Libraries, later

I don't think of libraries nearly as often as I ought to anymore. When I was but a lad my parents had a system in place by which I had to read an amount of time equal to what I spent watching television and playing video games. The library was a regular destination then. I needed a constant supply of books to keep pace with my constant intake of video games. Normally I paid the reading forward, but every once in a while I would rent a game for the weekend and go on a four-hour jag that left me deep in the hole, frantic to get a big block of reading done before my OCD found me and broke my knees. The genius of the system, which I think surprised my parents plenty, was that it was mostly self-enforcing.

This was the period that I tore through series books: Choose Your Own Adventure, The Hardy Boys, and Fear Street were staples of my literary diet, and you can bet I never paid for all that reading. It was that era when I developed the tendency to never be "between" books.

Looking back, I think college, of all things, broke me of recreational librarying. As an English major I always had something to read, and it being college we were all expected to buy our books and write in them so the school could buy them back for cheap. My fiction and nonfiction needs were covered by academic mandate. When I wanted a book for recreation in college, it was probably a Dungeons & Dragons rulebook. These were reference materials, so even if the college library would have accommodated me (which I doubt), I really needed to own them. At any rate some of these books ended up in pretty sorry shape. A chair leg gouged a large hole out of the spine of my Dungeon Master's Guide. My general philosophy of tidiness at this time was that the floor was flat, and so were books, so it made more sense to walk on them than to pick them up.

After college I lived in the University District of Seattle, which is the land of the secondhand. The secondhand economy of Seattle's U District was not even remotely limited to books. Old furniture was abandoned on street corners--the garbage trucks ignored this; it was simply assumed that someone would want it and take it away. We furnished our house by harvesting the sidewalks at the end of every school year. Every summer I would find a propane grill that was slightly less broken than our current one, and roll it home. Half of the clothing stores sold artisanally marked-up secondhand clothes (in constant supply as people grew out of them every freshman year). At one point we took in newborn kittens for a local shelter, simply to ensure that the kittens were secondhand when they were finally adopted out.

Books were used in Seattle, and hence cheap, but in Seattle I also lived with a series of people who owned books I hadn't read. So what I didn't buy used I mooched outright. That situation continues to today, when I live in Maryland. Sometimes it is worth it to leave the house, but as I write this I can see literally years worth of reading material from where I sit, literally without turning my head. That's just how booky this house is.

So it's not that surprising that it's taken me this long to get anything out of my local library here in Hyattsville. I was, and remain, dismayed by the lack of bookstores in the area, but we have a nice library, which Girlfriend convinced me to look at.

The library is to thank for our recent watching of Shadows of the Vampire, which we couldn't find for love or (little enough) money through normal channels, at least not on short enough notice. The local library has a reasonably eclectic, erm, library of DVDs that beats the pants off of Netflix in terms of the wheat/chaff ratio.

Also, there are books. I actually find that I've forgotten how to browse a library. At least, I used to be comfortable with going into a library and not being sure what I would bring home, like some men are with bars. As I got older, and my tastes have become less forgiving, or more stodgy, I've gotten more used to setting out with a specific object in mind and subsequently being either satisfied or disappointed.

Considering that, it's nice to find intriguement (intriguedness? intrigual?) somewhere between satisfaction and disappointment, and to go with someone beside myself with the nerve to hand me a reprinted 19th-century book on secret societies. I don't know whether it will be good or bad, but it's almost certain to be worth more than nothing, and likely to be gristful in any event.