One of Those "Everything But the Kitchen Sink" Posts

Tonight is my night off from the Columbus State bookstore, since it’s only open until 6 on Fridays.  (My night shifts start at 5:30, so there is no sense in working for only half an hour.)  I enjoy the job at Columbus State, and my co-workers are good people, but I still felt great when all I had to do after work is come home via the local branch of the library (to pick up reserves).

Most nights this week, I’ve simply been too wiped out to sit down and type an entry once I’m home, and once Susie is in bed and Steph has retired to her bedroom for the night.  That is why the entry I’m writing at the moment will not hang together, subject-wise, and I doubt it’ll flow in any conventional sense.

Slowly, I am easing myself back into walking.  The bookstore job has entailed a lot of walking back and forth on the second floor, either shelving books, straightening out awkwardly placed volumes, or helping customers.  Although the vernal equinox was Sunday, temperatures in the 20s and 30s have made return appearances in Columbus this week, so I haven’t considered walking home after the bookstore job ends at 8 p.m.  (It ends at 9 p.m. as of Monday.)  I logged plenty of mileage on the floor, but I have only had two “real” walks since I last posted.

The first was on Saturday night.  The monthly “Return of Nite Owl Theater” was a week early, because Fritz the Nite Owl is at HorrorHound Weekend in Indianapolis this weekend.  I walked the three miles each way to the Grandview Theater and thoroughly enjoyed the 1962 black-and-white film Carnival of Souls, starring Candace Hilligoss.

I found the movie even more enjoyable when I realized that its director, Herk Harvey, filmed some of it in a place I have actually seen.  The abandoned amusement park where the heroine is trapped by disembodied souls cavorting about is the Saltair Pavilion, located just west of Salt Lake City.  I remember seeing it in 1987, as I was en route by Greyhound from Athens to San Francisco for spring break. It stood out in the midst of the Great Salt Lake on over a thousand pilings, and I remember seeing it from I-80 and wondering just what it was.  (A year later, I was walking down High St. here in Columbus when two young Mormon missionaries tried to proselytize me.  Both were Utah natives, so I got them off on a big tangent by describing the building and asking what it was.  We ended up talking about that, a welcome break from Mormon theology.)

This is from Cardcow.com.  A picture of Saltair in its heyday, and a post card that gave me a laugh.

I walked very briskly home, because the temperature dropped 10 or 15 degrees during the movie, and I was a little underdressed for the weather.

The other walk was because of a fax machine error.  One of my co-workers tried over six times to fax paperwork to OPERS (the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, what we pay into in lieu of Social Security).  It went through our machine fine, but never seemed to arrive on the other end.  She was getting more and more frustrated, because the meter was running on the deadline for submitting this paperwork.  Finally, I told her I’d run it over to OPERS’ office on E. Town St.  It was exactly a mile each way from our office, and I needed to get some pavement under me, no matter how much I had been resisting it.  She was quite grateful.  She sealed it all in an envelope and gave it to me, and I left the office at 12:30.  (“Cue the theme from Rocky,” I told her on my way out.)

It was a good walk.  Despite being a little out of practice for me (I wish I had the mindset that I had when I posted all my entries and Tweets about always jonesing for a good long walk), I kept a pretty good pace and obeyed all the WALK-DON’T WALK signs, which is something totally out of character for me.  It was misting just a little, so I very conscientiously kept my co-worker’s envelope underneath my sweat jacket.  (I thought of my cousin Bob, describing to a desk sergeant how he knew that he had paid a speeding ticket: “It was drizzling rain, and I got into my car with that envelope, and I carried it upside down, so the rain wouldn’t blot the address, and I put it in that fine box by the Delaware County Bank.”)  I gave her envelope to the receptionist in PERS’ lobby, and when I asked for a receipt, she Xeroxed each page, date-stamped the front one, and handed them back to me.  I put them back in the envelope and returned to the office.

Some of our customers at the bookstore are people who, for whatever reason, dropped out of high school, and are at Columbus State to get their GEDs.  The GED books are in constant demand, and I am sure many of them are very diligent students.  (I considered dropping out of high school and going for the GED, but my dad insisted I get a job if I did that, and Ohio was 49th in employment at that time, and regular work was anathema to me at that period of my life.)  After he retired from Marietta College, Dad taught GED classes a night or two a week, and he told me that many of the students there were more conscientious than his college students.

What appalls me is how many people have no clue how to locate their books, or how to determine what books go with what courses.  The layout of the second floor shelves is pretty straightforward.  Subjects appear alphabetically, and the course numbers are numerical within those.  The free-standing bookshelves go from A through N.  N through the end of the alphabet (Veterinary Technology).  In the “teach a man to fish” spirit, I explain that when someone asks how to find a book.  On several occasions, I have had to pretty much lead the person to the book they want, and then point to the shelf tag to show them what books or materials go with the courses.

I had the same issues when I worked at DuBois Book Store in Cincinnati, situations which I satirized (quite mercilessly) in my as-yet-unpublished novella The Textbook Diaries.  My constant thought when these situations arose was, “If you need to be led by the hand to find your books, and cannot puzzle out an alphabetical shelving system and straightforward shelf tags, then maybe college isn’t for you.”  That thought even popped up once in awhile when I was in Harvard’s orbit.  Most of the people I met during my 18 months in Cambridge were bright, intelligent, and creative, but there were some whom you knew were only there because their parents could afford the tuition and promised generous contributions.

The One-Man Tag Team

Day three at the Discovery Exchange makes me feel better and better about redoing this job.  I won’t lie–working a second job, no matter how temporary, takes a lot out of me.  I’ve also been curbing my excessive caffeine consumption the last week or so, which means the end of the workday makes me feel a lot more exhausted than normal.  Yet, as I headed to bed tonight, I remembered my duty to my readership–analogous to Fritz the Nite Owl’s “14 viewers out there in the darkness”–so before I fall asleep, I’m at the keyboard typing up this blog entry.

Since my job at Columbus State’s bookstore began Monday night, my evening task has mostly been shelving new books, usually straight out of the delivery cartons, and last night this expanded.  An overloaded book cart, groaning under the weight of buybacks, materialized on the second floor last night, so I spent most of the evening putting them back where they belonged.  (Winter quarter at Columbus State is winding down, and spring quarter will soon be upon us, so there are deliveries galore.  When I worked at DuBois Book Store in Cincinnati, the arrival of a UPS or Roadway truck often resembled scenes in M*A*S*H when casualty-laden choppers and ambulances began arriving, a real all-hands-on-deck atmosphere.)

Tonight was a little different.  I’ve been beating myself up the past couple of weeks because I haven’t had the mental or physical energy to do any long walks lately.  Even the two blocks to Kroger has seemed to be like climbing Everest in flip-flops.  I felt a little better Monday and Tuesday nights, because the amount of territory I covered when shelving books meant I did a fair amount of walking on the second floor of the Discovery Exchange.

Partly because of brain wiring and chemistry, there is no logic to the way I shelved the books.  I pretty much shelved them in the order they sat on the cart, regardless of whether the textbooks were for subjects that were close to one another on our bookshelves.  (I also see myself doing this when I’m at the grocery store and working from a shopping list.  I will pick up items in the order they appear on the list.  Item #1 and Item #2 may be clear across the store from each other, but that is how I will get them.  Steph and I were married over a decade before she finally realized that the most expeditious thing to do was to organize the list so that all the meat products were clustered together, all the cereal, all the dairy, etc.)

Tonight I arrived when there was not much shelving.  The night supervisor gave me an assignment that didn’t require as much pedestrian activity, but it was a necessity I had noticed.  He gave me a pair of scissors and a thick stack of shelf tags.  On the shelf hangs a transparent plastic pocket for a tag.  The tag lists the title of the course, and below it is a list of all the required textbooks and materials.

A typical shelf tag, one of many I replaced tonight. As I had been stacking books on Monday and Tuesday, I noticed that many of the shelf tags were too light, as if they had come from a printer low on ink or toner.  That was where my assignment for tonight came in.  Take out the old tag and replace it.  However, I was supposed to cut them to fit the little pouch. I am not all that proficient with scissors.  I was one of the last kids in my kindergarten class to learn how to cut, and I still have never been able to do paper dolls or valentines.  During my typesetting years, I never mastered the art of cutting and pasting, or using an X-Acto knife.  (My supervisor at Feicke Web drafted me into cutting and pasting one evening when she was shorthanded with laying out the next issue of Homefinder.  I told her I was a typesetter, not layout, but she was desperate.  The finished product looked like I’d used either my teeth or a butter knife.) Despite this, I was able to get through almost the entire stack of new shelf tags.  I started in Landscaping and worked my way around most of the subjects beginning with L and M.  It became the type of job that went so fast I flinched when I looked at my watch and saw how much time had elapsed.  The bookstore’s music comes from (I think) Sirius Radio, and we heard a succession of very good songs from the ’70s, which made the evening go faster. Focusing on the music also made the tinnitus more bearable.  Right now, the only sound I can hear is the sound of my fingers on the keyboard, and the white noise of the laptop motor.  Since there are no louder sounds around me, that means the tinnitus is more noticeable.  This has made me think of Mission of Burma, a Boston group that was quite popular when I lived there.  I would see their names in The Boston Phoenix, I would typeset their concert reviews in The Crimson, and I would see ads for their concerts on telephone poles and fences all over the Boston University campus.  (They seemed to be the local band that had stepped in when Human Sexual Response disbanded in 1982, shortly before my arrival.) Then, one day in 1983, suddenly Mission of Burma no longer around.  I soon learned that their founder, Roger Miller (not “King of the Road” Roger Miller), was dealing with severe tinnitus, and could no longer perform.  That was the first I had ever heard of this condition.  After reading about this in the newspaper, I remember looking the word up in a medical dictionary.  At the time, I assumed that only rock musicians, people who worked around heavy ordnance, or factory workers constantly exposed to loud machinery, were at risk for it. I have learned something in 30 years.

My Day: Tinnitus and the Bookstore

I had my appointment with the otolaryngologist and audiologist at OSU this afternoon.  I met with two doctors, had a thorough hearing exam, and the diagnosis is tinnitus, a constant ringing or buzzing in the ears, ICD-9-CM code 399.30.  I have felt this since before Christmas, but thought that it was a byproduct of my annual bouts with coughs, sneezing, and runny nose, so I rode it out.  This time, it wasn’t going away.

The hearing check reminded me of the tests I had in first grade.  The equipment is more sophisticated, and the setting a lot more pleasant than the school nurse’s office, but it was essentially the same.  I held a clicker in my hand, and I was supposed to push it whenever I heard the tone in one side or the other of my headphones.  The tones varied in pitch and in volume, but I pushed the button whenever I heard one, or thought I did.

How did my tinnitus come about?  I have never had a job where I’ve been around constant high-decibel noise, such as operating a jackhammer, or playing in a heavy metal band, or working on the ground crew at an airport.  I shudder when I say this, but it’s a byproduct of aging (I will be 48 next month).  There has been nerve damage in my ears, and the affected nerves pick up sounds in the higher registers.  Since I am no longer hearing more high-pitched sounds, my brain is generating the non-stop, high-pitched whine to compensate for it.  (I realize I may have had this problem longer than I thought: When listening to any type of recording, whether it is music or voice, I always turn the treble as high as it will go, while keeping the bass level in the middle, at the very highest.  If I owned a more high-end stereo system–I almost typed “hi-fi,” betraying how old I really am!–I probably would have gone through tweeters by the dozen every year.)

What is to be done?  Apparently nothing, unless the whine intensifies to the point that it either prevents me from sleeping or awakens me during the night.  The doctor and the resident both suggested that I take melatonin, which would increase restfulness and lessen the effects of the tinnitus to the extent that I can sleep better.

In other news, tonight was my first night back at the Discovery Exchange, Columbus State’s bookstore.  I was home briefly between the doctor appointment and the job at the bookstore, and it was good to be back to work.  This is finals week at Columbus State.  On the second floor, which is where I work, cartons of incoming books tightly occupied every square inch of available floor space.  There were only two of us working, and not many customers, so I took a cart full of books and began shelving them.  It’s my first day back, so I need to relearn where many books go.  By the weekend, I’ll be able to glance at a book cover and better know where it belongs, from sheer repetition if nothing else.  Tonight, I focused mainly on titles I knew instantly, especially the basic English reference books such as The Blair Handbook.  It’s best to take the low-hanging fruit in the beginning.  The best way to find something is to stop looking for it.

My Annual Cough

This is my last week of comparative luxury.  The seasonal job at Columbus State Community College’s bookstore begins Monday evening at 5:30, so from then until the 31st, 13-hour workdays will be the norm and not the exception.  I should probably savor what free time I have, but it’s hard to when my cough has come back, making its presence known whenever I take a deep breath.

The vernal equinox is the 20th, and I had been hoping that I would be spared the cough this year, but no such luck.  It started off as a mild tickling in the back of my throat, and now there’s a constant urge to cough nestled at the base of my tongue.  All I have to do is breathe normally and that’ll trigger it.

Susie and I are in the same boat, ear-wise, unfortunately.  She developed an earache that goes down the whole side of her face and even into her tooth.  Nevertheless, she took some ibuprofen and gave a splendid performance in Annie, Jr. tonight at Dominion Middle School.  (I didn’t go, because I was supposed to be at a late doctor’s appointment.  His office called to reschedule just as I was leaving work this afternoon.  But I’ll be there tomorrow night at 7 p.m. sharp.  Take note, those of you in the Columbus area!)  She went to bed tonight with some NyQuil, and hopefully that’ll clear it up.

On Monday, I leave work at 11 a.m. for an appointment with an otolaryngologist (ear, nose, and throat guy) at OSU Medical Center.  Since before Christmas, I’ve had a non-stop rushing and ringing sound in my ears.  It feels like your ears do after someone has come up behind you and boxed them.  I was a little worried when the office called to reschedule, because they wanted an audiologist there, as well as the physician.

I complained to a friend of mine that I had such a backlog of work, I needed a periscope to see over everything.  I admit that sometime soon I’ll have to make an effort to clean up the papers that scatter my desk, but I’m actually spending most of my work hours transcribing, which means I haven’t had time to sort through what belongs there and what I should discard.  One of my un-favorite doctors dominated today’s work.  He dictates very rapidly, occasionally gasping for breath between paragraphs, and I have to take down what he’s saying, sort out his run-on sentences, and pause to look at various medical references (both online and in books) to make sure he said what he said.  I keep thinking to myself, For Christ’s sake, you’re a physician, not an auctioneer.


Some people have said I’m a little anal-retentive when it comes to transcribing the doctors’ reports, but this is one profession where it is a must, or should be a must.  So many medical terms sound alike (“atraumatic,” as opposed to “it was a traumatic event”), as do the names of many medications, that if I’m not 100% sure, I stop the recording and look up the term or drug name in question.  This is because someone’s health is at stake whenever you transcribe a report.  It’s not like a data entry job at Victoria’s Secret, where the worst that can happen is that a package addressed to Logan, Ohio may end up in Logan, Utah.

After about a week of going without, I have a cell phone yet again.  My LG cell phone fizzled unexpectedly Wednesday night.  I spent over an hour on the phone with Net10’s customer service people the next day (not including the time on hold–you can listen to most of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen during that), and finally they agreed to send me a new phone free of charge, and FedEx delivered a new Motorola cell phone, complete with camera, this morning.  I had to go to my email account and send a mass message to friends who have called me.  (I stored most of their numbers in the phone, and when the phone went belly-up, the memory was kaput as well.)


While Susie was onstage and Steph was in the audience tonight, I did something which probably helped neither my cough nor my ears.  They had eaten dinner before I came home (since they thought–as I did–that I wouldn’t be home), so I went out in the cold rain (temperature in the mid-30s tonight) and went to Wendy’s and brought back two Double Stacks for dinner.

More doctors’ reports await me when I walk into the office at 8 a.m.  They’re from a psychologist, so at least it’ll be interesting.  They’re long, but I always seem to whiz through psychological and psychiatric examinations.  Hearing about people’s backgrounds and family upbringings is more interesting than hearing about their spines and their problems walking.  (One claimant had a condition you’ll find most often in spelling bees: trichotillomania, a compulsion to pull out your own hair.)

Tucson Tragedy Was Work’s Backdrop This Weekend

Blogging here headed my “to-do” list for this weekend’s activities, but I fully anticipated writing a mundane “working on weekends is a pain in the ass” screed and nothing more.  Events proved otherwise.

On the first floor of the Discovery Exchange is a flat-screen TV.  It is always tuned to CNN with the volume muted.  I work on the second floor, but there is a railing overlooking the wall with the flat-screen.  Each time I passed it, while helping customers or walking to the staircase to the first floor, I’d give CNN a cursory glance.

Mid-afternoon, I saw the headline ARIZONA CONGRESSWOMAN SHOT, and soon the face of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) appeared.  Since there were no closed captions, I had almost no clue as to what had happened.  From bits and pieces flashed onto the screen, I learned that she was one of 19 people shot today in a Tucson shopping center.

Once I saw this headline, I frequently drifted toward the railing so I could watch the screen.  CNN immediately cancelled all its other programming so it could focus exclusively on the shooting.  At another glance, the news was that Rep. Giffords was dead.  With no captions, and single-sentence bits of information flashing under the screen, it was hard to glean what was happening.  A Tucson station, KGUN-TV, kept flashing pictures of emergency personnel rolling stretchers toward ambulances, milling crowds, and police barricades, scenes which have become tragically recognizable these past few years.

CNN admitted that they were receiving conflicting reports about whether or not Giffords had died.  Instantly, I thought about the Spring 1981 afternoon Ronald Reagan was shot, and the networks kept receiving differing accounts about whether press secretary Jim Brady, shot in the head, had succumbed.  ABC News’ anchor, the late Frank Reynolds, finally hit the roof.  He turned off camera and shouted, “Let’s get it nailed down, somebody!  Let’s find out!  Let’s get it straight so we can report this thing accurately!”  I am sure Wolf Blitzer was thinking the same thing.

My only surprise is that it took this long for this to happen.  I am also surprised that it didn’t happen to a higher level government official.  (Giffords has survived surgery, and is still in very critical condition, but the surgeon sounded optimistic.  Or at least as optimistic as possible about someone who has suffered a bullet to the brain.)  The only incumbent U.S. Representative assassinated was Leo Ryan (D-Calif.), who was murdered in Guyana by people from Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple in 1978.

I’ve been clicking back and forth between the blog and various news sites, and the information about the killer, and Rep. Giffords’ condition, has been coming in fits and starts.  The chair of the Brain Injury Association of America has said that she is in for a prolonged recovery, and there will inevitably be some permanent damage.  The killer had posted several free-association (that’s the kindest word I can use) videos on YouTube about how “I can’t trust the government”, and ridiculing the voters in his district, among other things.

American assassins seldom seem to have a truly political agenda.  Most of them are acting on personal demons.  (John Hinckley actually voted for Reagan, but thought that he could “win the love” of Jodie Foster by killing Reagan.  Arthur Bremer just wanted to be “somebody,” so he shot and crippled George Wallace after stalking Richard Nixon in the U.S. and Canada, intending to assassinate him.)

Keith Olbermann has called for an end to gun-related analogies in political rhetoric from both Left and Right, and I think the man has a point.  In this commentary, he has cited many of the politicians and rhetoricians of the Left and the Right who have done this, and has apologized for the times when he has crossed the line.  I think there is a lot more going in the mind of the person who decided to shoot Giffords and all the others yesterday, and ultimately he must own what he did, so whether human sewage like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh heavily influenced his thinking and his action is a question that will remain unanswered for months.

I have little hope that the bigots who see anti-U.S. terror plots behind every Muslim will speak out against this act of domestic terrorism.  Many still believe that we are above all this.  I remember the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, an event that affected me much more strongly than 9/11 did, because I was a Federal employee at the time.  Until Timothy McVeigh was charged, speculation ran rampant that it was the work of Middle Eastern terrorists, the same cell that had bombed the World Trade Center in 1993.  I was one of the few people who suspected that the perpetrator was American.  I lived in Cincinnati at the time, and was going to Columbus for the day to interview for a job with the Department of Agriculture.  As I was getting dressed and packing my over-the-shoulder bag for the trip, the disk jockey on the radio was talking about “on this day in history,” and he mentioned Lexington and Concord, and then mentioned the gory end to the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco.  When I heard about Oklahoma City over lunch with my friend Ivan and his stepson, mentally I made the connection right away.

The 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade is later this month, and the pro-life and -choice letters are, I’m sure, clogging the Letters to the Editors pages and Websites of many newspapers in the country.  (I stepped away from the debate when Susie was an infant.  It may sound callous, but since the day of my vasectomy, it has ceased to be an issue that affects me personally.)  I have a Seamless Garment attitude about the whole abortion issue, but only Libertarian friends of mine understand my anti-abortion/pro-choice stance.  (A union official handled the issue best.  He was speaking at a rally, and someone asked him, “What do you think about Roe v. Wade?”  Without skipping a beat, he said, “If the water is above my waist, I’d rather row than wade.”)

The “pro-lifers” de-legitimized the whole argument about the right to life with the slew of abortion clinic arsons, bombings, and murders that began in the late 1970s.  That is when I began making the distinction between being “pro-birth” and being “pro-life.”  Many of the victims had nothing to do with abortions themselves; they were janitors or security guards who worked in the building.  Anti-abortion violence was why I never seriously tried to get a job with the University of Cincinnati during the six years I lived in the Blue Chip City.  At that time, U.C.’s civil service and human resources offices were in a multi-storied block of ugly near the Cincinnati Zoo at 3333 Vine Street, known around U.C. as “Thirty-three Thirty-three.”  Unfortunately, there was a women’s clinic in the same building, and they did provide abortions.  I’d pass the building on my way to work, and see the giant photos of aborted fetuses, BABY KILLERS → (pointing to the building), and the angriest and most rabid faces I have ever seen.  I genuinely feared I would be in 3333 Vine St. taking a civil service examination, or interviewing for a job, when the clinic would be bombed.

Many anti-abortion people I knew, however, were as appalled by clinic bombings and killings as I was.  One was a Christian pacifist who gained my eternal respect when he would silently stand across the street from armed forces recruiting centers with a sign that said, “REAL CHRISTIANS DON’T ENLIST,” and he and I became friendly.  But at pro-choice rallies, we were on opposite sides of the street and the issue… and once the demonstration ran out of steam, we’d go split a pitcher of beer or two.

This was on my mind when I was working my graveyard shift job at the Cincinnati post office.  I was processing letters mailed by Cincinnati Right to Life.  Its return address featured three small pictures–a fetus, a very elderly woman, and a child who was clearly developmentally disabled.  Had Ted Bundy’s face been on  this envelope, I would truly believed they believed in the right to life.  Period.

It is odd that the same party and the same people who spread the deceit about “death panels” would host a Website featuring the faces of politicians they oppose with cross-hairs superimposed on their faces.

My biggest fear is that this is not over.

A Glimpse at My Daughter Tonight

The title of this post sounds a bit sentimental, I know.  And people who know me (either in person or through reading what I write in here) may be wondering, “What’s he talking about?  He and his daughter live under the same roof.”  I’m writing about the downside of moonlighting.  I saw Susie tonight for less than five minutes this evening, and it was the first time I had seen her since she went up to bed Sunday night.

Susie catches her school bus to Dominion before my alarm goes off in the morning, so this week the most I’ve been able to accomplish is hearing her moving around in her bedroom and in the bedroom, getting dressed and ready to leave for school.  She’s in bed for the night by the time I arrive home from the bookstore.

Her cough is the only reason I was able to see her tonight.  While I was downstairs having some soup Steph had saved for me in the Crock-Pot, I could hear a very productive cough issuing from the direction of her bedroom.  Susie sounded absolutely miserable, so after I finished my meal, I went back out.  This time I went to Kroger, where I bought some Big K diet cola (to take to work tomorrow) for myself, and a bottle of Kroger Nite Time Cough for Susie.  I was away for about a half hour, and when I came home, I went up to Susie’s bedroom.  She had been asleep, but woke up a little groggily when I told her I had cough medicine for her.  She sat up, and I don’t think she was ever 100% awake, but I poured her a dose of the cough syrup (thankfully, the bottle came with one of those little plastic cups), and she was with it enough that all of it went down her throat, and none of it on the blankets or her pajamas.  I think she was dead to the world before I turned out her bedroom light.

The hours at the bookstore are the reason I’ve neglected the blog this week.  In my defense, I can boast that I’ve written in the holographic diary every day this year thus far (there are less than 20 pages to fill in the current volume), but I usually write during my breaks and lunches at work.  There is no Wi-Fi access at work, and Blogger is blocked, so I can’t post entries during the workday.  So, readership, it’s not that I don’t love you.

While helping customers at the Discovery Exchange, sometimes I feel like a magician giving away secrets.  (Which is a no-no in the illusionists’ trade; Harry Houdini stipulated that all his notebooks and journals be destroyed after his death.)  However, I tipped my hand, by necessity, several times when helping people find their textbooks.  The textbooks are arranged alphabetically by subject and course number (e.g., Biology 101) on shelves from A through N.  N (nursing) through V (veterinary studies) are arrayed along the perimeter of the back wall.  Small cards with the course names and numbers appear on the shelves, along with the titles of the books required and/or recommended.

Whenever someone is uncertain as to which book is necessary for his/her class, I have made it a point to ostentatiously check the ISBN on the back, by the UPC code.  On the shelf cards, we’ve printed the ISBNs alongside the title of the appropriate books, so I have let customers know that if they’re unsure, they should make sure these numbers match.  (This is not exactly classified information, but more than one person seem impressed by this feat.)  I’ve even used the phrase “When in doubt…” before showing this to them.  (When I was in seventh and eighth grades at St. Mary’s Middle School, my English teacher, the late Sr. Elizabeth Donovan, O.P., was fond of using sentences beginning with “When in doubt…” when informing us about rules of grammar or composition.  In the yearbook, we predicted she would make a fortune from her bestselling book, When in Doubt…)

Example of an ISBN on a textbook bar code.

This is from the University of Saskatchewan’s 

Website, so this diagram is not necessarily

universal for all textbook stores’ price tags.

Many people are crestfallen when used copies of textbooks are not available.  Like most textbook stores, we don’t separately shelve new and used books, so they’re disappointed when I tell them that if they don’t see the yellow or orange USED stickers on the spines, there are none to be had.  (I’ve also seen a disproportionate number of books that are fresh off the press and in use for the first time.  The wound to the pocketbook is often mortal.)  In desperation, many people pointed to the spines of the books and asked, “Does this mean the book is used?”  It breaks my heart to have to explain that no, that’s an anti-theft device.

The price of calculators is appalling as well.  Many of the math class, even the 100-level introduction to algebra classes, require expensive calculators.  I noticed several of them require the TI-84, which is an expensive graphing calculator made by Texas Instruments.  The customer has to buy the calculator at the cash register, since we don’t stock them on the shelves.  (Calculators used to be on the shelves, but they began evaporating by the dozens.  Something that expensive and that portable led many into what Catholics call “an occasion of sin.”)  It reminded me of wanting to have something in common with the math geeks in high school, and saving stray pennies and nickels to buy a TI-30 at True Value Hardware.

The coveted TI-30

I don’t remember if I ever bought it.  Then, as now, my math skills were quite limited.  I still count on my fingers when I figure tips, and I never passed Algebra I in high school.  The extent of my ability with calculators was knowing that 58008.618 spelled BIg BOOBS if you turned the calculator upside down, or that if you punched in 7734 2 06, it spelled gO 2 hELL.

How do we bookstore clerks keep ourselves entertained when there are few customers?  Usually, there are two or three carts of buy-backs sitting by the manager’s desk, and so I will push one of the carts (they’re identical to library carts, or the carts I use at the Industrial Commission) up and down the aisles, and try to figure out where these books belong.  Often, two or three of us are walking around, books in hand, looking at the shelves.  (Some titles are easier to place than others.)  It becomes a group effort, especially with the more difficult books.  I’m surprised no one has considered making some kind of game or contest of this project.

I will be working at the bookstore through next week.  I thought that next Sunday would be my final day, but Stacey, the supervisor who interviewed me and hired me, asked me yesterday if I’d be willing to come in Monday, Tuesday, and Saturday next week.  Realizing that would mean a fatter paycheck, I readily agreed.  (Discovery Exchange is open one Sunday a quarter, and I’m working it.  I’m sorry to miss church–although I’m a Unitarian Universalist, I have strong Roman Catholic tendencies when it comes to church attendance.)

I posted two or three Gerry Rafferty videos from YouTube to my Facebook account yesterday, after learning that he had died.  (I was a big fan of “Baker Street” and “Right Down the Line” when in high school, and City to City was an album I bought soon after it was released.)  I was too exhausted, however, to post a blog entry.

And I may have made a mistake here tonight.  I opened a diet cola to take my Lithium, but had a second one so I’d have enough fuel to finish this entry.  My alarm is set for 6:45 a.m., and another 13-hour workday begins at 8 a.m.  So, I may have to take a melatonin to counteract the caffeine if I’m going to get anything resembling sleep.

Therefore, we now conclude our blogcast day.

Our Revels Now Are Ended

(I can’t take credit for that line in the title, by the way.  It’s Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene i.)

They say it takes two weeks to develop a habit, but two consecutive three-day workweeks is a habit I picked up quite easily and adapted to almost immediately.  Unfortunately, it won’t be a habit.  In less than 12 hours, I’ll be back in civil service mode, with such pressing concerns as typing lump sum advancements and ex parte orders, transcribing doctors’ reports, and so on.  Then, once 5 p.m. rolls around, I’m trudging the near-mile to Discovery Exchange, and facing the first-day-of-class onslaught.  Customers have arrived consistently in the few days that I have worked at Columbus State’s bookstore, but there were periods of time when I did nothing but walk around the shelves and straighten the spines of projecting books, put silver security strips someplace inconspicuous on the book covers, and re-shelve stray buybacks.  My work day will end 9 p.m.

Someone asked me why, just for this week, didn’t I end my Industrial Commission day at 4 p.m., so I’d have some “breathing room” between one job and the other.  He pretty much answered his own question when he phrased it that way.  I won’t say it’s fun to go straight from one job to the other, but it’s better because I’m still in work mode, and haven’t had time to lose the momentum and mental energy that’s geared toward work.  (The same issue arose in the summer of 2001, when I was working full time as a header entry clerk at Medco Health, and three or four evenings a week I worked in the stock room and loading dock at Sears near Westland Mall.  I insisted on going straight from one job to the other.)  A Marietta friend of mine used to be an operator for AT&T, and he often worked split shifts.  He’d work four hours, was off for four hours, and then back for another four.  That would drive me up a brick wall backwards if I ever tried a schedule like that.

Susie and I were out until 2 a.m. this morning, going to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show at Studio 35.  The movie is crazy enough, as we all know, but in Columbus the madness increases a thousandfold, thanks to the antics of The Fishnet Mafia, who host the show the first Saturday of every month.  Susie prevailed upon me to buy the movie kit for $1 (complete with toilet paper, a piece of toast, newspaper, a glow stick, and a noisemaker).  I was glad that The Fishnet Mafia posted prompts on the screen, as to what to throw and when, etc., because I hadn’t been to the movie since 1980.  (For years, I had always wanted to rent it from Blockbuster and watch it at home, throw my own toilet paper, wear the newspaper on my head in the privacy of my own living room, etc., but never did.)  Susie eagerly took in all the activity around her, but she wants to see the actual movie at home, so she can see what actually happens in it.  (I did see it on cable once, when I was up here visiting my mother, watching it on QUBE.)  She enjoyed it all, except she was seriously creeped when she realized that Riff Raff and Magenta were both a couple and siblings.

Sleep-deprived though we were, we both made it to church by 10:30 a.m.  Susie went to her class, and I went to the service.  The service had been going for about 10 minutes when my cell phone vibrated.  (They always ask you to turn off and/or silence electronic devices when the service begins.  As far as I know, that does not include pacemakers.)  I was receiving a text message, Look behind u.  Sure enough, it was Pat.  I went back and sat with him.  He was in the service by himself–his kids were in class, his wife was at a birth (or resting after having been at one).

My stamina collapsed once I came home.  Steph had taken her laptop and gone to a coffee house on High St., so the house was quiet.  Susie immediately went on Facebook and her blog.  I made a cursory check of my Facebook page and my email, and then around 2 p.m. went upstairs and collapsed in the bedroom.  I was asleep the moment my head hit the pillow.  I took off my glasses, cell phone, and shoes–that was it.  I only meant to sleep for an hour or so, but it was dark by the time I finally woke up.  So I don’t completely skew my body clock, I’m afraid I may have to resort to melatonin to sleep tonight.  I do this reluctantly, because I always feel hungover once I do awake.

Melatonin – the centerfold

Writing has proved to be a task so far this year (when has it not lately?), but to get myself in the mode (or mood–either word will work), I started listening to the B-52’s’ “Planet Claire” when I began typing this entry.  That’s a good typing song, as I discovered on fall afternoons in Athens when I earned a little extra beer money typesetting The Athens News.  Other than the radio, the music selections were quite limited.  The office had about three eight-track tapes, and one of them was The B-52’s.  I wished there was a way to fast forward an eight-track, because I had heard “Rock Lobster” so many times on Boston radio that I wanted to scream, but “Planet Claire” was an excellent song for typing.  I know that junior-high typing classes often typed to music, and that would be a great choice.  (Currently, Santana’s “Soul Sacrifice” is playing in my ear buds, and that is another song I’d add to the list.)  Leroy Anderson’s “The Typewriter” would be up there as well, but I’m not sure it’d occupy the top slot.

Odd What Work Will Inspire

By “work” I mean my moonlighting at Columbus State’s Discovery Exchange this evening.  (Since this was a cost-savings day, the Industrial Commission was closed, and I slept until mid-morning, venturing out for a beard trim, and trips to Subway, the post office, and Kroger.)  Work at Columbus State’s bookstore began at 5:30, and I walked the nearly two miles from Weinland Park there.  The temperature has been above 40 degrees today, so I was quite comfortable in a hoodie for this walk.


The flow of customers is starting to pick up, and I understand it’ll be sheer chaos come Monday, the first day of classes for the winter quarter.  I’m finding Columbus State’s students to be much more likable than many of the students I met during my many seasonal stints at DuBois Book Store.  I think the difference is that the community college student has already experienced some responsibility and motivation in life.  Many of them are continuing their educations after raising children, many are taking night school or online classes while working 40 hours per week, and many are trying to get their GEDs.

My experience with students at the University of Cincinnati (and I played this observation to death, and not at all flatteringly, in my still-unpublished novella The Textbook Diaries) was that many of them were kids who enrolled in college because they learned that getting a job at Keller’s IGA or joining the Army actually involved work.  There was a bumper sticker popular at O.U. that said “College is a four-year party with a $20 thousand cover charge.”  There were more students living off campus than on, mostly with their parents.  It was easy to tell that some of them were just marking time before going to work for the family business.

It wasn’t until I worked at DuBois that I began to understand the meaning of the phrase “a sense of entitlement.”  When working customer service on the floor, I lost track of how many times someone would come in, thrust his/her class schedule into my face, and say, “Find my books for me.”  After the second or third time this happened, I politely but firmly explained how the shelves were laid out, where the course guides were located, and how to read the shelf cards to determine the required books for the courses.

While there were few customers on the second floor, in the textbook area, I took a cart loaded with buybacks so I could re-shelve them.  The books were on the cart in a pile, not organized in any way at all.  I took a pack of security strips (silver peel-off strips that resemble the gold strip that used to unwrap the cellophane on cigarette packs) and put them on the books, in inconspicuous places.  Then I’d walk around the textbook area and re-shelve the books in their proper places.  (Some were easier than others; the packets of software were the worst.  Some of the other buybacks were for popular subjects, so I’d walk by a shelf and see it crammed with the identical title, and I’d place it there.)

Once work ended and I came home, I had some chicken soup, and then came to the laptop and resumed the book cataloging project I started the other day and blogged about earlier this week.  I managed to do all the books in a milk crate, plus some of the volumes stacked outside it, and set aside three books that had no Library of Congress call numbers.  (Susie was in the other room working on her blog, and didn’t pay attention to her dad’s latest madness.  She’s long since gotten used to it.)

I don’t know whether I’ll buy a few rolls of the little library stickers and then try to organize all this once this endeavor is finished, but it is fun (mostly) to look at what I have and type it into the database.  Thomas Jefferson sold his personal library to Congress to replace the Library of Congress’ holdings.  (Most of the original Library of Congress was destroyed when the British burned Washington in 1814.  Jefferson was drowning in red ink–something he and I share, besides being Unitarian–and sold his personal library to pay off some of his many debts.  In reality, he used it to start a new collection of books.)  Jefferson’s intention was to organize his books based on Lord Bacon’s hierarchy of science, but he ended up shelving them by size.  (For more information, click here.)

Here is just a little of what I’m working with here:

Christmas Eve 2010

Christmas Eve is the second day of my four-day hiatus from work.  (I took yesterday off, a “cost-savings day” decreed from on high, one of the 10 unpaid days dictated by our latest contract.  Having to take yesterday off so angered me that I could only sleep until 10:45 a.m.!)

Susie has already opened one of her gifts–the Super Mario Galaxy game for the Wii.  She’s christened it already, and plans to play it while waiting for Steph and me to wake up tomorrow morning.  (It wasn’t even my intention for her to open this gift.  When I handed her the package, I thought it was another gift, which she will open in the morning.  I ordered online from Amazon.com, and the gifts have been coming from Amazon, as well as distributors all over the country.  There is one present still at large, but we’ll be okay if it arrives before January 6, the twelfth day of Christmas.)

She and I went to the 5 p.m. Christmas Eve service at First UU this evening.  (There’s a later service, but we wanted to be home for a delicious ham, sweet potato, and green bean dinner.  Midnight Christmas services are definitely the creation of celibate clergy!)  Susie gave her friend a poster of Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd and gave a younger friend a journal and a set of pens.

I remember one Christmas Eve during my bachelorhood where I saw something that was rather poignant.  I was living in Cincinnati, and Christmas Eve was my one night off from the post office.  (I didn’t make any effort to make the trip to Marietta, because I had no desire to see my stepmother or -sisters, plus I had to be back on the West End toting barge and lifting mail on Christmas Night around 9 p.m.  Why didn’t I head to Athens to see my mother?  For the same reason John McCain doesn’t send Christmas cards to his captors at the Hanoi Hilton.)  I decided to explore the bars in Clifton, my neighborhood and still favorite Cincinnati neighborhood.

One of the bars I habituated was the Submarine Galley, located on the south end of Short Vine.  The beer was cheap and the jukebox had a very good selection.  (Also, I had been around a few galleys in my typesetting days.)  I went inside and the atmosphere was more somber than a Good Friday vigil.  The lights were turned down low, and the jukebox was dark.  The bartender had a boom box sitting on the shelf with all the liquor bottles, and it was playing Christmas carols.  There were only a dozen or so people in the bar, and they all looked like they were in there alone.  There was very little eye contact, and everybody seemed to be intently studying the drinks in front of them.  My mood was already low enough, and I didn’t want it dragged down any further.  (Irish wakes are much more cheerful, and those usually occur with an open casket in the room!)

I didn’t even stay for one drink, but went instead to Cory’s, a jazz bar a few blocks south (George Thorogood filmed the “I Drink Alone” video there), and enjoyed a wonderful performance by nonagenarian James “Pigmeat” Jarrett, a jazz pianist who had performed with Duke Ellington.  Some other friends of mine, who were far from, or estranged from, their families, were there, and we ended up closing the place up and having an after-hours party at their apartment in that warren of streets south of West McMillan.

I spent part of yesterday indulging myself.  My supervisor gave me a $25 Wal-Mart gift card.  Wal-Mart is not one of my favorite places, even less so during the Christmas holidays, but I went south to Great Southern and braved the hoards of shoppers.  My purchases were pretty utilitarian–blank DVDs and CDs, mostly.  I was proud to get a two-disk copy of Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal for $5 (I’ve never seen the second movie).  I considered buying a diver’s watch, but decided not to because the dial was as big around as a silver dollar and the case weighed about a ton.  I can’t swim a stroke, so don’t ask me the appeal of a diver’s watch!

Yesterday, I also ran a more essential errand.  I must truly be drifting into insanity, because I will be taking a temporary evenings-and-weekends job at the Discovery Exchange, which is the bookstore at Columbus State Community College.  I will be helping with the rush period, before the winter quarter begins on January 3.  I applied online early in November, and had almost forgotten about it before the bookstore manager called me and asked me to come in after work last week for an interview.  After she recommended me for hire, I filled out information online about my last few addresses (I had to plow through the last few volumes of diaries to get the dates I lived at certain places), my criminal background if any, etc.  Yesterday, I stopped by the Human Resources office and filled out a W-2, signed up for SERS (School Employees Retirement System), and completed an online I-9 (an Employment Eligibility Form).  The Department of Xenophobia Homeland Security, via the Ohio Department of Public Safety, provided an amusing two-page Terrorist Exclusion List, and I had to indicate whether I was a member of any of them.  (If I was, would I admit it on a form when applying for a job?  If I did, I doubt that the Keystone Kops in Homeland Security would bother to follow it up.)  It was gratifying to see Kahane Chai, the Kach Party, and the Real IRA on the list, since the conventional wisdom seems to be that terrorism is the sole province of the Islamic world.

Discovery Exchange, Columbus State Community

College (283 Cleveland Ave.)

I’ll be starting at the Discovery Exchange Monday night after work, I believe.  After I gave the H.R. office all my information, they submitted it online, and there was a notice in my email when I got back from Wal-Mart saying my new employee Novell account is open.  I sent an email to my supervisor-to-be asking where and when to report to work.  She apparently didn’t get the message, and the bookstore was closed today, so I anticipate a phone call from her Monday morning.  I’m going to work at the Industrial Commission Monday morning planning to race-walk the eight-tenths of a mile to the bookstore.

One of my few completed writing projects is a novella called The Textbook Diaries, which I based on my experiences working at Du Bois Book Store in Cincinnati.  I worked there at the beginning and conclusion of almost every academic quarter at the University of Cincinnati for most of the time I lived in the Queen City, sometimes when I was otherwise unemployed, sometimes when I was also working at the Cincinnati post office.  I met quite a few characters, made a few friends, and had a variety of bizarre experiences during these stints, and had enough to create a manuscript.  (Charles Bukowski had already skewered one of my other employers, the U.S. Postal Service, so I figured I had textbook stores to myself.)  I took some dramatic liberties with my life and situation, rearranged some incidents, and embellished others.  I flatter myself by saying the finished product is what George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying would look like written by Bukowski.

Here is part of the first page of the manuscript, resurrected from the still-unsorted boxes of my writings and notebooks.  (This will be your chance to see it before you have to pay admission to see it under glass.☺)

When I learned I was getting the job at the Discovery Exchange, I emailed my friend Robert in Silver Spring, and the title of the email was “Son of Textbook Diaries,” since I may have more material by the time my job ends.  (I remember a New Yorker cartoon I hung over my desk when I was a teenager.  It showed a woman and her friend looking through a doorway, where one of the women’s husband is sitting at a desk, industriously at work on a typewriter.  The wife says, “Harvey fictionalizes my every word and deed.”  Maybe that’s what I should do at this job!)

It’s after 11 p.m., and it will be Christmas in about 45 minutes.  I’ve been to two Christmas services this season, one more than usual.  Both of them, the Qabalah celebration and the one tonight, made me think of a quotation from a Unitarian Universalist minister, the Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed, whom I’ve had the pleasure of hearing in person here in Columbus.  Long before I met him, I was familiar with his words.  A friend from several UU youth conferences would always sign off her letters with his words, words with which I will conclude this entry tonight.

May we dedicate ourselves to the proposition that beneath all our diversity and behind all our differences there is a unity which makes us one and binds us forever together in spite of time, and death, and the space between the stars.  Let us pause in silent witness to that Unity.