My goodness, you've fallen down a well.

Slow, nasal mumbling preceded the utterance of, "Never mind, I'll make him look it up. He looks smart." I pretended not to hear, hoping the walk to the ref desk would be a deterrent. I finished reading the sentence I was on in the news, then ventured a glance at the reference floor in general.

"That's right," said a man looking for all the world like Baby Huey in that unique sides-of-the-head-shaved mullet that virtually requires the wearer to be a bigger fan of Metallica than any person should be, "I'm talking about you."

Is it weird how much I enjoy using run-on sentences? Never mind.

"Look up The Doors," the distinguished gentleman ordered my computer monitor, looking and pointing past my shoulder at the screen. My previous post indicated how well I tend to deal with this sort of person, but as the library had been open for exactly 24 minutes at this point, this-- we'll call it a question, though it clearly isn't-- this was only the third stupid question I'd been asked so far this morning, and I wasn't yet feeling broken down by the weight of my town's collective idiocy.

Sidebar: One of the two other stupid questions I'd been asked prior to the one about The Doors was "Where is the computers?" Not "where's," which, though incorrect, is an understandable lazy contrivance of speech, but "where is," with the word "is" enunciated as though calculated to accentuate the incorrectness of the query.

Fresh-faced as I was, I asked, "What exactly do you want to know about The Doors?"
He rolled his eyes. He actually rolled his eyes.
"Like, yer books?" he minced.
"Like, which books we have about The Doors? Is that what you're trying to find out?"
"Yeah."
I turned to the computer. I know we have No One Here Gets Out Alive, but searching for Doors, The Doors, or Doors, The, under subject or under subject keyword returns nothing. I try looking for Morrison, Jim under subject, telling Baby Headbanger "Nothing is showing up, I'm going to see if I can find anything on Jim Morrison."

"Holy sh**," he blurted out, "did I just..."
I looked up, waiting on our excruciatingly slow catalog. His jaw was quite slack.
"I can't believe you know Jim Morrison. Like, about nobody knows who The Doors are."
He can't be serious. "I'm pretty sure," I say slowly, turning back to the catalog, "everybody knows The Doors." Honestly, even if you haven't heard them on the radio, (in this area they're still in very regular FM rotation Despite the nearly 40 years since the death of their singer,) or from a friend, (lots of stoners around here, and half of them have Doors stickers on their cars--I think it's the visual equivalent of a secret handshake,) then you might have noticed the movie about them. It was pretty low profile, I mean it only starred Val Kilmer and Meg Ryan in the 90s, but it's possible you stumbled across a copy somewhere, right?
Maybe not.
"Hell, nobody I know. Ain't nobody heard of them."

I thought about this for a moment. I wondered if introducing him to genuinely obscure music would shock him. I pondered the implications of this man thinking of a band whose status in popular culture was once like unto living gods... as obscure. I asked myself what that means for digital distribution of independent artists, and for the Creative Commons movement, and I thought for the briefest of moments of telling him about these musicians who just give their music away, and how I can guarantee none of his friends have heard of any of them, I thought it would positively blow his itty-bitty mind.

I entertained these thoughts all within a fraction of a second, ending with the realization that it would culminate in a discussion about nerd-core, I'd inevitably force him to listen to MC Frontalot, letting him in on a secret that would grant him membership to a club so exclusive, so niche-y, so tiny that, judging by suggested market saturation for podcasts, numbers at most fewer than 200,000 people world-wide, and he'd glaze over and wander out, drooling and mumbling about geeks.
I told him I'd found two books about Jim Morrison, that they were both checked out, and that I could reserve them. He shook his head and left.