Voodoo Time Dot Com

My wife and I are avid readers. We each go through a book about once every week to two weeks. Over time, this becomes an expensive habit, and the monthly amazon.com bills are really starting to add up. But as it turns out, there’s this place in town that has thousands of books that you can borrow for like two weeks at a time, and it’s free! Just pick a book, read it, then bring it back. So yesterday, we made an exploratory visit to this “Public Library” and it did indeed contain many thousands of books. We even brought two books home, and no one has called to ask for them back yet, so the system appears to be working as advertised. I wonder why no one thought of this sooner?

Anyway, this is not about the library itself, but rather about what we found when we arrived. There is lettering attached to the building in such a way as to spell out “PUBLIC LIBRARY”. Only, somehow an ‘L’ has come up missing, so it now reads “PUB IC LIBRARY”. I suspect this was not an accident. In fact, knowing what I do of human nature, I have come to believe that this ‘L’ was deliberately removed in an act of vandalism. And though I am no detective, I believe I can construct a reasonable profile of the perpetrator - an adolescent male.

How do I know this? I used to be one. In my experience, I know that adolescent males have a propensity towards vandalism, and a love for toilet humor unmatched in any other demographic. This tends to manifest itself in many unique ways such as:

  Drawing of external genitalia on anatomical diagrams of the human reproductive system in high school textbooks.

  Prank phonecalls to every listed telephone number belonging to a Mr./Ms. Butts, Cox, Dick, Gaylord, Johnson, Peters, and Wang.

  Construction of large snow phalluses (though, to be fair, the first time I ever saw this, was in college)

  And, my personal favorite, the Magic Marker defacement of an advertisement for the “Museum of Art” into “Museum o’ fArts”

So, to the anonymous teen now running around with a silver letter ‘L’ on his keychain: Please bring it back. Just drop it down the after-hours book drop - no questions asked. Let’s all just put this silly little episode behind us. Believe me, 10 years from now, you will not look back on the time you made the library sign read “PUB IC” as a defining moment in your life. No one is laughing. Put the ‘L’ back.

Now, “Museum o’ fArts” on the other hand… that’s funny.

Bye for now.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2003 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Funny. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.