Excursion to the Dallas Public Library

Well, it's been a while since I've posted, so to quickly get up to speed, I moved to an apartment in Dallas by the American Airlines Center, just on the other side of the freeway from downtown, with my good buddy and long-time character actor Alex Brownstein. It's a great location, very close to everything, and it has really been enjoyable.

So today was Sunday, my only real day off, and practically the first time Alex and I had been home at the same for the day since we moved here.

With the city at our fingertips, what else were we to do on my day off but go get a library card? It was a rhetorical question, obviously this was the only choice we had.

We drive the 5 minutes it takes to get down from the top floor of our garage, and then the 3 minutes it takes to get to the downtown public library. Alex and I did not realize until it was much too late that parking is free on the weekends, as he made a pointed effort to park in his garage he uses for work, and ultimately driving up on the sidewalk in the garage and smashing his passenger side mirror into a pillar while trying to read an "Hours of Operation" sign.

Then we walked down the extremely shady staircase to the street and over to the library. The Dallas Public Library is brilliantly enormous, full of wonderful educational and entertaining material, the most of which are the vagrant characters which inhabit the majority of the establishment.

Other entertaining events from the excursion include:

The lady who gave me my library card was very nice, but spoke very little English. The crux of the whole thing was that English was most definately her first, and only, language.

As we got on the elevator to go from the 4th floor, where Alex unsuccessfully searched for a comic book for 30 minutes and we witnessed a guy playing online Hearts the entire time, we encountered a very large man with a mustache, Dwayne Wayne from "A Different World" glasses/flip-down-sunglasses, and about, no lie, 25 pens, pencils, and markers stuffed in his short-sleeve button-down shirt pocket. He was also carrying a large bag and an extremely torn up 1000+ page book, and he leered at and grunted disgustedly at us as Alex pushed the 7th floor button as his destination was definately the 8th.

We viewed an original press of The Declaration of Independence that was on display and I commented, "There's no way this could be the original, otherwise Nick Cage would be trying to steal it and subsequently find treasure."

As we browsed the bottom floor just before we left, we found irony in the fact that the book, Is American Culture in Decline was juxtaposed with a copy of The Osbournes, which hosted a picture of Ozzie with his tongue out along with the rest of the family.

Through it all, we did make it out unscathed; who knew the library could be so entertaining?