I like getting lost. A little bit. Until it becomes monotonous.
I made it over to Orange, NJ, today, to scout out what payphones might survive. I don’t know the town at all but, as expected, I found a few. I expected more but it’s all good. Seemed like a mellow, low-key town.
I liked the Free Library on Main Street. That’s where I roamed the stacks some and got this unexpected mirror shot on the upstairs level.
Orange Free Library Unexpected Mirror
Wandering the stacks of a library is something you might know how much you appreciate until something like COVID takes that privilege away.
I went to a college with palatial stacks. On some floors you could barely see the top shelves, so high into the clouds did they rise. You couldn’t just reach up and grab a book. You needed ladders and elevators and a personal jetpack and an oxygen tank to get up into the firmament to get at that book you wanted. THOSE are library stacks.
On that account sometimes it seems coy to call Orange’s Free Library’s shelves STACKS. They barely reach over my head, man!
Just kidding. Stacks are stacks. Even those Little Public Library cabinets, all of their two shelves are called stacks. Would a library with just one shelf say it had a stack?
This was a neat library, with an outsized stained glass window and a glass tile floor on the upper level. Not going to lie, though. I was mostly there for the bathroom.
The bathroom was locked. Bummer. Maybe all I had to do was ask. I’d had to GO since before even getting to Penn Station, over an hour earlier. No mind. The prostate holds up well. Hah. I make that comment aware how vulgar some people find it. As a middle aged bloke it’s just a very mild form of gallows humor, as the abyss widens.
This is a video I made from the Free Library in Orange, NJ, yesterday.
