MY APOLOGIES: I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to each and every one of you reading this now for not taking the opportunity to apologize to each and every one of you on a previous occasion. The opportunity to apologize does not come around often enough—the recent spike in gas prices may have something to do with that, what with most apologies getting more or less the same mileage they did back in the 1970’s—and it was a truly unconscionable lack of judgment on my part not to have apologized at that time. One cannot apologize often enough these days, I think, and so I wish to reiterate my apologies for not having apologized when I should have apologized. As apologies go, of course, this isn’t a very good one, and I apologize for that, but then again, I am not a professional apologist with an advanced degree in apologetics, for which lack I would like to apologize at this time. I am an entirely self-taught apologist and so my apologies tend to be a little rough around the edges, and so I would like to again apologize for my inexcusable apologetic autdidactism.

I wanted to be an apologist when I was a boy; all of my childhood heroes were apologists and I would have collected apologist bubble gum cards had someone manufactured them in those days. No one did, the times being benighted as they were, and so I had to settle for collecting the baseball cards of players having bad years. If there was a pitcher on a last place team who couldn’t find the strike zone if he was standing ten feet in front of it with a half-blind umpire behind the plate, I had his card; if there was a hitter who couldn’t hit the broad side of a fat babe’s butt with a 2 x 4, I had his card as well. Sometimes I collected good players, but only if they were on the disabled list with a pulled hamstring or a torn rotator cuff. I kept all of my baseball cards in an old shoebox my father called the litany of woes, because everyone in the box had an excuse for why they weren’t playing as well as they might that season.

As you’ve probably surmised by now, I did not get to be an apologist. My parents opposed the idea out of hand, pointing out that apologists, however well they did the job, got paid squat. This was true, of course; apologetics did not pay very well then. In addition to the poor pay, most people in those days regarded professional apologists as little better than sob sisters, PR men, and Red Sox fans. Mindful of these facts, my parents insisted that I find some more remunerative line of endeavor like dope peddling or swindling little old ladies out of their life savings. I apologized for not living up to their expectations, whereupon my father threw a fit and a Fig Newton at me and told me to shut up, he was sick of my apologies. He was like that sometimes. I remember one Christmas where he dressed up like Santa Claus (say what you will about him, Pop could do a mean Santa impression) and came down the stairs to his waiting children with a sack of toys thrown over his shoulder and then threw cans of string beans he’d gotten for half price at us. That was a wonderful Christmas, or so my brothers tell me; I had a pretty bad concussion so my memory of that day is a little fuzzy.

Now, at this point you’re probably wondering why I’m apologizing for just about everything under the son and, I’m sorry to say this, I’m wondering why you’re wondering. Explanations are so last century, after all; there hasn’t been a truly reasonable explanation for anything ever since Calvin Coolidge’s press secretary, C. Bascom Slemp, invented the cardboard tube that toilet paper comes wrapped around in 1897, but this hasn’t stopped people from looking for them. The modern apology, unlike many other art forms, and definitely unlike the classical apology, is about nothing at all. It is, in short, Seinfeldian in its philosophical provenance. You do not need to have done something wrong in order to apologize for it in this our postmodern Great Republic. Politicians spend a lot of time apologizing for one thing or another, especially during an election year, where if pandering for votes won’t work, a pol will grovel for them. I’m especially fond of pols apologizing for events that occurred years, sometimes centuries, before any of us were born. Still, it’s nice to know that their hearts are in the right place, even if all that and a couple of bucks will buy you is a ride on the subway.

In any case, I don’t think I would have made a very good professional apologist. In listening to my apologies on tape, I can tell that I lack the one great gift of the true apologist: sincerity. Yes, I can apologize all day long, and as a part of my work, I’ve often had to do just that, but the people I’m apologizing to can tell it’s all form and no substance. They can tell I am saying, I am terribly sorry for the inconvenience, sir, but that I’m thinking, buzz off, dumbass, and take your ugly wife with you. Sam Goldwyn had it right: if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made. I just don’t have that in me, I guess.

THE COOL LIBRARIANS: I see in the New York Times, and if I see it in the New York Times it must be so, right (high irony alert), that librarians are now officially hip, cool, or whatever word the kids are using these days to denote special approval. I don’t know how this happened; we were just sitting around shushing little kids (I am a champion shusher, if I do say so myself—in library school I got my best grades in the course on shushing) and telling teenagers that no, they can’t eat, drink, dance, or copulate anywhere in the library, and all of a sudden, we’re at the center of the cool universe. This is certainly very strange, especially for those of us who have been in the profession for a while. The Times goes on about how libraries are not just about books these days, that we are about packaging, for lack of a better word, information for the patrons. This sort of thing always amuses those of us who have had to do this for a bit, since libraries were never just about books even when all we offered were books. No, indeed, sometimes it's about cadavers.

It is a commonplace amongst librarians that library schools do not teach you anything useful about the actual functioning of a library. This was especially true if you planned to work in a public library. For example, I cannot remember a single instance in library school of any instructor telling the gathered cool people to be what the proper procedure for dealing with a corpse in the men’s room was. I mean, do we try to identify him? And if we do, should we check to see if he has any outstanding fines and take the money out of his wallet before we call the police? And what about the books and DVDs he has out? Will we ever see them again? No one told us and I am pretty sure that none of us in the classroom ever thought to ask. Similarly, the questions of crazed dogs, crazed junkies, crazed parents, crazed kids, and what to do with the people who are just plain crazy never crossed our minds as we learned the intricacies of the Dewey Decimal System. I am sure that if given a little time, I could probably catalog and classify any number of oddball behaviors, but what to do with the people actually exhibiting those behaviors while inside the library did not rate much discussion, as far as I remember. I had to learn how to deal with barfing dogs and paranoid schizophrenics defecating in the fiction stacks on my own and without any help from my graduate degree, which, don’t get me wrong, is always a nice thing to have, but I suspect is largely superfluous to what I actually have to do in this egregious mold pit from day to day.