A Stroll in the Park

Dear readers, please forgive my hiatus. My ladyfriend Catherine recently returned from tending to her ill mother. After the rather emotional weeks she spent as a doting nursemaid, she demanded my exclusive company for several days. Although it was, as always, a delight to entertain her and regale her with anecdotes and fictitious adventures, it kept my pen from my paper for a length of time.

While C. takes great pleasure in wandering the grounds on my estate, after a few days she suggested we travel to the city and enjoy some of the public parklands there. One of our great pastimes is sitting discretely on a bench and regarding the passersby and other various parkgoers, commenting on them mercilessly. We attempt, like children, to maintain our composure and dignity when others approach, switching our discourse to politics, the flux in the transportation market, and so on.

Oh Sweet Helena!

When I was a young man, many untruths reigned freely in my troubled mind. Despite my father’s wisdom, I regularly mistook any fleeting glance from a lady to be signs of unrequited love. The passions that raged within me from these accidental moments would be quelled only by drowning them later in wine, when I would writhe in miserable anguish on the study floor, red sediment staining my lips from their familiar hold on the bottle.

Helena was by far the most thirst-inducing of all the nymphs of my youth. Oh sweet Helena, forgive my foolishness!

Visiting the Library

Libraries, ah libraries. When your afternoon stroll through the cemetery must be postponed due to a downpour, it is to the library you often turn, no?

(And today I refer to public libraries. Private libraries are doubly magnificent, with generally exquisite furniture and artistic reading lamps, ornate liquor cabinets and comfortable mahogany desks. Oh and the books! But I digress.)

The public library is a bastion of democracy and literacy, where vagrant and doctor both can enter and become enlightened. Recently, however, I discovered that my own public library, the C. City Library, is frequented more by the former than the latter, and this once-great institution has changed its presentation to suit its new constituency.

A recent renovation, planned by clearly unintelligent people, has turned the reference area into a computer area rife with porn connoisseurs (their screens changed abruptly when I could no longer keep my approach stealthy enough). Was the old wing so dilapidated that it had to be redesigned to something so pedestrian?

Perhaps, actually. As I was browsing the Historical Animal Tending section (a particular pastime of mine) I noticed that that entire section of the Dewey Decimal system was in shambles. Books in disarray! Shelves buckling! I even noticed that two editions of the same book (A Passion for Donkeys by Elisabeth Svendsen of the highly regarded Donkey Sanctuary in England) were not shelved in order of publication.

I righted the wrong, but I was not about to trawl through the entire building correcting other such mistakes. This is what librarians are supposed to be doing.

And about those librarians! I recall the days of sophisticated, bespeckled women in semi-transparent blouses and sensible shoes. At the C. City Library, however there were only heavily pierced teenagers and potato-shaped matrons.

A further disappointment occurred when I ventured into the Modern Collection area. There were more digital items than paper ones available for loan! DVDs, CDs, books on tape (or rather, on CD), computer games...! What a travesty! Truth be told I was actually a bit curious: would this be an opportunity to finally see The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, directed by the esteemed Rodney Amateau?

Alas, such material was not in stock. (I had to use the computer "card catalogue" to search. Gone are the glorious days of real card catalogues, as I'm sure, dear reader, you are already aware. We should mourn their passing over a good bottle of aged single-malt whiskey very soon, I say.)

I was considering investigating what digital material they did have available, but I didn't want to touch anything, for fear of contagion.

There is so much more I could say! How the graffiti, once comprised of amorous tributes and of notes on books of which call number (and what pages) had the best images of lumberjack footware, was now mainly juvenile depictions of male genitalia. How children, formerly confined to their own area of the building, instead scampered freely through the isles like fleas on a stray.

This post has gone on for long enough. I have decided to redirect my efforts and leisure time to restoring my own private library. When it is in a more presentable state, I would be delighted to have you visit, and I will have cigars and cognac to celebrate the occasion.

Coffee at Chez R

I came to this outdoor venue to pen a cheery piece for you, my venerable readers, but instead I am forced to recount an uglier truth. What used to be a pleasant café, Chez R, has since gone to the dogs, and the fithy, rabid curs couldn’t even properly deliver me a decent cup of coffee. Typical. The kids take over the business and it goes to rot.

I arrived just past two. After waiting nearly ten minutes at the wobbly, splintered table, a churlish waiter finally arrived, wiping what appeared to be swine blood from his hands onto a greasy apron. He sneered at me and demanded my order, not even offering a menu.

Also, Katy (Red)

Yes, the feared and respected (yet inexplicably a really nice person if you actually talk to her for like five minutes) Red Herring is now an author here as well.

Also a mysterious person we shall call Mysterio, whom you likely know (if you frequent MSPA), but whose identity will still remain a mystery to you.