The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We got a little library down here at the notoriously (but proudly) illiterate South End. One of those 1960 phone booths landed in the park I care-take across the island about a year ago so I decided it would be easier to make something interesting with it than try to haul it to the dump. We turned it into a Little Library, built bookshelves and stocked it with fiction and non-fiction, even some CD’s. A week later vandals pulled the bookcase out, scattered the books, burned a few, tossed some in the woods and painted graffiti on the glass walls of the booth. Sure, I was bummed, but since I was married to a librarian, I decided to rise above the obvious desecration of literary values and try again. To that end I posted alien robots to guard the sanctuary.

Yesterday I drove by and noticed through the windows the bookshelves were gone so I pulled into the parking lot only to find the entire library, books and bookcase, scattered on the ground and left in the rain, ruined. It’s not like the burning of the Library of Alexandria exactly or even like our own evangelical book burnings, more like a senseless attack on anything intellectual or bureaucratic. Although, to be honest, it’s probably just a couple of kids who think it’s funny to destroy things. You see it all the time, not just on the South End, but it’s epidemic on the internet. Ransacking a little library is probably just our way of trolling down here.

Obviously I underestimated the intelligence of our potential Vandals. It only took them one year to recognize the alien security guards as harmless sculptures. Sure, we could bring in surveillance cameras, hire some security, lock the library up at night, set up lending hours. But … let’s be honest here. Maybe the South End isn’t ready for culture just yet. It might be better to bow to the public, acknowledge their mistrust of books and art, maybe just use the phone booth for a private vaping salon. That, or patiently wait for our hoodlums to grow dumber since pretty obviously they’re not interested in learning much of anything. Couple more years on drugs then we can try the alien robot guards again. Third time, they say, is the charm.

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