Yesterday I got a wild idea: Yes, I went to my Local Library. I know, it was crazy! I'd been feeling the need to go ever since my mother caught me coming home from Borders with an armful of books and chastised me for not borrowing them from the library. Fine. I'll go to the fucking library, mom. Jesus Christ.
Of course, as all mothers know, you have to tell your kids to do something fifty times before they actually fucking do it. Borders was closing their doors forever and having a HUGE sale so I came home with yet another armful of books, which earned me a glare from my surely well-meaning mother. Of course, the glare could have been because one of the books had the word 'SATAN' in big bold letters on the side and she's a devout fundamentalist Christian... But there's really no need to jump to conclusions about that. It was more likely that she was thinking "You could have learned about Satan at the library". To which I would have replied, "No, I could learn about Satan by sacrificing chickens in my back yard." I'm pretty sure I'd have been dragged kicking and screaming to church for a remark like that, though.
So what made me change my evil book-buying ways and seek out the library? Well, there's this horrible entity called Money. I don't have a whole lot of it anymore and, since the porn industry is so grossly overpopulated, I probably won't have any significant amount of it for a long while. So I caved. I have read all of my books, many of them more than two or three times, and needed some new material that wasn't puked out by some fourteen year old on fanfiction.net.
Woefully, I got in my car and drove to my Local Library. The parking lot was at the bottom of a hill and I, having just come back from lunch with my uncle and his boyfriend (who I am constantly trying to impress), was wearing the sexiest boots in existence. Unfortunately, they also had 6 inch heels, which made walking up the hill like a death march on stilts. When I arrived at the door, wheezing like an 80 year old smoker, I kicked the button that opens the door for the handicapped... who somehow would have managed to wheel themselves up that godforsaken hill.
Once inside the library, I realised that I hadn't set foot in one since middle school. I had no fucking idea where to begin. Something about the Dewey Decimal system came to mind but it just angered and confused me. Instead, using the power of common sense, I found a computer terminal that let me search for the books I was interested in. I'm a big Neil Gaiman fan so I wanted to read The Graveyard Book again, which I had borrowed from a friend some time ago. Many books came up under his name but all of them were at different library branches and I would have to order them. Well, fuck that biz. I took to browsing the shelves instead.
I wandered into the Science Fiction section and noticed that the Left Behind book series (you know, the ones about the Biblical Apocalypse and how the billions of Non-Christian people get 'Left Behind' to deal with the Anti-Christ? Those.) was sitting there in it's entirety and looking pretty new. I had read the first four of these books before I realised that they were terrible and returned them to the nice old woman who lent them to me. There were also some dog-eared copies of Dean Koontz and Terry Pratchet novels and a bunch of shit I'd never heard of. Then I ran into a little rolling stool that, I suppose, was for people who weren't wearing impossible heels to use to get to the top shelf.
I wandered around aimlessly for a few minutes before giving up and considering just venturing down to the kids section of the building... which was located at the bottom of a flight of stairs... and I was wearing crazy heels. I was pretty sure I wasn't going to find anything worth that kind of, probably literal, trip so I quietly made my way to the exit: Quiet Exit made possible by the mercifully carpeted floors.
I loitered in the foyer of the building for a few minutes, looking at bulletins local businesses had posted. Several of them were for daycare centers. Next to the bulletins was an ominous looking little closet of a room that was dimly lit and had a make-shift sign on it that said "Book Sale". Naturally, I wandered in. When I wandered out again thirty minutes later, my pocket book was $7 lighter and I had 7 battered hard-back books clumsily stacked in a grocery bag. Unintentionally, my trip had turned it to a giant "fuck you" to my mom.
I came home and dragged the books out of my car. It's not that they were heavy, they were just terrifically bulky. My dog greeted me at the door and tried to convince me to let her eat the books with a show of gestures and longing, wide-eyed looks at the plastic grocery bag. I told her she was more then welcome to try (she's a tiny eleven year old Shih Tzu) and laid them out in front of her. She sniffed them, looked up at me, and cried mournfully. I gave her a cookie and let her out back.
Later on that day, I took my mother to the airport to recover a missing bag she'd lost on a recent trip. She, like always, asked me what I'd been up to that day. I told her I'd been to the library and that it was very nice. She was super excited:
"Did you borrow any books?" She looked like she was going to burst.
"No, they didn't have anything I wanted. I actually ended up buying a stack of books from the used book sale that they were having."
She was quiet for a moment before leaning back in her seat and asking "Do they always have a book sale?"
I was pretty sure that they did. The dark little closet looked pretty permanent. I think I will go back there again in a few weeks. I love old books and I really love not having a library card.
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