Students going back to school means after the final bell rings our stacks get full. For some, they've been coming for years but others this is their first time in the library. Dumped off by parents, waiting for rides, or just have no other place to go. We try to give them things to do other than dry hump in the copier room, but we are only librarians.
Credit: Marvel comics
Fall is approaching! Children are getting back in their forced labor camps, the squirrels are digging up the yard, and the leaves are waiting to fall off the trees, turn brown, and decay into the soil. It is a time for the end of thriving life and the slow decline into the heartbreak of frozen grief. May August end and September birth a new, colder hell.
Y'all ever rewatch a movie and suddenly have an insight into what it means? Last night I'm watching Iron Man (2008) for maybe the twelfth time. Never watched it that closely. My surface level take is simple: a funny drunk rich dude realized war ain't good, so he makes a suit of armor to become a hero. I was wrong. Tony Stark is a sad rich dude who felt weak once so he takes it out on the world only becoming a hero when he dies.
Sometimes the world is a fickle and wanton bastard that throws things at you like a man monk in a library full of diseased rats. To make sense of things, people have made lists. I have done so. This is my story.
From 1940 to 1957, George Metesky planted 33 bombs, 22 of which exploded and injured sixteen people in and around New York City. Known as the "Mad Bomber," George felt he had been given a bad deal by Consolidated Edison (Con Edison or ConEd) and unfairly denied worker's compensation. Two of those bombs found their way into the New York Public Library.
Reference wanted to write a full LibGuide on the topic of serial killers, but after going over their notes we found that it was kind of a "how to" guide. Creeped out, we compromised on this listicle. The following are a few things to notice in your loved one or neighbor before the chainsaw comes ripping through the wall.
Antisocial
Look, we hate people, too. Nothing wrong with that. There's a lot of them and most of them are unpleasant. They want things, want to do things, and want you to do the same. It's bullshit.
That's not what we're talking about. This is about that boyfriend on Reddit that got mad at the neighborhood kids playing ball in his yard so he pooped on it. That kind of antisocial, harmful wildly inappropriate behavior. When someone goes to extreme lengths to repel others, maybe listen and start packing.
Arson
Burning things is a fun activity. Even though the children's librarian is in her forties, she giggles and pokes a campfire like a raving madman loving life. However, were she to take that love of fire to, say, a dumpster, we might start to worry. Burning trash in the backyard, dangerous but just stupid. Burning a Toyota while giggling… hide the hammers.
Animal abuse
Come'on. If we had to tell you this, then maybe think about your own behavior.
Lives at a summer camp
Some folks like nature. They live out in the middle of no where and like to share that by being guides or camp medics or grow fabulous gardens of smokeable medicine while hiding from the government. We don't judge those people.
That hermit living in a moss-covered hovel with a series of tunnels and a deep knowledge of machete maintenance ain't one of those people. Steer clear.
Victim of teenage bullying
Once again, a single item on this list is not up for concern. Everyone had some assholes in their past that were mean, said horrible shit, maybe recorded a video of you jumping off the high dive and losing your shorts and called you "library stump chump" for the rest of your high school so you leaned into that and became a librarian and fuck you, Rachel.
The key here is "victim." Some damage got done. Maybe it was the loss of a limb, loved one, or life. That person has a real reason to hunt a pack of losers down and carve them one by one like a Rachel-sized turkey. Maybe just don't laugh at someone else's bad day.
Love scorned
Kinda like the one above, but all creepy and stalkery. Look, we can't control how someone else feels. Love and lust and everything in between are very complex emotions to both give and receive. That being said, some people take a firm "no" as a challenge.
Others take a firm "no" as a violent reaction to their person.
Yet still others take a "you must be kidding" with the same energy that the circulation librarian takes when they get stuck on the desk and everyone eats the birthday cake without saving them a piece and it was really good. Like, from the bakery down the road, the one that makes its own chocolate. She was not happy.
Point is, for most of these but the animal abuse one, be kind and compassionate to those around you. Everyone has bad days, but a few really enjoy those bad days.
For as long as Grandmas have been jumping Snake River Canyon or beloved pets have been finding themselves on farms, people have been looking to get rid of a body. Sometimes, this tradition is done with somber reflection and grief. Sometimes they shoot Hunter S. Thompson out of a cannon.
Here are five ways to use the elements to vanish the dead:
Earth
Ah, burial. A classic. Dig a hole, let gravity and your little cousin do the rest. And the worms, of course. Maybe a very determined coyote depending on your or your little cousin's digging skill. Bonus points if the ground is moist or swampish to hurry along decomposition. Maybe that adds water to the mix, but it's mostly dirt.
Fire
Another wonder of human innovation: burning stuff. This can go along with a variety of methods, but the pure form is a bunch of sticks and taco seasoning. Light and wait for the ashes, gather them in a coffee can, and take your volleyball coach to the beach for one more game. Or make a diamond or ink or whatever else people do with ashes.
Wind/Sky
We thought this would be pretty hard to figure but then cultures around the world were like: yup. To be honest, this is mostly a bird thing. Some just chop the body to little bits so the birds can carry the person away in their tum tums. Others build a kinda tall bed so the birds don't have to work so hard. Or harder, I'm not a bird guy.
Water
When I first saw this, I was like: fire right? Body goes in the boat, boat goes in the water, fire arrow goes in the boat. Our boat. But this is another bird thing, for the most part. Just set your dead guy on a boat in a river or ocean, push off, and make it someone else's problem. Bird, maybe fish, get a meal and everyone can pretend they left for the summer. Good deal.
Spirit
For those of you that will miss your loved one or those who went to Arizona State, we have the spiritual burial. Does this mean a lot of church shit? Nope. We mean party. With the dead folk. Dress that body up for a night out (sunglasses help cause creepy), and drink and toast to them all night. Maybe put them by the door like the world's worst bouncer. The point, at the end of the night maybe they go home with someone and problem solved.
Some things, like the Grateful Dead or monster truck rallies, can only be experienced in person. Fleeting, ephemeral events that exist for scant few hours and vanish when the sun rises. Some foods are like that as well. They can only be had at specific times of the year in specific places, like the Mardi Gras king cake or the fabled Christmas fruitcake grandma sends in the winter. Such is the humble space burger of Grant County, Washington.
The first PC game I really got into was Zork. Really it was an Infocom variety pack of twenty or so games my dad bought. Probably thought… I have no idea what he thought they were other than a way for his son to get off the Nintendo and out of books. Little did he know I would spend hours reading text from a screen while immersed in the Great Underground Empire.
Picture this: A sixteen year old kid, lanky wearing a spiked bracelet and a shirt of the punk band Rancid, stands outside a college lecture hall. He's having a cigarette, waiting for the last possible moment to go inside where his friends are because he's awkward around lots of people. An old man with curly brown hair, some gray finding its way, stands off to the side with a group of stuffy academics. The old man walks to the punk kid and bums a cigarette, then moves back to the professors. The child goes inside to find his friends. A few minutes later, the lights go down and the old man walks onto the stage. The lecture does not change the boy's life, but it blew his damn mind.
So that's how I met Kurt Vonnegut, albeit briefly. Seemed like a nice man.
I've been thinking about that this week. Two people united by a bad habit passing in the night. One of them is an acclaimed author and humanitarian. The other a kid who wanted to write but did not know how.
That was my first time hearing a published author speak. High bar, right? His lecture on storytelling and the happiness of the characters rocked me, as did his books when I inhaled several of them. Hearing him speak, Vonnegut either loved or hated storytelling because those are the only emotions I can conceive that would produce the depth of thought on the subject.
Since then, I have heard many authors speak. In a small bookshop in Utah, I heard Dennis Lehane talk about his process. I drove all night and most of the next day from Mississippi to Arizona to get Christopher Moore to take a picture with my friend's lawn gnome. Just the other night, I saw Neil Gaiman read and speak in Seattle.
I love them all, but none will touch the first. The greatest of high bars.
Maybe I was too dumb to know better.
I do wonder why the hell he did not have a cigarette on him, though.
What would the world look like if it was remade how the library saw fit? Probably fucked up. We tend to have issues with plans if we think too far ahead.
A lot of stories are like that. The hero's journey is based on the fact that the hero is wrong about the way their life works out. They want something, like to get away from the humble dirt farm they grew up on, all the while the audience sees that they just need companionship and purpose. Stop trying to kill the Empire and hug your friends, Luke Skywalker.
The tragic version of this comes out in movies like The Northman. Based on the story of Amleth that was the basis of Shakespeare's Hamlet, it's about a kid who has his dad killed and vows revenge. Where Hamlet's revenge comes in a slow poison death for all involved, the Northman ends with a naked volcano sword fight after a period of violent magic sword hackery. The journey of both heroes is the same, however, to learn that revenge is much more petty than tearing down the whole system. Sad to say that as a part of the system of betrayals and violence, the hero of those stories must also be torn down. The tortured hero cannot live in a utopia.
Villains plan. By their nature, they create chaos by any means to get what they want. The majority of stories start with some evil nerd trying to get money or an evil stepmom trying to get the house cleaned. Then some hapless cop or poor dirty girl have to get involved, spending half the time reacting while the villain tears shit up until they gain the skills, equipment, and friends to start kicking ass. Or some random prince rolls in with a fancy shoe and kicks stepmom to the curb.
What can we learn from all this? How can the library plan without becoming the villain? How can we react with any surety of the future? How can we learn from the stories we tell ourselves, we humans, that compassion and empathy give way to rich lives without sounding like assholes?
Fuck, got lost in another rabbit hole.
Come down to the library for story time this week. We're talking American Hippo by Sarah Gailey and how the world can be different sometimes based on how you look at it. Alternate histories abound in the forever fields of the human mind.
For some, Inbox Zero lies just behind searching for the Ark of the Covenant and finding the Loch Ness monster. Inbox Zero is the concept that you have zero, zip, zilch, no emails in your inbox. Well, as your helpful librarian I have a system to teach you how to reach and maintain Inbox Zero if that is your goal.
Create Folders
The first thing I want you to do is make three folders. They should be named "Do Me Now, Do Me Later, and For Your Information." You can name your folders whatever sexual metaphor that's work appropriate for you, but make sure they approximately mean "Important today," "Important this week," and "Important to know."
Organize Good Shit
The next two steps will be the biggest undertaking of your life. Go through your email inbox. Think of your plain "Inbox" like a mailbox outside your house. If there's more than one page of Inbox, then that shit is full. So move every email you must answer today into "Do Me Now." Move every email you plan to answer this week into "Do Me Later." Anything with useful information should be moved into "For Your Information." Be careful with the brain belief of "useful information." Make this stuff that's need to know within your life, not the life you wish you had.
Delete Bad Shit
If something does not fit into one of the three folders, delete that shit. All the ads, follow-up emails, reminders of overdue library books, and letters from princes from other countries get deleted. Honestly, you can cut your Inbox in half by searching "Netflix" and "Dominos" and deleting all those. The only caveat I hold is receipts. Instead of deleting those emails, I archive them just in case I need to yell at someone.
Find a Routine
Now you should have the fabled Inbox Zero. To maintain this, get some routines, rituals, daily dealings going. At some point during the day, look at your inbox and organize that shit.
Here's my routine: I start with my Inbox. I open each email, scan through them, and move them into the appropriate folder or delete them. If there's a particularly unwelcome email, I click it to spam or I unsubscribe from the company with maximum ferocity. Then I go to my "For Your Information" folder. I scan through all of them, from the bottom to the top. This makes me aware of what I might need to know and clear out stuff that I have either memorized or do not need anymore. Sharon's birthday party only mattered when it was going to happen, not after, so add it to your calendar for next year and delete the email. Then move to the "Do Me Later" folder. Again, scan each one bottom to top and see if there's anything in there that must be done today and move it to the "Do Me Now" folder. When that's all done, start working on the emails in the "Do Me Now" folder. Get that shit done like a to do list, one at a time and with extreme prejudice.
Does this sound like a lot of work? Maybe, but just for the first week or so. Think of it like a garden that's gone to shit. Sure, it will take a while to cut things back and figure out how fast the grass grows, but sooner or later you just have to mow on schedule and things work out fine.
Do you have a plan for Inbox Zero? Have you tried out something like this? What's your favorite color for late night summoning?
Let me know in the comments or at contact@bannedlibrary.com for all your library questions.
As I am sure all of you do, around the holidays I start to look at all the nonsense that clouds us from each other. The decorations, the pageantry, and that guy in the red suit surround me with a stench of gingerbread that I cannot escape. The most insipid is the Christmas carol.
That's a long way to say that I hate "The Little Drummer Boy." I wake up early on Christmas morning because my hate for that little bastard is so strong it gives me energy.
Written in 1941 as a choral arrangement for amature and girl's choirs, the song was recorded first by the Trapp Family Singers in 1951 as "Carol of the Drum." You may know that group because the last time you saw them they were escaping Nazis over the Alps to the sound of music. Not the most popular version, though, as Jack Halloran's arrangement took the world by storm. His version is the one you know today, just as you know all his other songs such as "That Other Drummer Boy" and "Jesus Take the Wheel."
Later, Hendrix fucking rocked that shit.
But what the hell is that song about? It's a little drummer boy, sure, but what's he up to? Why is he drumming?
Motherfucker is playing to a baby.
From the lyrics, the story goes that the magi invited along a kid with a drum to see the baby Jesus. They've got gold, frankenstein, and murray, but the kid is like "I'm not giving no baby my drum."
The magi are like "well, we all brought something."
And the little drummer boy is like, "I'll play him some shit."
So he does. Mary nods because there's three weird dudes and a drummer kid. You can debate all day about where they showed up. It's popular to say the manger because that looks cool, but from what I found the magi showed up months or even years later.
Imagine that conversation:
Magi: Hey, we heard there's a baby king dude here.
Mary: I mean, I have a baby and some shepherds and an angel said some stuff.
Magi: Cool. We brought him some shit.
Mary: Awesome! We could use diapers and a stroller and a camel seat…
Magi: We got some smelly stuff.
Mary: That's nice.
Magi: Also we brought along this kid who was playing a wicked drum solo. Figured the baby king would dig it.
Mary nods.
Little drummer boy plays.
Magi: Wow, that did not go over well for a baby. Here's some gold. Sorry about that.
And that's how Christmas began.
In this six part lesson, library administrators will tell you what to do when you feel ill and the sky burns bright with armageddon, but damn it all if Ms. Mabel needs that new James Patterson novel.
Here's seven books that nobody else read so you can say you read them during quarantine.
Archives (n.) - a place where many librarians belong
Cell phone (n.) - a device that only works when yelled at
Chair (v.) - To position ones self at the head of a meaningless committee
Martha will chair the craft circle committee next year and her position is more crafts.
Computer (n.) - A device that makes fools of us all when we are not paying attention
Donation Box (n.) - A collection of donated items no one wants
Hold (v.) - The process by which a librarian fights with another librarian over the phone for a book neither of them wants
Lost and Found (n.) - A collection of donated items someone may want
Microfilm (n.) - Where newspaper goes to die
Phone (n.) - A device that only works when whispered into very quiet while the other person is in a loud library environment
Reference (n.) - a library service dependent on more questions than answers
Signage (n.) - An invisible creation of information and protection only made visible by a pointed finger
"That man over there is sleeping," the woman said. Her finger shook, the little charm bracelet on her wrist jingling.
The library watches a bunch of Youtube at the circulation desk because its almost impossible to block due to being owned by Google. Praise be the Google.
As I write this, a hazy smoke has enveloped the Pacific Northwest and the high desert whatever the hell biosphere I live in at the moment. There may be a picture accompanying this, but if there is not allow me to describe it: Gray haze with shimmering figures in the distance that resemble mountains inhabited by old chain smoking yeti figures who have run out of shit to eat.
How many times have you been working the reference desk and thought, man alive I could use a meal? Too many times, am I right? Born and raised in the deep South, my meals tend to lean toward the "chicken fried" variety, so I submit to you my own recipe for cooking up chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes, green beans, biscuits, and gravy in the library break room.