On this trip, I went to work in the downtown library — I’m writing a book, it’s what we old writers do in our declining years — and it seemed to be a shelter for young unemployed people, a warm place they could sit and watch video on the library’s computers. A legitimate social service but not what the librarians were intending to do with their days — direct patrons to good books about the French Revolution or the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton — not watch the clientele to make sure they aren’t dealing drugs.
I camped there, and got to work on a chapter about cheerfulness, of which I am now an advocate, seeing as half of our countrymen have a previously unacknowledged longing for a lawless autocracy. So be it, it is what it is, but meanwhile I plan to be upbeat, bad news or what.
