drizzly

i've gotten very little done today, all weekend actually. i need a vacation, and we're only in week 5. sigh. i miss laura. she needs to loose her guests and entertainment and just sit around her house and play with her cats and mope and call ME.

finished up fic writing reading. went to the library. i love the library. i was reading an article on the decline of libraries in the utne reader, and it made me nervous. they're getting all technelogical, and throwing away books. branches are closing, and big cities are building fancy architectured structures that impress critics, not booklovers. i'm so glad i live in chicago. am currently reading through sara ryan's booklists- she's got a yagblt list, and the list her book was banned on. i love reading ya banned books. and edgewater has a nice branch, too. reminds me of branches in my childhood. my library card is my most precious possession. i mean, it's free, so it's not like loosing it would make me sad, i could just get another one. but to live somewhere without a library? to be prohibited from going, from checking out? no thanks. i'd go without bread, without wheat, without carbs, before i'd go without books. chocolate...ah... if i had to choose never to go to a library or never eat chocolate again, i'd probably turn in my card for the hershey's. but i'd spend alot of time in barbara's bestsellers. books or chocolate is no question- books win every time. they're so much better than tv. first, have i mentioned they're free? and they're portable. and they can be private, you can read on the train without bugging others... but you can read out loud to a group or a lover and it's much more personal and engaging than, say, watching a movie together. and they're unexhaustable. there are more written every day, and the library is always buying more, and even if you don't count all the millions i'm not interested in, there are still more than i'll ever be able to read. and they're all so different. i sometimes imagine the stories actually unfolding in the physical space of each and every book. you open them up, and there are all the characters living their stories, like polly pocket. and it's like the city. each of these very different stories, lined up next to each other on the shelves, stacked up in aisles, each unaware of the one happening next to it. like people in apartment complexes. i think of both the city and the 7th floor (literature and foreign launguage) like that- this complete story that can always be telescoped out to see this enormous context, a sort of collective unconscious of humanity... or literature, as the case may be.

i was going to give this rant after reading the utne article, then i read one about turning route 66 into a bike path. it's going so slowly, cause of funding. what the #@$%? i can't think of anything more important. sheesh. i hate to think how many billions of dollars we're spending on this fucking war, all the money going through giant corporations, oprah giving everyone cars. i get so frustrated by the stupid things getting too much money and the important things not getting any. children. the homeless. the uninsured. the mentally ill. the cyclists. my god. that's perhaps why i love libraries so much. they are perhaps the only federally funded thing that's still managing to do it right. not that's it's perfect, esp. not equally across the country, but really- there's nothing better than a library. information is power.

and my FAVOURITE quote is in the popular library, on the wall above circulation. it's by groucho marx:

"outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."