god bless california, make way for the walmart!

I'm writing from the Palo Alto Main Library, where I've biked on a rainy Thursday evening to rip all the tracks off its meager blues CD collection. (Now ripping: "Muddy Waters: Folk Singer.") I fucking love this place. It's 8:25 p.m. and it's rockin'. It stays open until 9 p.m...it's practically a night club. All the librarians are exactly as you would expect them to be, with bowl haircuts and extremely pleasant voices. They've redone the layout since I was here last, some time in 1999 when I checked out some stupid econ book over Thanksgiving break to get school reading done and wrote all over the margins. Now there's a "teen" section, and the CDs are segregated between adult listening (categories including Orchestral, Popular, Folk, International, and Wedding Compliations) and something called "Teen," which includes:

1. A 1994 Eurhythmics album
2. Billboard's Top Ten Songs of 1992, 1994, and 1995
3. An album by the actress Minnie Driver, whose picture is dodged and burned such that her giant Owen Wilson lantern jaw is reduced to a one standard deviation size
4. Albums by (Leave) Lindsay (A-)Lohan, Fall Out Boy, and Bow Wow

I thought this was pretty funny. Palo Alto's efforts to woo it's teen clientele also include a "beading workshop," posters for which are discretely tented on the four infant-sized tables in the teen section, which was completely empty except for me, browsing through music from the 1990s and feeling the warm sensation that comes with being patronized to.

All I have been doing on the last few days of my winter vacation is driving from Costco to Fry's in Mountain View to the Costco and Fry's in Sunnyvale attempting to find gifts for Stephanie's 40-something lesbian aunts, since I have to deliver the goods on Saturday when I fly into Atlanta for the last leg of my extended winter vacation. (We're driving to Nashville and Memphis, for the Grand Ol' Opry and Graceland!!!! Hence I am in the Main Library finding music from the South so I can fit in with the hoi polloi.) I have also have been infected with naegleria fowleri, the brain-eating fungus that infects warm, stagnant freshwater bodies and sulphurous hot springs and kills its victims in two weeks, as a result of sitting in a hot spring in Big Sur for twenty minutes and accidentally rubbing my nostrils with my fingers last Saturday. I'm only reasonably sure I've been infected. So far symptoms include headaches, grogginess, stuffy nose, and an addiction to Afrin.

One of the librarians is a man who looks about 38 and is wearing a black mock turtleneck and a chartreuse v-neck sweater underneath it, and a lanyard around his neck with his ID card at the end of it. He is sitting eight feet to my right chatting with another librarian, but he is so good at what he does that his voice is barely audible. In fact, I think they might just be lip-reading. I am concerned that they will leap over the counter and stab me with golf pencils.