Whitmore Library, Cottonwood Heights, Utah

Oh Whitmore Library, how desperately I wanted to stay. I loved everything about you from the minute I arrived to your ample parking lot and first espied your beautiful, foxy boxy glory.

Why are you like this? "Cruel and unusual" should be the only description on your "About Us" page. It aptly describes my visit there, to a razor sharp T.

I love a library that pretends to be a 1950s post office, especially when it's actually significantly newer, but I especially love a library that refuses to state her age. I had to look past the information page offered by the library system itself to an article on the Cottonwood Heights community website to find out that Whitmore is 43 years old (b. 1974).

But Whitmore has treasures in store...so much more than that drab, government-bureaucracy-at-work exterior could tell.

I parked around the side and immediately saw my first focal point of squeaking and picture taking: A curved wall. As I've screamed here before, they are my fave. Big Fave. I'm maniac for the curved wall. The best part of a curved wall, especially in an otherwise box-shaped structure, is that it has no reason for existing other than to be Special, Weird, and Pretty. There's no practical function to a curved wall. It vexes organization charts and resists traditional furniture.

The Curved Wall.

But there it was, in all its glory, which I documented with my usual, curved wall fervor. Little did I know that was the appetizer to a deliciously strange meal.

Once you enter the Whitmore, one element reaches out, grabs you by the cuff, shakes you vigorously, then french kisses you in the eyeballs. It makes NO sense, it follows NO logic, it is beyond purpose or reason, maybe even sanity itself. What otherworldly, completely psychotic element is this? The ceiling-lighting scheme. Look at it. LOOK AT IT.

O. My. GOLLY.

Heavens to Betsy.

I could barely contain myself as I stumbled in, trying to look cool taking my down-low pictures, but I could tell I was exuding palpitations and exhalations. It was so beautiful. So extreme. So completely nuts.

I love the Whitmore ceiling-lighting scheme so hard.

There were nifty little study corrals to set up shop next to other laptop laborers, so I sat down, plugged in, and started working on that day's blog entry. Little signs instructed patrons in this area to be courteous and quiet (no talking to each other or on cell phones) but a man that smelled like hot, angry lemons emitted a seemingly endless, breathless monotone under his hand and into his cell, looking up every once in awhile to see if he was caught. The rest of us just typed away, obeying the rules and not really minding the Monotone Lemon Man since his talent for speaking as though he was somehow white noise was kind of impressive, anyway.

Alas, I could not stay. Perhaps the weird, circus-tent structure of the building is the problem. Maybe it is some technical issue beyond my understanding or influence. Whatever the reason, the wifi would not cooperate. I tried every trick in my bag, but the best coverage I could get was weak or nonexistent, and constantly changing. Since my objective for that day was to track down links for an obscene number of 80s songs, it simply was not going to do.

I was truly sad to leave the Whitmore. It's not often that something so boring and charmless on the outside hides within it something so weird and wonderful. Au revoir ma étrange truffe.