Loud and smelly Library

The Library is an Absolute Wasteland

I swear to god, going to the public library in an actual big city is a psychological endurance test that nobody should have to subject themselves to. It is the exact, literal polar opposite of a place where any serious person would ever go to read a book or get an ounce of actual work done.

You walk in thinking you’re going to sit down and quietly read Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, but the absolute second you sit your ass down, some guy plops right next to you, rips open a bag of chips, and starts eating them at a volume that defies the laws of physics. Just CRUNCH, CRUNCH, CRUNCH, followed by the agonizingly slow, violent, systematic crumpling of the plastic bag.

And it’s not like you can just pick up your stuff and move to another table. You can’t! Why? Because every single other square inch of the library is completely occupied by people who have basically moved all their worldly possessions into the building, who are snoring at the volume of a jet engine, and who have quite clearly pooped their pants. You’re trying to appreciate classic literature while a guy with a literal, gaping hole in his leg from some horrific, unaddressed skin disease sits down, farts loudly next to you, and you’re just sitting there scowling like, wow, this situation completely sucks ass.

The intense, overwhelming stench of human feces and ancient bacteria hits you like a physical wall. I used to go to the library a lot when I was younger, and I guess I just stubbornly refused to learn the lesson that the library is a godforsaken adult daycare. The moment you sit down, someone with severe, completely unmedicated mental illness sits right next to you—and they were already mid-sentence, talking to their imaginary friend before they even sat down—and they just keep right on screaming at the wall.

The Toxic “Empathy” Force Field

But you know what the most infuriating part is? You are never allowed to talk about it.

There is a very specific, insufferable segment of the population that immediately jumps down your throat the second you complain about people pooping or screaming next to your workspace. They get all high-and-mighty: “Hey! You can’t say that! They’re unhoused!”

Listen, you stupid pieces of shit: if you love them so much, why don’t you do a single, solitary thing to actually fix it? You literally do not care about these people at all. You think someone who spends every single day of their living existence sleeping on the concrete in their own filth gives a flying rat’s ass if someone complains about it in private? They probably want people to notice and complain about how horrific and godawful their situation is, because at least that would mean someone is acknowledging reality, which is a hell of a lot better than the fake, performative silence of the virtue-signaling masses.

Interestingly, I actually got into a massive email fight with a librarian once over this exact thing. I emailed her and asked a completely logical question:

“Why aren’t there two types of libraries? One that is an adult daycare for stupid people who just want to poop and talk to themselves, and another type of library for civilized people who actually want to get work done?”

And this brainless librarian emails me back with the ultimate NPC response: “If you care about the homeless so much, why don’t you volunteer at a homeless shelter?”

I lost my mind. BECAUSE THAT IS NOT MY JOB, YOU COMPLETE IDIOT.

How does it not even occur to you how profoundly stupid of an answer that is? You literally work in—and spend your entire adult life in—a building full of books. Can you not actually read them because the smell of shit is destroying your brain cells? How do you not see the flaw in that logic?

If I’m a dentist, and I’m driving my car, and my car hits a massive pothole, am I supposed to get out of my car with a bag of asphalt and start fixing the road because I “care about the pothole” so much? No! That’s not what I do! I fix teeth! I cannot stand when people are this intensely, aggressively stupid. It triggers a primal response in my brain where a siren starts going off saying: DANGER. THIS PERSON IS SO DUMB THAT BEING AROUND THEM IS THE WORST POSSIBLE THING IN THE WORLD.

The Era of the Mindless Sheep

Honestly, so many people today are just mindless sheep or cows. It’s the price we pay for having millions of people packed together in modern society. I heard that back in the day—like the 1500s or 1600s—something like 1 in 4 people was a murderer. People were just violent and prickly. But to make massive, modern societies work, humans had to become hyper-”agreeable.” The prickly people got weeded out. Which, fine, I guess it’s good we have fewer murderers running around, but now we’ve swung way too far the other way. We are living in a literal WALL-E world populated entirely by moronic librarians who don’t read books.

And don’t even get me started on bookstores. You walk into a bookstore today and a massive wall of 100 different books is staring at you, and just from the lazy, corporate, copy-pasted graphic design, you can instantly tell that every single one of them is absolute, unadulterated slop. How does that happen? How can an entire industry produce nothing but trash?

People will tell you, “Oh, it’s just what the market wants.” No, it’s not! Think about any other entertainment industry. Is TV or music actually giving people what they want? Hell no. Look at the music industry. I heard that if you want to make it as a rapper, the people at the top will literally drug you, videotape themselves “taking your butt” while you’re passed out, and then use that blackmail video to control your entire career and dictate what you put out. That is the entire Diddy dynamic!

Do you think our resident genius librarian would ever understand that? Is there a single librarian out there named Colleen who is capable of looking at the world objectively and saying, “Oh yeah, the movie industry is full of monsters like Harvey Weinstein that everyone knew about for decades while saying nothing, and it’s basically just high-level sex trafficking… so I’m sure the book industry is equally corrupt and just pumping out brainless slop”? No. Colleen thinks the book industry is pure and good.

The Help is Helpless

The absolute peak of this horror happened to me recently. I went to the art book floor of the library, and I walked up to the guy working behind the desk. I don’t know if he was a certified librarian or just some guy they hired off the street, but I looked him dead in the eye and said:

“Hey, where can I find books about Picasso?”

Instantly—and I mean instantly—this guy gets this look of sheer, unbridled horror on his face. He freezes. He slowly turns to his computer and starts typing with the speed of a dying snail, completely pretending to look for it. And I don’t know how I knew this, but it was painfully obvious: he was literally just waiting for me to give up. He was staring at that monitor just praying that I would say, “That’s okay, don’t worry about it, I’ll find it myself.”

Within one single second, it was clear this man was never going to find the books. He was physically manifesting a aura of total, helpless incompetence to shield himself from having to do his actual job. This is the kind of person our tax dollars go to. A guy who is so profoundly stupid, lazy, or terrified of reality that he cannot type the seven letters of the word P-I-C-A-S-S-O into a search engine that is sitting directly in front of his face, which would tell him the exact aisle and shelf.

Instead, he has cultivated this lifelong persona of: “Please don’t hurt me, I’m just really stupid and I just can’t.”

Can you imagine going through life being that guy? I don’t even hate him; I’m just deeply, existentially horrified. And I am even more horrified by the hiring manager who sat across from that man in an interview, listened to him breathe through his mouth, and thought, “Yeah. Excellent. This guy will be great for the job.” Unbelievable.

The most insidious part of this whole sick experience is that sometimes you go to the library and it’s actually great.

But that is part of the problem! It sets a trap for your brain! You go in on a rare good day, it’s quiet, you actually read a few pages of a book, and you get your goddamn hopes up! If the city just put a giant, glowing neon sign on the front of the building that legally labeled it “HOMELESS DUMP CENTER,” then at least there would be truth in advertising. You wouldn’t even step foot inside unless that specific, horrific experience was exactly what you were looking for that day.

But no, they call it a “library” to trick you. And yet, even when it is a hellhole every single day, you keep going back. Why do we do this to ourselves?

Well, I’ll tell you why: because society has systematically destroyed every other option. Look at Starbucks. About a decade ago, Starbucks corporate clearly made a boardroom decision to start blasting obnoxious, upbeat pop music out of their speakers at deafening volumes. It was a direct, hostile message to the consumer: “Get the hell out of here, we absolutely hate you, don’t you dare bring your laptop and try to do work here.”

And even if you tolerate the music at Starbucks, you can’t escape the madness. You walk in, you want to use the bathroom before you sit down to work, and there is a woman in front of you in line holding a giant suitcase. You stand there waiting. Five minutes pass. Ten minutes pass. Finally, you hear the toilet seat violently slam down onto the bowl, and your brain just explodes: What the actual fuck has this lady been doing in there for the last ten minutes? Was she remodeling the bathroom? Was she living in there?

So you flee Starbucks and go back to the library, which is just a different flavor of psychological torture. There was a period in my life where I went to the library every single day, and every single day this specific woman was there who would just snort constantly. Just this wet, rhythmic, disgusting snorting sound. Every morning I’d walk in, hear it, and think, Oh great, there’s pig-woman! Gotta make sure I sit as physically far away from pig-woman as humanly possible today. It sucked absolute ass. But I kept going because I desperately wanted to believe in the utopian idea of the library being a good place. But no. We can’t have nice things.

Why Do People Like Anything?

Somehow, I am the only person alive who is capable of looking at modern media and realizing it is garbage. No one else can see it.

I remember my friend showed me that TV show The Boys. This guy’s life is a complete, unmitigated nightmare. He got fired from his actual career, and the only job he could secure was working the night shift underground for the MTA. He literally told me, “They work us like slaves down there.” He had to completely halt his entire social life, he was completely isolated, and mind you, this guy is 57 years old.

So I asked him what he does to cope, and he shows me what he watches: The Boys. I sat there looking at the screen like… I don’t get it. This is trash. And then recently I saw in the news that everyone suddenly hates the show now, and I just laughed. Yeah, no shit, I bet it was never good to begin with! Why do people like so much of this crap that gets pumped out of the corproate slop machine?

What do you think that Picasso librarian guy watches when he goes home? Does he unlock his front door, sit on the edge of his bed, and just stare at a blank wall for eight hours? Honestly… that is something I would actually respect. At least it has dignity.

I was on Reddit once because I specifically searched for the phrase “staring at a wall for hours” to see if anyone else had achieved that level of enlightenment. And sure enough, some guy posted: “I’m in India, I can’t get a job, and I just stare at a wall for 8 hours straight every day.”

And I read that and thought: You know what? That is actually pretty cool. It is infinitely more honorable than watching Pixar or dealing with pig-woman at the library.

But then you have those rare moments where you go into the library, and by some miracle, absolutely nobody is bothering you. The coast is clear. No chip bags, no pig-woman, no biohazards. It’s completely fine. And you sit there and you’re like, Wow, look at me, I’m so smart because I’m pretending to read a book in a building filled with books. Look at all this knowledge, this is what smart people do.

So you walk over to the shelf and you grab a copy of The Odyssey. And let’s be clear: you’re grabbing it because it’s a foundational text of Western civilization, not because Christopher Nolan is currently adapting it into some bloated, three-hour blockbuster with deafening sound mixing. You’re trying to have a dignified, intellectual moment.

But right as you settle in, the absolute hypocrites working at the desk start chatting and laughing at full volume. And your brain just shifts into pure rage: Shut the fuck up, you worthless human garbage. Your life is totally, completely worthless. Just because you have a lanyard and work in this tax-funded shit-hole does not mean you get to violate the one sacred rule of the building. Keep your goddamn voice down so I can go back to pretending to read The Odyssey.

Because that’s the reality of what happens next. You pick up this incredibly smart, heavy book, you stare down at the pages, and your mind just completely checks out. You’re looking directly at the text, but a separate part of your brain is screaming, I know that I am looking at these words, but I do not care about this at all. Why am I literally incapable of reading this even though my eyes are tracking the lines?

And then the existential dread hits you: Damn. I guess I’m not nearly as smart as I would have hoped, because I cannot pay one single second of attention to this shit. So you close the book, pull out your phone, and go back to scrolling social media like a normal, brain-rotted, dumb idiot.

The whole thing is a scam anyway. You pick up a book like The Odyssey and you think, Okay, theoretically, this should be highly entertaining. I know it’s an epic adventure story about monsters and oceans, and I’m pretty sure I saw a Simpsons episode about it once that was pretty funny.

And then you actually open it up to page one, you look at the structure of the text, and you realize it’s not a normal story at all. It’s a poem.

And you literally just reactively recoil like, “EWWWWW!!!!”

I’m sorry, but I guess I am just too stupid to get it, because I have never, ever understood the point of poetry. The absolute highest praise I have ever been able to muster for a poem in my entire life is: “Yeah, I guess that specific line doesn’t sound like total, complete shit.” Does that mean it’s good? Is that the metric for high art? Because most of the time, I look at a poem and my immediate, unfiltered reaction is just: “No, that IS shit.”

It is genuinely fascinating how you can go from reading about some famous, legendary intellectual or artist from history, and then instantly snap right back to your own absolute shit life.

Like, I’m sitting there reading some biographical thing about Goethe—because let’s be real, I am not going to actually read Faust because it is—EWW!!!—a poem. But I’m reading about him, trying to understand why this guy was supposedly so cool, and the author describes some contemporary describing Goethe on a trip to Italy. And Goethe says this incredibly profound, elevated stuff:

“Whoever looks seriously around himself here, and has eyes to see, must achieve solidarity; he must come up with an idea of solidarity more lively than ever he saw before. And at any rate I feel as though I had never appreciated the things of this world as rightly as here.”

And then later on, this man looks at a literal crab on the beach and says:

“What a lovely thing is a living creature! How attuned to its condition, how true, how full of being… I am living very frugally and keep calm so that things do not find an exalted soul, but rather exact the soul.”

You’re sitting there digesting this beautiful, exacted soul of a man who looked at a crab and saw the truth of the universe, and right at that exact peak moment of philosophical enlightenment, the librarian at the desk starts talking loudly or let’s out this massive, dramatic, obnoxious yawn. And you’re just glaring at him like, shut the fuck up. Honestly, it feels like he’s yawning that loudly because he’s just begging for one of the local homeless men to walk over and shove their massive, fat, huge penis directly inside his gaping mouth while he’s mid-yawn, just so he can gag and choke and have an excuse to make even more disgusting noise and be even more annoying and worthless than he already is.

The Commute Into a Failed Society

So you completely give up on Goethe, pack up your shit, and leave the building. You walk out to the street and take the city bus home, which is just the next tier of hell.

Everyone on the bus is talking loudly and annoyingly on speakerphone, and then, without fail, the mechanical bus announcer cuts in with some automated, dystopian nonsense like: “THIS BUS IS NOW NOT WORKING FOR NO REASON. LAST STOP. THIS BUS IS NOT A BUS ANYMORE. GET THE HELL OUT.”

They just kick you off into the street! So you have to wait around in the freezing cold for the next bus, and when you finally get on that one, there is some guy sitting in the back playing garbage, blown-out trap music directly out of his phone’s shitty speakers at maximum volume.

And you’re just sitting there, vibrating with pure, unadulterated hatred, thinking: Maybe art and being smart really ain’t shit. Maybe the Goethe stuff is a total myth. Maybe being an intellectual is a disease.

The Only Real Solution

Maybe the only real answer to life is that you just need to become a total, ruthless psychopath, make an ungodly amount of money, and buy a house to raise your shitty kids in a safe, gated neighborhood far, far away from all this fucking SHIT.

But then you realize the tragic punchline to that plan: even if you do successfully grind your soul into dust to give your kids a nice, safe, wealthy upbringing, they won’t even appreciate it! They are literally too stupid to understand the sacrifice because they’re like 4 years old or something. They’ll just sit there playing with a plastic toy, completely oblivious to the warzone you saved them from.

And honestly, even if they grew up, realized what you did, and ended up hating your guts anyway… they’d probably be right. They’d be totally justified because the entire world is such an irredeemable, steaming pile of shit sometimes.

Like when you’re at the library and it’s so deeply, intensely annoying. You finally manage to sit down, read a book, and actually learn something, and for a split second you’re like: Wow, I just processed a piece of information that wasn’t completely stupid for once in my life. I didn’t even know that was still possible.

So, naturally, you try to share this rare spark of human intelligence with someone. You go up to them and you’re like, “Hey, did you know Germans have this weird letter that looks like a big cursive capital letter B, but it actually means F or S or something? I forget the exact rule. But isn’t that interesting?”

And the person just blanks out and goes, “Eh? What?”

They aren’t even really listening to you because their eyes are completely glazed over, staring at a 10-second video of some random person making pasta on Instagram.

And you’re just standing there like, “Yeah… they have a cursive B. I learned that when I was pretending to read a book about Goethe.” And they don’t even respond. They don’t even blink. And you just look at them and think, Okay, I could literally keep talking right now, or I could just stop. It makes absolutely zero difference to the universe.

The Myth of the Prodigy

I really, truly do not get poetry. I remember reading somewhere that Arthur Rimbaud was considered this massive, legendary prodigy at poetry when he was a teenager. What a completely different planet that must have been. How utterly unrecognizable must a world be where society actually cared about such a thing?

There are probably poetry “prodigies” that exist today, but they only get written up in The New Yorker because their dad happens to be a high-ranking executive for BP or some other evil, smelly petrochemical company that is actively poisoning the earth. And since their family practically owns a stake in the magazine, we all have to sit here and collectively pretend their dumb, oblivious child is uniquely talented or interesting. Maybe their pathetic collection of poetry even becomes a New York Times bestseller, but I highly doubt a single living soul actually reads that shit.

Honestly, someone smarter than me wouldn’t even bother to say any of this because it is so blindingly obvious, and there’s probably something way more profound to say about the whole dynamic other than just “it’s stupid.” But it is stupid.