How about “Bates-Rage”?

Bates Hall is getting on my nerves in a major way.

I don’t know what’s up this morning, but about twenty-five people have come into Bates Hall since I got here to take pictures. And they’re all using their FLASH! WHICH IS PROHIBITED, PEOPLE! YEAH, THAT MEANS YOU, LADY! The last couple days I’ve been reporting to you from the BPL, there’s not been one instance of flash photography in Da Hall (as we Bates Hall denizens call it). Why now? What phase is the moon in? Are we having increased sunspot activity?

Some guy just came in and tried to move one of the lamps on the tables here. People are funny.

Good ol’ Bates Hall. I’ve been coming here periodically to read, write, and study for years, of course. For nearly fifteen years, in fact—ever since I first came to Boston in the early nineties. And I’m telling you, it’s the same borderline personalities in here now that were in here when I started. Myself included. It’s like home. I call it “My Ancestral Home,” in fact. These are my peeps.

All week there’s been a brother in an army jacket buttoned up to his chin at the next table, who’s barricaded himself in behind a wall of big, fat reference books. He’s working hard on something. Blowing his nose, mainly. When he’s not doing that he’s squinting and staring into the middle distance. Sometimes he strokes his chin and shakes his head slowly. Occasionally he snaps his fingers, beatniklike. He’s extremely well-kempt—so extremely well-kempt you know there’s something amiss. But I like him. He gives the place the air of a prison library. I think one of the books in his book barricade is the Koran, actually.

And three tables away is my old friend, a resident of Da Hall. Master Bates, I call him. I wrote about him in an entry from my personal diary, way back in November, 2003:

There’s old Master Bates sitting at the next table, organizing his notes again. His morning ritual. He left, after choosing the day’s ball cap, for his Mexican shower downstairs.

There’s another regular who’s been busy today arranging and rearranging his things, and being very fastidious, wiping the tabletop with a kleenex from his pocket. Here comes Master Bates again, and it turns out they know each other! A pleasant surprise!

Master Bates begins rooting through his rucksack, throwing away some carefully selected balls of wadded-up newspaper. He has just fetched a Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament. OCDers, Schizophrenics, and Borderliners love the OT God. And the OT God loves them back. Heck, back in the day, He was one of ‘em.

Master Bates has stacks of notes in teeny, tiny print that he is also arranging meticulously. He is writing a book, it looks like: Meditations on La Via Crucis is the title. That’s Latin for the “Stations of the Cross.” It’s all painstakingly hand-written, of course. Not that I’m knocking any of it. Were this a Medieval monastery, all of this would be perfectly normal. Maybe Master Bates is actually Brother Bates, or Father Bates, or Archbishop Bates, who got sucked through a wormhole from the 14th Century. Like, pre-Gutenberg.

Opa! He has just dumped out a whole bag of magic markers on the table! Now he’s digging, digging, digging, carefully arranging his pullovers—six or seven of them—which he has stacked in the chair next to his. Rooting, rooting—digging for some treasure! A gem of enlightenment along La Via Lucis, perhaps. A pearl of wisdom at the bottom of his rucksack?

Aha! There it is!

He has chosen a new cap.

I suppose I was being a bit flippant when I wrote that. Today I see it differently, of course. There must be a place at Bates Hall for all of us. And who’s to say that his contribution is any less significant in his dimension than any of our is in ours? Not I.

But I do hope to get my wireless situation resolved sometime in the very near future, so I can start working from home again.

Now I’m off to the garden! Check out my new snapshots here.