I was recently flipped off at the public library. Yep, in that way — middle finger extended. The digit-al effenheimer.
I thought on this later. Being flipped off that the public library seems akin to getting cursed out in church. Or mooned in the voting booth.
I mean, the library and vulgarity just don’t go together. It’s obscene in the extreme. Just ask every kid who tried to draw pee-pees and wee-wees in the margins of a book that had a due date. You might giggle but deep down you know your doodling doesn’t suit the mood.
We’re not supposed to talk at the library, not beyond a whisper anyway, and so we just don’t use get worked up about things of a nature such that F-bombs typically need to be dropped.
Personally, I always think the presence of books has a calming effect. Even if when I don’t read them. Just being near stacks settles the brain, in my experience. And if you do happen to pick up a title … especially one that grabs you … well, a well-read mind is a calm mind.
For those into mindfulness, the act of deep reading is considered by some researchers not materially different than meditation in its effect on the mind. Can you imagine the one-with-all-living-beings mantra maven sitting one cushion away turning to you and offering a nonverbal fuck you? No, you can’t.
Whatever urge we have to treat a human being as though we are at the moment posting comments on Facebook simply falls away in the presence of printed books.
It’s all thumbs-up at the local library.
For the record, when the northward digit was presented to me, I was not actually inside the library. I was just outside the library. Yet I was at the library — and so was the old bird who flipped me one.
We might say that I was engaged in library-centric activities. Specifically, I was on my way into the parking lot; I had pulled up to the return box. The return box at our library is placed in the same position as a drive-through at a fast-food joint. Except the depository is out of reach from the confines of one’s car. So I got out. I deposited my four items. I let the automatic door close.
While performing this act, which is not normally worth recounting in the course of one’s day, I noticed a car had come from the opposite direction and was now also stopped. The woman driving this vehicle faced me from about four car lengths away.
Maybe it my returns that offended: a Vince Lombardi biography (perhaps she rooted for the Dallas Cowboys in the Ice Bowl), two recent issues of “The Sun” magazine (“The Sun” gives life — and without advertisements of any kind), and a DVD of the best Labor Day movie ever, The Flamingo Kid.1
It wasn’t clear to me why the woman didn’t just pull around me. She could have. There was room to do so. And, in fact, that is exactly what she did do, eventually, after her stare down of me. That is, in fact, precisely what she was doing when she gave me the middle finger salute. Her car — big and white with silver trim — had tires that are possibly worth more than the Kelley Blue Book value of my old Civic.2 Possibly that is why I caused her to get so upset — her 90 seconds might well cost more than mine. Or maybe she didn’t want to be seen so close to my car — the mere proximity to it may have affected perception of value of hers. What I’m saying is that I can’t be sure.
I saw a news report some months ago of stealthy readers in Bonners Ferry, Idaho scouring all the tomes in a children’s library for signs of sexual innuendo. Maybe me lady here in the drive-through lane was on this team of do-gooders, far afield in Minneapolis, and she could spot me a mile away as a person who isn’t scared of the idea a kid might read Roald Dahl or Judy Blume.3
Up Yours. Half Peace Sign. Whatever you like to call it, the extended middle finger is a universal statement that has been expressed for millennia. The Romans referred to it as digitus impudicus: the indecent digit.
Even in this age in which our president’s indecency woven into his the essence and people in the tens of millions, many of them educated adults with offspring, engage in the equivalent of humanoid grunting at on a daily basis via social media, most people still consider a middle finger aimed at another person as a form of obscenity. Famously, British musician M.I.A. during a Super Bowl halftime show more than a decade ago extended a middle finger that caused many viewers to be up in arms.
Perhaps my most vivid middle finger memory occurred in childhood. During an NHL playoff game on April 8, 1984, Chicago Blackhawks winger Al Secord slashed Minnesota North Star Dino Ciccarelli across the back of the head. Fights ensued, penalties were assessed.4 As he was being escorted off the ice, Dino — possibly I was wearing my super-cool Ciccarelli No. 20 jersey that night, which I got for Christmas one year, but I can’t be sure — flipped off a Chicago crowd that was goading him for having the audacity to take a two-hander to the skull. As Dino sent pointed his indecent digits in the direction of the cheap seats, North Stars television color commentator Tom Reid said, with a straight face, that Dino was “telling the crowd, ‘We’re No. 1!’”
Rap concerts and hockey games. These aren’t places you go expecting middle finger shots to be fired, necessarily, but they are less surprising venues than is a facility that hosts a weekly story-time reading hour.
But maybe that’s just my experience. I do hear F.U.s verbalized more commonly in non-private company these days. Maybe this woman is plugged into the ethos of the moment in a way that I am know.
All I know for sure is that in exchange for the lady’s one finger I waved back with all five of mine.
Who doesn’t like Jeffrey Willis? Gin, Phil!
Possibly an Escalade or some such. I’m not a car guy.
Believe me: It’s not there! Generations of kids have come up with ideas about sex entirely on their own.
Few ejections, turns out.