(Groucho) Marxist (John) Lennonism

When my mostly non-violent takeover of the library system is complete, I'll be instituting a new policy of absolute subjectivism in regard to the payment of library fines. This new regime will proceed by (loosely) enforcing our new core principles of more-or-less-instant karma, relaxed accounting, and basic human decency.

Some days it starts from the first few moments after we open up. Some reliable patron will come in and return a few books a few days late, and I'll just feel wrong about applying the seemingly trivial $0.10-per-day fine to such a good old friend of the library. Maybe 45 minutes later a dude who is definitely down on his financial luck will return some videos a few days late. I can tell that Blockbuster would probably turn him away for lacking proof of ID or a current credit card, so I'll cut him a break and while no one is looking I'll erase his fines. Later on, a family with six kids will return a mountain of stuff one day late, but rather than those ten cents adding up and equalling their gas money for a week, I'll just set the computer back a day and check their books in as if nothing was wrong.

So I'm an unpredictable Robin Hood of the library system. My generosity flows subjectively, though, as I was saying. If someone is a careless repeat offender, or someone's been holding on to a super-popular title for months, I'm not gonna be kind, and they're gonna get fined. If I don't like the looks of them, the fine stands. If they have confederate flag patches on their jacket or a "W" lapel pin, I'd triple their fines if I could. That's just me; I'm subjective. I mean, there are days when I would strictly enforce the ten cent fine on Albert Schweitzer if he showed up one day late with a medical text he'd been using to save thousands of third world lives. Some days I just feel like sticking to the letter of the law. Like most subjectivists, there are days where I just feel like being an iron-fisted objectivist, but the feeling rarely lasts long.

When some beleaguered mom appears genuinely amazed that her pile of one-day-late Dora the Explorer DVDs ($0.50-per-day fines) is going to set her back an Andrew Hamilton, I might just magnanimously shrug and send her off with a "Just be more careful next time, ma'am," like I'm a highway patrolmen letting a speeder get off with a warning. Then again, I've had people argue with me about their fines and accuse the library of getting rich by applying these ten-cents-a-day penalties. (I guess they must have noticed my Lexus in the parking lot when they returned those three-months-overdue "Ab Workouts for Dummies" videotapes.) All I'm saying is consider the benefits of instant karma, people, and tip your Circ. Clerks generously.

Do Not Resuscitate

On this totally standard library morning I helped a grandmother find dinosaur books for her grandchildren, an aging hippie dude needed information about how to develop film, and I applied some of my amateur photocopier repair skills (which mostly involved punching it in various tender spots the way The Fonz worked Al's jukebox). I also caught myself daydreaming about watching the very last episode of the morbidly great "Six Feet Under" later that night if the trained monkeys who work in the Netflix shipping department got it to my mailbox on time.

Just as I was furiously wrapping stacks of books to be sent to other branches, I was interrupted by an extremely elderly Asian gentleman who struggled to communicate with the very few English words in his vocabulary. Now, my morning book-wrapping routine involves mostly mindless but incredibly satisfying and almost hypnotically repetitive tasks: scan, print, wrap, box, repeat. I've turned it into an amazingly obsessive zen ritual where I try to achieve flawless right angles with exactly same-sized materials which must fit into their corresponding shipping boxes like perfect puzzle pieces. I can trust no one else here to perform this critical function with the maniacal perfectionism I demand, so I guard the stacks of books to be wrapped and routed like a vicious mother wolverine defending her cubs.

The Asian gentleman uncomfortably roused me from the combination of obsessive book-manipulating and "Six Feet Under"-inspired morbid daydreams when he kind of quizically waved a stack of papers at me. I've become fairly adept at communicating with non-English speakers with my combination of expressive hand gestures and confused facial expressions, but it took a while for me to understand what this wizened old fellow required of me. When I started looking through his stack of paperwork, my eyes almost immediately glazed over, which is pretty much my default response to any legal- or insurance-looking document. I became even more frustrated at having to interrupt my meditative book-wrapping flow to deal with this impossible explanatory excercise.

It was the boldly printed, ALL CAPS term, "DO NOT RESUSCITATE" that snapped me out of my solipsistic morning haze. I concentrated a little more closely on the mountain of forms he was un-shuffling for me, and I finally caught on that he was trying to fill out a living will. When we got to the section where he would fill in contact information, I learned that he didn't have any family or friends to contact. He did, however, insist on filling out every last form to ensure that every possible organ he had could be donated to whomever might need it. That made me think a little about the extended networks of family and friends who will benefit from this lonely Buddhist wanderer's meticulous form-filling, and it made me double-check my own driver's license to make sure my own organs won't just be planted in a casket.

For whatever reason I was just a little less excited about watching the family funeral home drama of "Six Feet Under" later that night. I just kept wondering what kind of journey brought this solitary old man through eighty-some years of life to this library with a stack of paperwork in a foreign language and no one else to help him fill it out.

Heartwarming Tales from the Wholesome Heartland

I'm really laboring to keep this blog as negative and bile-filled as possible. Nevertheless, I can't deny that certain happy and fun events occasionally happen within this library. In other words, I don't just work here for the the fabulous wealth, amazing glamour, and undeniable sex appeal that accompany the library business.

For instance, not all of our elderly visitors are card-carrying members of the Ku Klux Klan. (In fact, I've only met the one so far). I just issued a brand new library card to an excited older gentleman who proudly mentioned that he's always read so much that he was the youngest person in the history of Emporia, Kansas, to receive an adult library card. By the looks of him, this record of his was apparently set in the 1890s. While the winds of time may have erased his name and record from the granite walls of the Emporia Library, it's always cool to meet people who are so enthusiastic and appreciative about being able to use a halfway decent public library.

On the other end of the age spectrum, I helped a little girl find some books of jokes the other day. For the next hour or so, she came up to my desk and told me a series of these horrifically un-funny one-liners. I mean, her delivery and timing left a lot to be desired, and the material she was working with was decidedly sub-par. This first-grader was definitely no Sarah Silverman. Somehow it was all still completely hilarious.

On this note I'm also reminded of one of our every-day visitors who is reliably loud, obnoxious, and unwashed. He has incurred several complaints from staff members who apparently do not appreciate his over-familiarity and vigorous bear-hugs that leave a residue of nasty-old-guy-smell for up to four hours. He also may be about to singlehandedly inspire a new policy of limiting the number of inter-library loans a single patron can request. Apparently he's a devoted film-lover who long ago went through every video we have in our collection and has had to branch out with inter-library, inter-continental, and inter-galactic library loan requests to find obscure movies he hasn't seen yet.

Despite this gentleman's many, MANY flaws, he does have at least one endearing quality that usually keeps me from losing my religion with him. Every time we get a new security guard (and as I've mentioned, we seem to go through more security guards than Murphy Brown had secretaries), he introduces himself with smelly effusion and then gestures over to my desk. By the time he's done telling the new guard how much my colleagues and I enrich his life and how hard we work to find him movies from all over the Western Hemisphere, I have that warm feeling that allows me to overlook the rest of the day's indignities and frustrations. I've even thought about taking up a collection to buy this dude a DVD player, but I'm afraid my co-workers would respond by braining me with the sharp-cornered metal file box that's already stuffed to overflowing with this patron's hundreds of inter-library loan requests.

I'm itching to tell this story

I stand on the front lines of a battleground in an intense biological war, and I have nothing to offer this library except blood, toil, tears, sweat, and a raging case of germ-o-phobia.

My basic training before undergoing this mission occurred on one of my first days at work here. I had occasion to clean up a little spill on the front counter, and I reached for one of the handy disinfectant wipes to do the dirty job. After lightly scrubbing an area not much larger than a postage stamp, I picked up the disinfectant wipe which now appeared as if I had dragged it through the industrial stew of an official EPA Superfund site. I just couldn't believe a lightly colored formica countertop could yield such a potent batch of otherwise invisible toxic waste.

After taking a good look around the front counter area, I noticed a massive proliferation of "instant hand sanitizer," and over the next few days I learned all the excellent reasons for employing it liberally. Apparently, not everybody treats library books as the holy, sacred objects I like to imagine them being. In fact, my extensive research indicates that many patrons employ them as coasters, doormats, replacement paper towels, ashtrays, and occasionally dinner placemats.

In other cases, people have oddly mistaken the trash can in front of our building, conveniently labeled "Trash Only," for our book drop. Someone must have been handing out free lollipops the day those books were accidentally deposited because they came out looking like an albino porcupine about to throw its sticky quills. As a result of incidents like these, I've nearly chemically removed the first several layers of skin on my hands with the obsessive use of the probably equally toxic "instant hand sanitizer," which I now notice is labelled "Professional Use Only."

Now the issue is our resident homeless gentleman's alleged case of head lice. In an uncomfortably graphic educational campaign, we've all been encouraged to read a handbook created in-house in regard to the identification and combat of this filthy menace from which I would have thought graduation from elementary school would de facto inoculate one. Such is the power of the written word that I've noticed myself and everyone else who reads this manual unconsciously itching their heads. In fact, I just did it after typing that last sentence. And I just did it again.

The anti-lice campaign may, however, be a ruse along the lines of nabbing Al Capone on tax evasion charges. The time seems to have come to find a civilized way to expel our resident foul-smelling homeless visitor, the one who peruses dozens of foreign language websites each day and carries on lengthy conversations with our Computer Fascist regarding the positive merits of McCarthyism and witch trials.

I'm certainly not saying I'll miss him. In fact, I've often thought about just buying him cab fare to the nearest truck stop and a ticket for one of the luxurious Roman baths therein. When it comes to combating nasty filth in the library, however, I'm just saying in some very unfortunate way that I honestly prefer hosting the stinky homeless guy to helping another brand of disinfecting campaign aimed removing allegedly offensive library materials.

Do Not Poke the Security Guard

Lord knows I've had my differences with our library's staff of armed, uniformed, official security personnel. There have been plenty of occasions where I've felt like it's necessary for me to keep an eye on the security guards to prevent their egregious violations of the same library policies that they're sitting at their desk with their pistol and badge to enforce upon the rest of our visitors. Whether it's loudly chowing down on a bag of unshelled peanuts; having extensive, excruciatingly personal cell phone conversations; or getting maniacally obsessed with a variety of craft projects while patrons cry, "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war in the children's section, I've often wondered if the presence of armed security is the cause of even more trouble than it prevents.

Nevertheless, I can't help but sympathize with our security guards whenever some comic genius comes by their desk and rehearses a knee-slapping stand-up routine on the premise that an armed library security guard's daily routine might get a little tedious. I just can't imagine the kind of audacity it takes to walk up to someone's work desk and mock them in public the way jackasses at the zoo poke at the monkey cages.

I've heard variations on the following comments from a steady stream of chuckling maroons who approach the security desk:

"Boy, you sure got a tough job there!"

"Hey, don't fall asleep!"

"Are you gonna shoot me with your big gun?"

That last comment was drawled by a mouth-breathing yahoo who appeared to be in some pathetic way flirting with our female security guard. She's the one who takes the brunt of the moronic comments, and she actually bears it with a stoicism ancient Greek philosophers would have admired.

My completely unscientific theory is that security guards in any situation gain more respect the more their uniforms look like an actual police officer's. Even if the similarity is just enough to make an idiot think twice about acting on his lizard-brain instincts, I would think it would be totally worth it to encourage any sort of uniform confusion. The low-bidding security company that's protecting us, on the other hand, seems to have taken almost the complete opposite approach. Considering they've left their employees working 13+ hour shifts for months at a time and that they continue to employ a gentleman who accidentally left his gun on a library table while he wandered out to his truck for a nap, I shouldn't be at all surprised.

However, I sincerely hope that this company's otherwise apparently lax policies wouldn't punish an employee too severely who decided it would be appropriate to pistol-whip the next slack-jawed yokel who approached a guard to chortle, "Ah swear yew shore do look cute with thay-at pistol!"

I've seen a million patrons, and I've rocked them all

I suffer from a debilitating condition whose cure has eluded medical science for decades. I don't know the exact scientific terminology, but I call it The Jukebox Brain.

Being stationed at the library desk for eight hours a day brings on countless spells of this crippling malady. In the most obvious example, a book comes across the counter, and for the next hour and a half I've got the corresponding Elvis Costello song running in a constant loop in my head until I'm seconds away from complete madness. Rescue comes when a co-worker mentions something about how the latest news about Sally Kern "blew my mind," and then I've got a brand new chorus to sing in my head for the rest of the afternoon.

It can strike at anytime, so if someone asks me for directions, I immediately start singing to myself R.E.M.'s "Can't Get There From Here." When I go to lunch at the hot dog place across the street where the friendly first generation Greek immigrant proprieter carries a couple of dozen unwrapped weiners by stacking them up his impressively hairy arm, I unfortunately get the Rush Limbaugh theme song stuck in my head thanks to his blaring a.m. radio. When I have a conversation with someone about where we've travelled, I always mention that I've never been to Spain.

The most horrific recent example occurred when a woman who was most likely possessed by a demon or other wandering evil spirit walked into the library. She had a wild look in her eye like she'd been haunted for decades by the song in her head that she was cursed to sing to herself until she successfully passed its diabolical melody on to another host. She was the Typhoid Mary of Jukebox Brain sufferers, and she was finally liberated of her own crippling curse when she inexplicably sang the chorus and passed on to my sponge-like jukebox brain the nefarious 80s hair metal anthem, "Wanted Dead or Alive" by the Princes of Darkness themselves, Bon Jovi.

As dark as these depths sometimes get, I know it could always be worse.

Window Dressing. Literally.

By the front door of this modest, circa-1950s public library, right across from the vintage sign with the international "Radiation" symbol that reads "FALLOUT SHELTER," there resides a proud display window. It is a prominent space virtually crying out to be decorated by a creatively inspired designer in a manner that will thrill the visiting public and fire them with the urge to read our books and participate in our programs. Or something.

This display window has been my nemesis since my very first week on the job. At a staff meeting my boss asked for a volunteer to step forward to take over the decoration of said window. In a scene straight out of a Mel Brooks movie (or, at least, this is how I remember it), rather than a volunteer stepping forward, everyone else took one step backward, and I was suddenly crowned with the title of "Front Window Designer." Since I still had that new-employee-smell about me, I hardly felt it was possible to turn down this plum assignment.

When I peeled back the weathered blue curtain on my first venture inside the aquarium-like window box, I found myself surrounded by a faux-nautical world of plastic octupi, papier-mache fish, and severely sun-faded children's books from the undersea life section. Based on the barely detectable hue of blue on the "water" background and the fact that some of the fish had started developing rudimentary legs and feet with which to someday soon evolve beyond this prehistoric swamp, I guessed that the previous Front Window Designer had been retired for some years now.

Since we were entering the month of October, my first design inspiration seemed rather obvious. I was directed by my boss to check out the library's labrynthine upstairs storage loft, within which I found five decades worth of varied, decorative, what I believe the French call "crap." After assembling an inspired Halloween display out of 1970s-era monster masks and ominous spooky twigs a la the "Blair Witch Project," I went on a months-long spree of front window masterpieces.

For Presidents Day I unearthed a pair of mostly intact Washington and Lincoln busts from under a pile of Mardi Gras beads in the storage loft. The Lincoln bust even looked assassination-accurate due to a nasty spill it may have taken off the top shelf a few decades back. The very next month I exhumed the aforementioned beads for a Mardi Gras spectacular complete with cracked plastic trombones and saxophones for that "3:00 a.m. on Bourbon Street" flavor. For Easter I somehow shoved a ten-times-greater-than-life-size stuffed Easter bunny in the display window; I'm not sure if it was his apparent case of frightening elephantitis or the sideshow contortionist pose I had to arrange him in, but I distinctly remember fewer children coming in to the library that month.

Soon enough, however, my creativity was spent. For weeks at a time the window laid un-decorated through the uninspiring summer months (a fact that was noted months later on my annual employee evaluation; apparently "front window design" had been included under the always treacherous "Other Duties As Assigned" section of my job description).

I've gotten by in recent months by recycling leftover craft debris from our security guard's prolific personal collection and appropriating the after school art projects of neighborhood kids. Someday, though, my ultimate masterwork will come to fruition. I've noticed that the most attention the front window display seems to ever get is when I'm crawling around inside it trying to tape crap to the ceiling or arrange a stunning selection of glittery cardboard valentines just so. I think it's the "Human Zoo" quality that especially captivates passers-by, so this summer I'm planning a "Beach Reading"-themed display complete with umbrella, beach chair, some sand, some trashy paperbacks, and a certain staggeringly lifelike, Speedo-clad, sunglasses-wearing Circ. Clerk working on his golden summer tan.

She's Crafty

One imagines a security guard would usually protect library patrons from stalkers. In our case, the guard is the one doing the stalking. I can only guess this situation is due to her combination of utter job-related boredom and an inexplicable mania for "crafting."

For the past several months, our security guard has been hard at work with her head locked in the "down" position at her security post. I've watched her dabbling in an impressive variety of glittery, hot-waxy, card-boarded, or otherwise crafty materials, creating a profusion of truly horrific baubles and doo-dads.

Perhaps the absolute nadir was reached by an ungodly combination of straw hats and cutesy decorations, the sight of which made my stomach clench and my mouth dry up in fear. Within a matter of weeks she has taken over the craft program planning department of the library--admittedly a thankless chore--by volunteering to teach classes on the creation of these very own horrors. In a shocking result that once again forces me to question my own sanity, these programs appear to have become a huge hit with the similarly craft-crazy members of our library community.

Now, I understand that one will never go broke by wildly underestimating the taste of the American people, but these crafts, I submit, are reaching the proportions of crimes against humanity. Surely the Nuremburg Tribunals were assembled in the hopes that crafts such as these were never perpetuated in a civilized society. Nevertheless, to my utter amazement every time, rather than fleeing in horror people seem genuinely fascinated to learn the dark arts involved in their assembly.

Ah, but this is where the stalking comes in. Not content to merely set out a display of the above-mentioned atrocities and a clipboard sign-up sheet for those interested in signing over their souls in a Faustian craft-bargain, our craft-mad security guard has employed a far more agressive technique. Upon creating the sign-up sheet for a future craft program a few weekends hence, she spends the next couple of hours, or whatever it takes, jumping potential students a fraction of a second after they enter the door of the library.

She's a stone-cold profiler--if you're a woman between the ages of 24 and 95 and you look like you have the use of at least one hand for hot-glue-gun action, this armed woman is going to accost you while brandishing her sign-up sheet. Non-English-language-speakers are not exempt. You could be rushing in to photocopy your bail paperwork which has to be returned to your parole officer in five minutes, but first our pistol-packing security guard is going to quiz you on your crafting proclivities before giving you the hard sell on signing up for next weekend's diabolical straw-hat-with-ribbons-and-teddy-bears workshop.

Perhaps I've overstimated our patrons' actual love for nightmarish craft-making and underestimated the persuasive powers of a uniformed crazy woman with a gun.

The 2006 All Star Team

One of our former employees coined the phrase "All Stars" to refer to folks who visit our library more than, say, five times a week. I then suggested that the next time "Customer Appreciation Month" rolls around we ought to take a cue from Cooperstown and establish a Library Hall of Fame for these visitors who have reached the pantheon of patronage.

One such Library All Star just visited while I was typing the previous paragraph, an odd coincidence that is nevertheless only about the third or fourth creepiest thing about this gentleman. The Hall of Famer of whom I speak is an elderly fellow who bears a striking resemblance to the often equally creepy Joel Grey. He carries a strong and distinct odor of garlic, which I would wager he believes contains magical healing properties when ingested in bulk. Every time I've ever seen him, he has worn a short-sleeved, navy blue overcoat with epaulets decorated with what I believe to be the French tricolor, in 98 degree heat or the dead of winter.

But those aren't even the creepy things.

Since he's developed quite a level of familiarity with me, this gentleman approaches my desk as soon as he enters the building with a rather mad twinkle in his eye. He's one of those people who you're just 97% certain is completely insane, yet he's so utterly convincing that you just can't help but credit that remaining 3% to suggest that perhaps he's the only sane person left in the world and it's the rest of us who are nuts. In either case, one can pretty much erase that remaining 3% when one gets a load of what this gentleman requests from his friendly neighborhood library.

There is a monthly cyber-newsletter published by an organization which calls itself God's Kingdom Ministries, the name of which newsletter is Foundation for Intercession. Even though Mr. Creepy Joel Grey and I both know by now that this newsletter is only published exactly once a month, he still stops by in his garlic cloud every couple of days to see if the next month's issue has miraculously appeared. When I am able to provide this cheery, leprechaun-like man with his monthly news, he almost skips off to the nearest table with the magnifying glass he carries with him everywhere to immediately peruse its revelations. Since he quite often returns to share said revelations with me in a conspiratorial but always delightfully happy tone, I feel equally delighted to pass them along to my dear readers.

From this website's archives I have learned such inarguable facts as the true identity of the Great Harlot of Babylon (that is, the post-1914 U.S tax code), the reason for the "purifying wind" of Hurricane Katrina (i.e., a judgement on New Orleans' proliferation of witchcraft and homosexuality), and, perhaps most shockingly, the Catholic Church's complicity in both starting the American Civil War and assassinating President Lincoln. By the way, John Wilkes Booth actually escaped to India after capping Abe behind the ear. True story.

Creepy Joel Grey supplements his summation of the monthly news to me with at least thrice-weekly half-whispered revelations, mostly having to do with the Biblical tale of Jacob and Esau, which apparently explains just about everything one needs to know about modern world history up to and including the War on Terror. He leavens this by also setting the record straight on the events of September 11, 2001; just today, in fact, he revealed to me that the explosives that detonated the buildings were planted within them long before any planes collided with them. If I knew more about the Old Testament Tribes of Israel and modern herbology, I obviously wouldn't react to all this with such apparent surprise and amazement.

When I think about it afterwards, I almost always resolve that the next time I see him, I'm going to just tell him off and suggest he peddle his snake-oil elsewhere or find someone else to print out his outrageous newsletters and libelous websites. But this crazy old bastard is just so darn friendly. And as a library "customer," I guess he's "always right," right?

Insecurity Guards

I'm profoundly worried about our new library security guard. This position has more turnover than the drive-thru clerks at Taco Bell, and based on one particular personality characteristic, I predict the new guy's not long for the gig. The glaring problem as I see it: he's way too normal.

In my year and a half at this library we've gone through more questionable security guards than the night shift at Abu Ghraib. One rather friendly old codger of a guard way past retirement age in most industrialized countries abruptly refused to work a single day longer because he admitted he just loathed small children so much he couldn't be in the same room with them. Another one drawled loudly and at length on his own cell phone to three or four different family members and friends each day while simultaneously trying to enforce the library's strict "No Cell Phones" policy. One guard just disappeared one day, never to be heard from by the library or the security company again. Perhaps it is appropriate to mention at this point that these security guards do, in fact, carry sidearms. I should really find out if they keep the bullets in their shirt pockets.

The first guard I met upon starting my new job here appeared to be missing a few fingers and some non-essential bits of his ears. He spoke a dialect of English I'm still not sure could be located on a linguistic grid of the Northern Hemisphere. All things considered, he honestly appeared to have not fully evolved into the upright-walking humanoid one can usually find at the far right end of the evolutionary chart. His given name, naturally, was Darwin.

Offender Lookup

Working in a library, one quickly gains a lot of familiarity with certain websites patrons need to access for academic, recreational, or employment purposes. There is, however, a particular website that is apparently most useful to many of our internet users, to the point where I've gained an intimate familiarity with its navigational workings.

I'm speaking, of course, of our state's Department of Corrections website, particularly the extremely popular "Offender Lookup" search engine. For several of our patrons, this tool functions as a sort of cyber-high school or -family reunion.

The library visitor (I can't call her a "patron" for reasons that will become clearer) who first introduced me to this website has returned several times, often bringing a few folks with her to re-visit old boyfriends, acquaintances and relatives through the miracle of the World Wide Web. Perhaps it was this sort of bringing together of families that Al Gore originally had in mind when he invented the internet.

In any case, this tool became especially useful when our inquisitive visitor was trying to acquire a new library card for herself. She brought me her ID and proof of address, but according to our records she already had 30 items checked out which were long overdue on her old card. She assured me, however, that the library card record I was looking at actually belonged to her twin sister, who had been incarcerated for some time. Apparently the twin sister burned down their house in a meth lab accident, incinerating those 30 highly flammable library items in the great inferno. She also helped clear up all of my confusion by explaining that her twin sister actually had the exact same first, middle, and last names as herself.

Using the "Offender Lookup" function, I was able to locate this twin sister who did indeed turn out to have the exact same first, middle and last names as well as a record of meth lab entrepenurialism and accidental ignition. Oddly, thanks to the thoughtfully provided mug shot, I found that this "evil twin" also managed to have acquired the exact same tattoos, facial scars, and missing teeth as the perfectly innocent "good twin" who stood before me.

Thanks to the comprehensive record keeping of the Department of Corrections website, I learned that the "evil twin" had actually just been released the week before. Fantastic! I suggested that the "good twin" might go ahead and locate her so we could mark these 30 lost books with our special "Burned in Meth Lab Fire" designation in the library catalog.

The Special Shelves

I've spent a considerable recent portion of my county taxpayer-funded work hours as a morally treasonous tool of the local Christian fascists. In essence, I made our county safer for families by helping them be more afraid of homosexuals.

Thanks to threats from our state legislators and our library commission's spineless genuflection to homophobes, we are now branding certain books with a sort of scarlet letter and ghetto-izing them to separate shelves. My own part in this has been to re-categorize enough books to surround the three or four specifically scarlet-lettered ones so this special section won't reveal itself for what it really is--i.e., the Homo Section. We've found enough mildly controversial material about puberty or guns or teen pregnancy or breast-feeding (those La Leche harlots better watch the hell out) to basically camoflage the few actual "gay books" that the local snake-handlers deemed too immoral for the children of our town to encounter. You know, like the books that suggest maybe you really shouldn't beat the hell out of queers. Controversial stuff like that.

This is, to be sure, a more subtle method than a good, old-fashioned book-burning, so I guess this brand of fascists has just learned to be sneakier in their methods. As I'm applying the special sticker to these books and clicking the button on the computer that sends them to the special shelf that has to be a certain number of inches high to "protect the children," have I become a collaborator in this pro-family values witch hunt? I'm considering a guerrilla campaign of quietly, sneakily re-categorizing and re-shelving some really controversial, dangerous, morally questionable, violent, pornograpic material like, say, the Bible. This blog is anonymous, right?