Flotsam

We live two blocks from a wee Carnegie library. The building is beautiful—brick with arched windows, and surrounded by trees. It holds approximately twelve books, but makes up for that fact by housing fewer unwashed and unmedicated schizophrenics than most public libraries.
Oh! Speaking of which, go to this page and click on “Watch a Brief Educational Video on Bipolar Disorder.” I laughed until I was in danger of dilocating something. Not because mental illness is funny–so please, NO HATE MAIL–but because this video is so far removed from my experience growing up with a manic depressive. Said video is, however, an excellent portrayal of my time as a speed freak.
But none of this is the point. The point is that the Nearly and I went to the library last night, where I alarmed a librarian by insinuating that she is nothing more than a dowdy, super-literate pimp.
It has been years since I have had a library card. When I was a youth, I spent a fair amount of time at the library, until I racked up such exorbitant late fees that I received a letter threatening to repossess my car.
Joke’s on them, thought my 12-year-old self, I can’t drive anyway.
As soon as I had the money to buy books I stopped going to libraries—not because of the aforementioned late fees, but because I couldn’t bear to read a book, get attached, and then return it. It seemed wrong. It made me feel melancholy, and a little cheap. Admittedly, I have a relationship with my books that some would call inappropriately intense, but that’s an entry for another time.
So, I was explaining all this to the Nearly, as I hemmed and hawed about whether to get a library card. I am too poor to buy all of the books I need for school, and yet what if I borrow books from the library and end up adoring them? What then? The Nearly suggested I wait and see if that happens and then buy my own copy, but I brushed that suggestion aside. It wouldn’t be the same, as it wouldn’t be the copy I fell in love with in the first place.
“Library books,” I whispered to the Nearly near the reference desk, “are like whores. You can’t get too attached. They’ve been read by millions of people before you, and when you’re finished with them, they’ll end up back in ‘circulation,’ ready to give it up for anyone with a library card.”
Apparently I wasn’t whispering softly enough, because the librarian behind the counter jerked her head back in shock.
So! I have officially rendered myself unwelcome somewhere in my new neighborhood!
It’s feeling more like home all the time…

In the library vestibule I noticed a sign for a neighborhood writing group. For a moment I felt a flurry of excitement—despite my past experience with groups of this nature. Perhaps, I mused dreamily, this writers group would be full of smart, wisecracking women with well-stocked liquor cabinets, women I could chloroform and spirit away to my basement, feeding them table scraps and no-sugar-added ice milk bars until they agreed to become my friends. Unfortunately, I am fairly certain the group would in fact consist of the following:

1) Man named Tristan, Julian, or similar, wearing a Celtic cross on a leather cord, and specializing in poetry about sensitive young men masturbating in charming pensiones during their college year abroad.
2) Untalented woman writing the true story of her daughter’s painful death from cancer, and resulting in uncomfortable workshop participants: “What do you mean ‘dead and cold as stone‘ is a cliché? SHE WAS MY DAUGHTER!”
3) Two college students writing stories of self-mutilation and/or bulimia, stories containing unlikely dialogue of existential conversations had at parties. Through the course of this workshop these students fall in love, and their work transforms into baldly autobiographical stories about their relationship, with overuse of the phrases “tangled sheets” and “the smell of his/her skin.”
4) Middle aged woman writing about her grandmother’s kitchen.
5) Middle aged woman writing allegorical prose poetry about her father’s hands around a favorite (cracked, obviously) coffee mug.
6) Middle aged man writing about middle aged male professor and young, nubile student wise beyond her years.
7) Teenaged boy writing science fiction based upon a popular video game.

So much for that idea. But I truly do need to find some way to make friends. Pathetically enough, I go through most days without speaking to anyone save the Nearly and myself. And, of course, the Spanish-speaking employees of my office cafeteria, who now greet me with “You like same thing as every day?”
Perhaps I will be driven to join MySpace, or some such. At least I’d meet new people.
“So, have you always been interested in sodomy?” I’d ask, pouring martinis.

Sigh. I’ll think of something.