A lot of people wonder what a big action star like me does in his spare time. Well, when I’m not pumping iron at the gym or all up in the club watching Aston Kutcher grind dance with my ex-wife, I’m likely to be found at the local library, bashing the hell out of nerds. There’s nothing I like more than a nerd beating – it scratches me right in the specific spot I itch – but the thing is there are some people out there who have a tendency to take it the wrong way. They say, “Bruce, you’re this big, muscular, sexy, intelligent, altruistic, all-knowing, benevolent Hollywood action man. You shouldn’t be spending all your time beating up nerds. You should be picking on people your own size, power, wealth and intelligence.”
But what it is that they’ve got to understand is that I’ve spent a career in Hollywood laying the smackdown on stuntmen of all shapes and sizes, some of them literal man-mountains, some of them just pretty tall, so it’s nice for me to get in a fight with someone that you know is going to go down when you give them a roundhouse kick to the face.
I do do most of my nerd beating at the local library. I find this is the best place to find nerds and you get a bit of variety. You get the book nerds, you get a few computer nerds, and there’s always the other nerds whose interests lie in separate area but hang around for the nerd-comradeship. This can take as little as half an hour, as long as half a day – it all depends on things like what time you show up and is it a weekday or is sunny outside or is the library even open. Most of the time there’s at least four of five nerds hanging around and it’s just a matter of flushing them out and provoking them into conflict.
Usually when I’m through with the beating I hang back for a bit. And it was doing this very thing that at the particular library I go to that let me in on this great deal that I'd like to tell you about. Get this – for a small fee, only about forty bucks, they give you this card that, so long as you eventually return them, allows you to borrow as many books as you’d like.
Think about this for a moment. Books these days are pretty damn expensive. How many times have you bought a book home, read it, and then never touched it again? All you wanted was a little something to read, but now you’ve got this big, bulky thing that you're never going to use again, that cost you about forty bucks and that you’ve now somehow got to find space for.
Okay, so you buy a bookshelf. But what happens when you fill that bookshelf with books? You buy another bookshelf. But what happens when you fill that bookshelf with books? Don’t you see how you’re falling into this vicious cycle in which there’s no way that you can wind up as the winner, in which there’s no way you’ll have a wall in your house that isn’t covered from floor to ceiling with bookshelves full of books, in which you feel like killing your wife, your friends, your children, anyone – whose death can make the pain go away.
That’s where the library comes in. You go in there, you show your card, and you're allowed to get as many books as you like. You don’t keep these books – once you’re done reading you return them. But, if you want to grab some more, you're allowed to grab some more. They’ll tell you how long you have the book for and you have to return it in the allotted time, but if you haven’t had a chance to finish don't worry. Often, so long as no one else is after that book you're reading they’ll let you renew your loan so you have a bit more time. So long as you keep abiding by the rules they’ll keep letting you borrow.
All you need is a little area to be your sort of temporary book space. I’ve taped off a section of the den, next to my trophy cabinet. And it means I don’t have to build fifty different bookshelves and I don’t have to make that annoying trip down to the bookstore and I’m saving a tonne of money.
There aren't a lot of things in life that I’m entirely sure about. But I am sure that this really is a great deal, and I encourage all of you to at least give it a go. Yippee ki-yay motherfuckers.
Yours sincerely,
Bruce Willis
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