John Wilkes Booth on a Unicorn

Later Saturday afternoon I turned and looked out the front window of the library to see Nearly-Senseless Nick the "Security Guard" wandering aimlessly out into the street "on patrol" and I thought for a minute I was going to have to rush into traffic to save him from being run over by the ice cream pushcart man.

Later still on that sweltering, endlessly annoying, long-as-hell Saturday afternoon in the library, I eavesdropped from the Circulation Desk on our Computer Nazi's extended, totally serious conversation with the aforementioned really stinky, rather insane homeless guy who reads dozens of foreign language websites (Russian, Swedish, Swahili, I'm not kidding) for an hour and a half a day. Computer Nazi lectured this poor bastard on how the Democratic party is a front for Communist sympathizers, and how Communism is just lying dormant right now but is a few short steps away from world domination nevertheless. I just picked up snippets of this conversation, but a sick part of me would have loved to listen in more closely, even though both participants in this back-and-forth are, in their respective ways, absolutely howl-at-the-moon loony . CompNazi goes on to say how he has a "nineteenth century attitude" about how everyone should pretty much take care of himself and his own family and to hell with everybody else. He is specifically going off on how much he "despises" DHS for interfering with families. This went on for like five minutes, leading me to suspect that our friendly computer technologist might have had more than a theoretical relationship with the aforementioned government organization. I will lecture at length on this topic later, but aren't we library workers all in a very real sense participating in the largest and possibly most successful socialist entity in America today? I mean, especially now that Social Security is allegedly on its last legs? Should I alert CompNazi to this so he can start having his paychecks directly deposited to the John Birch Society's Oklahoma Chapter for Liquidating All Government Programs Including Stop Signs and Air Traffic Controllers (the shadowy but frightening J.B.S./O.C.L.A.G.P.I.S.S.A.T.C., to whom I may refer at some length in future postings)???

Well, according to CompNazi, "People called it 'voodoo economics,' but it worked, it continues to work, and it's worked for the last 200 years!!!" Stinky Homeless Guy nods in tacit agreement, or else he just spotted a winged unicorn circling the Reference Desk being ridden by John Wilkes Booth. It's hard to tell.