I’m nobody now. I don’t even get junk mail unless it’s addressed to Resident. I don’t think I could get onto a no-fly list with nitro in my shoes! Well, that’s not exactly true: I’m now on the no-library list in San Francisco. It’s a result of the psychological destruction I have been undergoing. Last Friday I had a contretemps involving a woman in the library who didn’t want to allow me to have the precious one hour of computer time that I had reserved. I was heard by a librarian to describe this woman with an emotive term, which though accurate was one of the six—or sixteen—words that one may not use in the library. I called her a “scumbag.” I would not have normally allowed myself to be dragged down to this level but the woman in question was so rude and coarse I couldn’t help myself. It’s clear to me now that I should have called her a harridan instead, or maybe a gorgon, even better, a term that she would not have understood—which even the librarian might not have understood, and certainly which would not have got me banned from the building. But the ignorant security people treated me like a terrorist, degrading me in the office that I was dumb enough to go into of my own free will. One of them told me that my guilt in this affair was “written all over me,” that anything that I might describe as provocative on her part—say if she had told me what sexual act I might perform upon myself, for instance—must have been merely a result of the repellent language which I had used gratuitously and for nothing but the fun of it. Let me repeat that: this individual who had known me by one word for a period of five minutes said that my guilt was written all over me. Even people who actually know me can’t tell if I’m guilty of something or if I’m not—and if they did know it they wouldn’t think that it was written all over me.

So I have to go to other libraries, further away but without a heavy security presence. They are really much more pleasant, more like actual libraries and not official buildings with guards everywhere. It’s really the homeless who are the reason for the guards. There is not place enough for them in the shelters—of course many don’t want to go into those shelters and for good reason—so they come into the library for shelter and a sponge bath. Sometimes they take things if they’re left lying around and their owners are looking the other way. (You can’t blame them; they’re like little Lloyd Blankfeins except for one thing: they go to jail if they’re caught. But they’re doing just what has been presented as the ideal of American enterprise.)