," she gasped. Like that was the offensive part of the story, like any other day of the week would have been more acceptable for such perversions.

Why I Will Miss Riding the Bus

Don't even try denying it, because I know exactly what's going through your head right now: What would this hair look like spilled across my bedroom pillow in the moonlight?

Now that I'm no longer pregnant I've resumed commuting by bike to work. I will be so sad to miss out on unexpected pleasures like this.

I found some mullet inspired haiku on the internet. I have entitled this one Mullet Picnic in the Park.

This super cool hair
And a bucket of chicken:
What more could I want

At Long Last!

I apologize for the long hiatus but something about pregnancy and the post partum period made me too mentally thick to blog. I felt like the guy in Flowers for Algernon after the experimental procedure wears off and his IQ plummets from genius levels to his original IQ score of 68. Since I was hardly at genius levels to begin with, I basically went from functional to persistent vegetative state. I didn’t get any reading done either. I pretty much kissed books good-bye one after I realized I had spent 5 minutes puzzling over a People magazine article like it was Advanced Genomics.

But the little darling is so worth it!

I have been bleeding my colleagues for tales of all the happenings while I was gone. My first time at the desk a tweaker lady approached the desk in a palsied gate and asked where the lost and found was. I told her security handles lost and found and directed her to the office. She drew back and looked at me with narrowed, suspicious eyes, like I was sending her into a trap.

“What are they going to do in there, tie me up, handcuff me and fuck me?”

It’s good to be back.

Maternity Leave

I will return soon.

Abation, LOL!!!

The New York Times recently reported that IM chat slang is creeping into school reports, driving teachers crazy. It also seems to be making its way just as inappropriately into pregnancy scare letters. Look at this gem that E found in a newly returned book, a note in which some young lady contemplates the future direction of her relationship after a potential pregnancy crisis.

dear Simon,

Since our scare, ive been thinking. We are seriously not ready for stuff like this. We too young and financially, emotionally not ready. I mean what if I was, what then? You get? I don’t know. Would you want me to have had the abation? This scare has really got me thinking about the Future. Just makes me really think. I just feel scared and insecure about the future.

I just don’t know. The last scare really really scared me. I’m still really really scared. I was actually really considering it, thinking about it. What if I was. idk. I feel kinda confused. So sorry. I think I confused you too. Boo! THE END I think! LOL!!!!

Simon's 'boo' is kissing cousins to Amber Richardson, my favorite Onion columnist.