October 5, 2001
  overdue

The other day I was going through my mail, and found five of the exact same carbon-copied, tear-off-the-sides-to-open slips normally used by sweepstakes, ("You might have won...!") and third notice bills. ("You might be sued...!") They were all from the local library system, usually a bad sign.

"Due to the following overdue materials...."

Oops.

"....and the following missing materials...."

Eh?

"....amount owing is...."

Shit.

Eight-seven dollars, ladies and gentlemen. Eight seven. $87. A nice, round number, wouldn't you say? Divisible by three. 87.

Libraries and I have a precarious relationship at best, a sort of love-dislike-hate-collection agency thing that repeats itself wherever I move. It's a failed experiment. The library system in Rochester has a contract out on me, for the sum of $2.13 that I owed for almost two years and finally paid in cash the day before I graduated. San Francisco's library system added a wing to the North Beach library off of the funds it gathered from my overdue fines; the King County Library System in Bellevue, Washington, where I grew up, has me on a black list that will require me to donate vital internal organs before I'm permitted to check anything out again.

Basically, I live in my very own Salvador Dali painting, in my very own surrealist landscape with my very own surrealist time zone. Look, what's that? It's a clock! Is it friendly? Sure, it says it's only August 4th, 1999. I have an entire nine months until the books are due.

It's not like I have any excuse this time, either. The Redwood City Public Library is literally two blocks away from my apartment. Three blocks, if the partial blocks are compressed into one very short block. I walk the same distance to catch the shuttle to work in the mornings I don't feel like biking, and the library is a grand total of one block away from the pick-up. On the days that I feel like biking, I pass right in front of the library -- and it's drop-box-when-closed -- on my way to and back from work. God has stamped the word "LOSER" on my forehead, in invisible ink that will glow vermillion under black lights. This is how my kind recognize each other at clubs.

The missing books were under my bed. I turned them in after the library had closed so I wouldn't have to face the librarians. I couldn't handle the guilt. (Tangent: When the hell did I start feeling guilt? The Japanese aren't supposed to believe in guilt. The Japanese believe in denial, and revenge, and "Don't bother feeling sorry because we'll be killing you to make it square anyway, so you might as well save your energy." The way the Japanese brain works, if you're still alive a month after your sin, it wasn't much of a sin to begin with, and therefore didn't happen. This is the way the Japanese invasion of Manchuria isn't dealt with in Japanese classrooms, where Japanese children are taught that the Americans were mad because the Japanese blew up their fleet -- never mind why -- and so came and dropped atom bombs on them. The Japanese are masters of revisionist history.)

Now that the missing books are back, I figure I now only owe the library $27. And a lot of change, because I'm betting they'll charge me overdue fines for the books they said were missing. Crap. I didn't even like some of these books. I didn't even read one of them. I don't think they should be charging me an overdue fine for books that didn't live up to my expectations, should they? It's not American.

This is the reason I buy books, the reason I buy DVDs and videos. It's too damn expensive to do it the other way. Imagine if I actually start renting stuff from Blockbuster on a regular basis. I'll own the entire store in a couple of months. The store in Redwood City will be able to get by on my overdue fees alone, at least until my credit card runs out. Then they'll start asking for payment in the form of my eggs. Two years later, the face of the Asian will have changed: suddenly 80% of all Asian babies will be round, squinty-eyed, and full of gas.

Firecracker stories.

Today, when the Firecracker dropped her baby off at the babysitter, she discovered him sitting in his baby seat in the back of her car, gravely eating a copy of National Geographic.

"I HOPE IT IS NOT POISONOUS," she fretted to me on the way to the cafeteria.

"When I was young, I ate charcoal," boasted College Boy.

Competitive people sometimes just don't know where to draw the line. "There's no need to be so proud of that," I noted.

Men.