St. Monday and the Ignorants

Man alive, they are tearing up the library. We've got ambient plaster dust, bare-bulb lighting, scaffolding, big plastic tarps, and dudes with helmets. I was walking through looking for a copy of J. R. McTweedpants's The Erie Canal was the Internet of Its Day when it occurred to me that I, contrary to almost everyone in the piece, was really enjoying the remodelling. It's not just that I now fit in, wearing my own protective helmet as I have since I realized the dangers to which language and its inherent instability expose me. It's that, finally, work is being done at the library. And when I say work, I mean force times distance over time, as everybody knows.

I spend a lot of time hiding from my anxieties amongst the library's stacks, and I usually see a whole bunch of other people there: undergrads playing online poker on their new laptops, grad students surrounded by empty paper coffee cups and books with titles like "Suppressing the Ablist Opposition in James Robert McTweedpants: The Erie Canal was the Internet of Its Day and Corporeality," and usually that guy in the trenchcoat. To the naive or untrained eye, it might appear that most of these people are doing a lot of work. They're taking out books, looking at them, staring off into space, and looking at them some more. The fact is, however, that all of these books, however far they might be taken, always return to their homes on the shelves. Even the heaviest book taken out by the skimpiest sorority pledge results in zero work done, which is pretty mind-blowing when you think about it. If the book weighs fifteen pounds, and she takes it from the library to the sorority house (approximately .5 miles), and then returns it after say forty-five minutes, at which point a library rat returns it to the place from which the broad took it, then to figure out the work done you have a zero, in the numerator (the top part), and zero divided by anything is zero. No work.

These guys in there now, however, are doing work. They're taking sheetrock from Home Depot or something and nailing right into the library, where it will stay until the end of time. If I had a calculator I would tell you how much work they were doing, but the fact is that they are doing work for what is probably the first time inside that library, and I applaud them. Back to work for me.