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How I Feel About… Libraries

Occasionally, I like to share my views — my fractured, cockeyed views — on a particular topic. So far, we’ve covered pinatas, pirates, hippos, and most recently, orthodontists. Today, I’d like to tell you:

How I Feel About… Libraries

Libraries are GOOD because they offer a calming, serene refuge from the world, where you can still sit and concentrate on actually reading. Not like the huge bookstores and their two-latte minimums, or the indie booksellers, where you have to listen to the owner prattle on about how Proust was full of shit. Buddy, if I wanted ‘pretentious’, I’d have gone to Barnes and Noble and ordered it with a biscotti and a mocha capuccino. Now sell me the goddamned ‘Far Side Omnibus’ and shut the hell up already.

“Buddy, if I wanted ‘pretentious’, I’d have gone to Barnes and Noble and ordered it with a biscotti and a mocha capuccino. Now sell me the goddamned ‘Far Side Omnibus’ and shut the hell up already.”

Libraries are BAD because the librarians are serious about maintaining that sense of calm serenity for the patrons. Just try getting a game of tag or Marco Polo going in your average library, and some mousy little librarian woman will be on your ass with a shush and a ruler before you can say, ‘Dewey Decimal System‘. And those people are vicious; they’re like Catholic nuns without the habits. Which means most of them are celibate for no good reason — and they’re pissed.

Libraries are GOOD because if Skinemax movies have taught us anything, it’s that under your average female librarian’s mousy exterior and wire-rimmed glasses, there lies a voluptuous and sultry vixen just waiting to let her hair down and let you thumb through her card catalog. Though I’d suggest you ask her to drop the ruler first, just in case. Being rapped across the knuckles is painful enough.

Libraries are BAD because at my library, the librarian is a portly old guy named Elmer, who’s about as close to ‘sultry’ as Green Eggs ‘n’ Ham is to ‘non-fiction’. If he ever asks me to thumb through his card catalog, I’m running screaming towards the door. And I don’t care who shushes me.

Libraries are GOOD because many libraries have a computer center, and offer internet access to those unable to afford it themselves. And lord knows, if there’s anyone who needs a glimpse of an animated dancing baby or kinky grandma porn, it’s poor people.

Libraries are BAD because every damned time I stop in to download kinky grandma porn, there are always a bunch of poor people in line in front of me. By the time it’s my turn, all the good upshawl and walker-on-walker shots are already gone.

Libraries are GOOD because one of the earliest libraries was the famous Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt, founded way back in the third century B.C. And if you’re stuck spending your life sweating your ass off and dusting pyramids all day, the least they can do is give you a place to read. That’ll keep you busy until the granny porn sites are invented.

Libraries are BAD because one of the most famous modern libraries is the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. And it seems a damned waste to have all those books there, when it’s fairly well accepted that most members of Congress can’t actually read. Maybe they’re all coloring books and pop-up picture stories. That oughta keep ’em shushed for a while.

Libraries are GOOD because a library is one of the few places where you can walk out with the merchandise without putting any money down, and if you never come back, they practically can’t touch you. Just try that at your local car dealership or jeweler or Best Buy. Some very large, very un-sultry man will meet you at the door and pound the laminated binding off of you. He’ll make you wish you were getting smacked with that ruler.

Libraries are BAD because many of them still use the Dewey Decimal System. And ‘Dewey Decimal’ sounds like some half-assed villian from an old Quick Draw McGraw cartoon. Maybe he flew in and terrorized the old West by threatening to impose the metric system. That’d sure put a crimp in the old 37-liter hat.

Libraries are GOOD because a library card is the first semi-permanent bit of plastic that many of us ever carried in our wallets. Before a driver’s license, before credit cards, before those condoms we bought in a fit of unrealistic horny optimism, we had our library cards. They made us feel like a member of society, like someone important. Someone who could play hide ‘n’ seek in the stacks, stand in the granny porn computer line, and idly wonder whether Elmer has a hot librarian granddaughter. Or maybe that’s just me.

So libraries are GOOD. Not ‘hot sultry librarian’ good, at least in my neighboorhood, but still pretty darned good.

And that’s how I feel about libraries.