CHERRY SWEATERS AND FISHNET STOCKINGS: I don’t, as a rule, write these little screeds while I am work; the public is not paying me to write, but to do the librarian thing I do so well; nor do I usually write this stuff directly on the computer; I usually write them out in pencil at home first and then type them up, editing as I go along; but as I bat this thing out at 4:42pm EDT on 24 August 2007 (yes, there are only four shopping months till Christmas) there are three men sitting here in the reference room of this egregious mold pit arguing about the models in Vogue magazine. I suppose that there are more tiresome things for three men to argue about; they could, for example, argue about the designated hitter rule (two of them are for it, one is against. Full disclosure: I am against it as well) or about the price of tea in China or about local politics; but they are refraining from these obvious topics and arguing about the models in Vogue instead.

The fly in the ointment here, as I see it, is that all three of these gentlemen live in the same halfway house down the road from here and they all live there because they’re all clinically nuts, which is not a term the American Psychological Association approves of, but does mean that this conversation is not merely loud (I've noticed over the years that crazy people think that sane people are hard of hearing; I cannot explain why this is so), but in many cases it makes literally no sense. Trains of thought are derailing in this room faster than their medications can lay down new lines of track and Aristotelian logic is taking a beating so bad that philosophy departments from one end of this our Great Republic to the other will have to put the subject on the disabled list until next school season. You cannot, after all, construct a suitable syllogism when your major premise is that God is love but not when he is covered with marmalade (no, I didn’t ask about the theological details—I didn’t even want to think about whatever disturbing experience brought this to this guy’s equally disturbed conscious mind) and your minor premise is that I was a pizza delivery boy in Chicago back when Gina Lollobrigida was wearing fishnet stocking and feeding calzones to the fish in Lake Michigan; they are still arguing about what the logical conclusion to this must needs be as I write, and if they arrive at a solution while this dump is still open I will let you know posthaste.

The really important thing here, as I see it, is whether these guys are nuts for arguing about something that bears no relationship to objective reality, as those of us who do not live in one of the local halfway houses understand that concept, or am I nuts for staying here in the place and listen to them bicker about it? The world wonders and frankly, so do I.