Ladies and gentlemen, Paul Gross.
For those who don't know, the above song is based on an actual shipwreck. At least I'm pretty sure it is. You can all Google it to find out for sure. I would use the above YouTube video to open a more nautical-themed post, but I don't think I'm going to get many chances to do those kinds of posts in the near future. I live in a landlocked state. This is the kind of place where Aquaman would be useless unless he was near an aquarium or maybe a lake. Anyway, I felt that the song was at least partially appropriate for this post because this afternoon I was at something that some might consider to be a wreck of sorts.
In the town where I live, there's a college that shut down back in 2010 if memory serves. The reason it shut down is because it was run into the ground by a bunch of idiots who were out of touch with the times. Anyway, the college was forced to close and the campus fell into a state of disrepair. It's not so much of a campus anymore as it is a rotting caracas of masonry. The archive I help out at on a regular basis was originally located at the college in the library's basement, and today I was asked to head back up to that library to help the people at the archive salvage some of the old books from the library's collection.
Helping to clear out that library was an interesting experience, though not a very pleasant one. Outside the building, the temperature was in the mid-sixties, but the inside was like a meat locker. There was no power to the library, so we had to find the books we were after using a flashlight. Plus a lot of the books were covered in mold, as were some of the walls. I'm just glad that nobody ever died a violent death at that library, otherwise the place might've been haunted along with being cold, moldy and dark. As it is now, that library would make a pretty decent setting for a horror movie, as I'm sure the other buildings on that abandoned campus would. There was once a rumor that the campus was going to be used as a film location for that AMC show, The Walking Dead, and at the time it was quite the believable rumor.
When all was said and done, the entire scavenging process took about four and a half hours. We packed up and hauled away well over a hundred books. The whole thing ended up taking way longer than I thought it was going to take. I thought this little project was only going to take like an hour or maybe two at the very least. Needless to say, I was totally wrong. That about wraps it up for this post. To close, here's another song about another real life shipwreck.
Ladies and gentlemen, Gordon Lightfoot.
