The Funniest Thing of the Week

Finally got a DC library card last night. It was a hell of a lot more satisfying than I'd expected. The whole thing just puts a spring in my step.

The building that smells like a school, the home-made displays, the beaten up shelves, the books that should have been tossed long ago mixed in with an entire set of the Oxford English Dictionary. Disheveled and very friendly workers, the pissy-looking children's librarian, the woman at the reference desk who would really rather be in an office, working. The familiarity of these places affirms my soul. It's like the watermark of urban American society. I go to these places and I feel like Yes, this is the real deal, and I'm in love with it.

I've been going into bookstores lately to look for reading stuff, 'cause I ain't got none to take on the bus with me, all of my subscriptions now on the four to six month forward schedule. So I've been going into Olsson's (is that what it's called?) or Borders or another place and looking for good car magazines--they never have the one I like best, "Thoroughbred and Classic Cars"--or something with reasonably good articles that aren't overwritten and harpy, or something with good fiction.

But these magazines are pricey, and often times I'll read through a whole issue and not find anything I want to read. And books--without a Dewey Decimal System or a Library of Congress system to go by, I got no idea where my nonfiction is, and their fiction is always ridiculously expensive (fifteen bucks for a trade paperback?) and they don't have what I want on the shelf, namely rockin' noir-y spy novels, something funny and obtuse, like Pynchon, or a young adult biography of Churchill. I like reading the young adult biographies, the poorly-written ones that are usually like 90 pages. These are quick reads, they give you the good anecdotes, they get most of the big facts right, they don't try to make impossible and over-reaching arguments about the subject's sexuality or possible history of drug abuse or whatever. And they aren't stupidly dry, and they aren't muffled by every last piece of information the biographer found in his research that he can't bear to leave out of the book.

But the public library! Dirty, underused, underfunded, idealistic institution! These things are better than Henry Rollins' "well-stocked garage"! I go there and suddenly I'm floating in space.

And I especially like urban ones. Anyone can go there and waste as much time as they want, as long as they don't stink too bad or make a big mess or make lots of noise or bathe in the bathroom.

So I checked out four or five books, one or two of which I'll probably read. And now I can plug into their databases and shit, and renew books online, and request stuff online, and check out as much of their crap as I want.

Just that this thing is there makes me feel great.