SEYBOLD BUILDING: LORE

Jewelers have lots of friends because some are naturally gregarious, but all jewelers have lots of friend because they expect discounts. Discounts from their middlemen, discounts from their priests and rabbis, discounts from the children garden or synthetic oil club. Jewelers need you to cut from the top because they are always the one left holding the cup; they buff and sparkle the fuck out of that bauble before wrapping it in tissue and laying it in its silky, plastic zip-lock sheath.

Just like the Phoenicians invented written language for commercial reasons, every sale, alteration, or consultation that jewelers make are based on a story, a narrative, un hilo or thread that carries the transaction from need to want to satiation. Jewelers are hubs from which emanate legions of anecdotes, cuentos, jokes, practicums and symposia. In our rush for k-pod singularity and 3D print articulations, jewelers might be some of the only remaining samurai artisan businessmen. Forget the retail chains or diamond wholesalers, many of those proprietors are just as privileged as your common portfolio manager; I'm talking about a hunger you can't teach in the U.S.

I am talking specifically about the jeweler that puts food on the table with their craft and their neck. These women and men can associate a story with every point of purchase, and as we continue to accelerate the loss of our physical memory to make way for the android memory server, let no one say I was not at the helm shouting down from the oxygen tanks that jewelers are repositories of stages in the life of an artifact, and that objects and artifacts used to matter. Maybe, I am being a nostalgic dick, a petulant post-millennial, or a gigantic mamon. Truth be told, I am heavily all three, but that does not preclude me from seeing the importance of jewelers.

But, I will never forget the tale of Eduardo and his loose wedding ring. Eduardo had recently gotten married; purely by mistake, he makes his ring a little looser than his fiance's. Because he was pressed for time, he decided to wear it loose and alter it the second he had a minute. Two months later, Eduardo is coming out of the Seybold, and while walking to Government Center, two dudes approach seemingly out nowhere and snatch his men's leather satchel, which the dudes probably mistaked for a bank deposit bag. While giving chase, the two dudes jumped over a fence with abundant ease; Eduardo gives chase, and manages to scamper up the fence with little difficulty.


But, as Eduardo nears the crest of the fence, he manages to slip a tine of the fence between his finger and the ring. At the same time, Eduardo looses footing as he throws his weight over, and the actual wedding ring ends up severing his finger. It pulls through the flesh, bone, and tears. The subsequent screaming that Eduardo looses upon the cold edifices of downtown Miami makes the santeros leaving dead chickens on the steps of the court house think twice about how they exit. Even though gold is considered a soft metal, it can still cut through skin and bone without much hesitation.

We need to see the serrated edge to know it cuts, but given enough weight and pressure, a ring of gold can act as a plasma slice of coin and cut through bone and plastic to yell its historical theater. .

SEYBOLD BUILDING: INTERIOR: FIRST STREET ENTRANCE

Come through all breeze on North West First Street, then straightaway the grey and dark grey diamond tiles patterning sieve of dark grey diamond tiles (or perhaps the sieve is light grey?). 20 feet to your left, the stairs for the mezzanine, which you won't want to take unless you need dull gems from Italy or like a horse mane brush with corral inlay.

Prime storefronts jut out and blaze the lucre in their windows; their displays: their most valuable, encrusted, gleaming champaigne soap bubbles on headless, velvet displays. House of Byzantine horrors, half-limbs and sample shoulders, half-conceived but for their flank wheren lay a whopping piece of metal exuberance.

The first stores on your sides as you come in are Aaron's Jewelery & Diamonds and Aruba Gold Jewelers, but I remember a time in the early 90's when a whiz kid from Italy had an expensive glass shop at the entrance that sold fragile oil and vinegar glass dispensers that held both liquids simultaneously in the glass dispenser at the same time, but separated them by a clever bladder or some shit.

And, this dude was there for a couple of months before his fragile glass outpost crumbled; he grew dependent on pain pills and turned into a pillhead and nearly lost his monthly allowance from some castle in Tuscany.

Immediately after, a mosaic on the tile floor that must take up just about 30 feet, in which a topaz frame is festooned in a beige background so that two brown tile X's fasten the ends of the mosaic to the (dark-grey/light-grey) sieve-expanse.

Straight ahead, jutting out of the ground, a parapet that holds the staircase for the sotano, and about 30 feet beyond that, the security guard Octagon-kiosk, an embattlement manned at all times by at least two security guards that are also weekend pilots for Hermanos al Rescate.

Inside the Octagon-kiosk, just below chest level, the panels all closed-circuit television screens, maybe 4 inches by 6 inches, with very little actual counterspace to let's say write notes or enter security log data. On the netherside of the Octagon-kiosk, an alphabetical index of all the DBA's, LLC's, and Proprietorships that can be found inside.

The slope of the entrance drains towards the sotano stairwell, but at such a small grade that it's hard to tell if it's slanted at all. In between the Octagon-kiosk and the sunken sotano stairwell lay a hole in the wall cafeteria for the more discerning bastards and mistresses.

We almost never went to eat there, and not because the food was bad. We almost never went to eat there because the air was no different than in the taller, in the tin can office on the sixth floor at the far end of the floor, by that cluster of Brazilian castiadores.

INTRODUCTION TO "LIBRARIANS WITH SPINES"

In May it will be two years that I have been an Adult Librarian for the Los Angeles Public Library; I am very happy with my position, and the branch I work at is a branch with over 100 years of service, and a small Black History Collection (4,208 titles). My side hustles are as a poet and writer, blogger, teacher, interpreter, rabbi (non denominational), sanitation functionary, and publisher, etc. I pay the bills for an online journal called Hinchas de Poesia (www.hinchasdepoesia.com) while one talented designer puts it together and one talented editor edits the shit out of every issue. We don't make any money and we don't ask for any money, so a lot of people do not know how to process our existence, and that's fine as it is equally hard for us to sometimes process our existence as well.

HINCHAS Press came into existence in 2016 to publish an anthology of ghazals (an Arabic poetry form) for James Foley, Ghazals for Foley. If you don't know James Foley, look him up. He and I were close friends in the Poets and Writers Program at UMASS-Amherst. A few years later he actually ends up lending me the money to buy server space to display the first issue of Hinchas de Poesia. So, this anthology of essays, Librarians with Spines, is a big deal because it is the next step in the evolution of HINCHAS Press and Jim's Legacy. What started out as an online journal has evolved into a venue that would like to tackle the lack of color in the publishing industry one ISBN at a time. It is my firm belief that at no other time in the history of the world has it been so easy to edit, publish and distribute a book solely under your influence and care.

When I was a a kid and had recently moved to Miami from Brooklyn, what is now the Kendall Branch Library used to be called the Snapper Creek Library. My parents were customers at the Executive National Bank on the corner of 97th and Kendall Drive, and every Saturday after my mom made her deposits she took my sister and I to the Snapper Creek Library to hang out and read, peer into the lives of things we had not yet conceived of. As an eleven year old transitioning into a mature twelve year old, I found refuge in those stacks, especially the Choose Your Own Adventure series and their extensive juvenile non-fiction. I can not underestimate the importance of libraries in my life, and what a joy they are to visit, and what joys have I experienced simply from a book.

Those Saturdays add up and I see myself older and becoming a more confident patron in 1986, but those first years were a little scary. As a kid, I remember approaching the reference desk as if the librarian behind it were a descendant of G'mork. Eventually, I figured out the order on the shelves and stopped asking for help; getting lost was just another way of figuring out how to find the subjects that most interested me, but I knew there was an order; it was there if you cared to pay attention. So, you can understand how weird it might be to be behind the desk you feared as a kid, to be the first person, perhaps, a kid sees when he or she come to the library.

There's something that happens when you come into a building and realize it's full of books, a weird kind of wattage that accompanies the agglutinated wisdom in ink of forty thousand spines. I do not feel the same way walking into a server closet, or taking a stroll through the air conditioned nightmare of a server farm. While I know I can highlight text on my e-device, I prefer the ball-point chicken scratch of my personal annotations, many of which are anachronistic inside jokes and offer zero insight. There's a sensory threshold I can't seem to get past using e-devices, and my books in no small part represent the parameters of my knowledge, the bricks that fill the foundation, the inconsistencies in the parapets, and the bleed through on the over-re-enforced portions.

I have never met Max Macias in real life, that is, in person. I know he is a person and I know he lives in Oregon and I know he works for Portland Community College and I know he can Smith Grind minipipe coping and loves to teach people about technology. Max and I are anomalies in the Library World because the professional library world is largely white and female. I make the distinction between professional and clerical because in most systems in our country that division is solely predicated on race, meaning in our large library systems, people of color do most of the clerical work at a library, and most of the professional work gets done by Caucasians. There is nothing wrong per se with this except when you change your shirt and start playing for the other team.

Max and I do professional librarian work as men of color (and politically vociferous men at that). But, this is a personal work of scholarship and we are publishing without our respective affiliations; Max and I are publishing this book as private citizens. We started out as Face Book friends and then we realized we both grew up skateboarding, we both were at the inception of Hip Hop and Punk Rock, and we both loved the dreamers, that category of people that constantly look at the world with an enormous sense of what if.

POEM AFTER RENE LALOUX'S "FANTASTIC PLANET"

A Traag murdered by an Om is unbelievable
but Terr is a resourceful Om and he's learned
tested Traag tenets sobre food cubes and color powder.

Terr's hooked up with a wild Om, a serpentine
witch naturalist guide proxy leotard Om.

Terr's been forthcoming with his knowledge of Traag tenets
but of course the wild Oms stand resolute at not widening
their circle of influence and poor Terr

well poor Terr has to strap on the raptor worm and joust
with the naysayers, nitwits, and feral not necessarily wild Oms
just to prove he was simultaneously understanding the Traag tenets

Terr's Traag was learning from their cognitive grape diadems
how to be compassionate giants in snug spandex cuneiform uniforms.

SEYBOLD BUILDING: INTERIOR: JEWELER'S FEES

There's an if you-hurry-me-fee and a fee for if you give me the wrong
size and I have to recast; there's a bring your pain-in-the-ass-wife
into my taller and I have to dust off some stools fee; there's a you-
fucked-me-once-before-fee, a fee based solely on a quotient of
vengeance; there's fees for having it finished for Saturday, even
though I'm here every Saturday; there's fees for express polishing
and steaming, for wrapping it in tissue paper like some diaphanuous
bonbon Satan's gifting.

there's a fee for if you come into my taller with muddy-ass Timbos
and make me mop a six by six tread of linoleum;

there's a fee for if you come in with a toy dog or in driving
slippers; there's a fee for if you cheap but your wifey is a Botox
dimepiece; there's a fee for if your last payment comes via my son via
a happy holidays smut pamphlet via a sign-off that hasn't been earned;

there's a fee for if your morph into a generic dildo and start belly-
aching over the price of diamonds; there's a fee for if my diamond guy
is coming in from Hyderabad and straight to the airport; there's a fee
for if you make me feel like I haven't snatched thistles of orodusted-
dander from the straight air and turned them gorgeous tines; there's a
fee for if you belong to the wrong soccer clubl there's a fee for if you
champion Ronaldo over Messi; there's a fee for if you spread the virus
of Argentinos insoportables; there's a fee for if you don't tell me how
Peronism makes you feel.

SEYBOLD BUILDING: EXTERIOR: FLAGLER CORRIDOR

If this were the early 90's and you had slept over my house under the pretense that we would go to work with my pops in downtown Miami, then once we got to Government Center we would have taken the easternmost exit, the exit that winds under the awningned escalator and onto NW 2nd Street. Crossing NW First Ave, we would have caught up with the gusts and rafagas hiding in the corners of the state of the art courthouse. We would have gone south on North Miami for one little block while gawking at the Haitian shops, the Creole pouring out of speakers, lace as static.

But this was the end of 2016, so we took the escalator down into the officious plazita at the read end of the Main Library and east on NW First Street because Pops wanted to show me the obtruse, metal carcass of the future train. But this was the end of 2016, so pops made us walk north on NW First Avenue until we reached the corner of the Dade County District Court on NW Second Street to creep a peep. But this was the end of 2016, and you could clearly see the platform for this beast was going to be 60 feet in the air, towering over the residents of Overtown, looking down on the diaphanous frame of Miami's first sports arena.

From the corner of NW 2nd Street and NW First Ave you can clearly see the terminus; there are enormous red cranes hoisting sections of lattice lay eyes can barely articulate. Make no doubt, though, something large and girthy as the Government Center itself is coming and will ransom just as much airspace from the downtown landscape.

In the early 90's we would have wrapped around the court building and walked up NW Second Street to North Miami Ave and turned south one block to NE First Street, turned east on NE First Street and crept up on Seybold in the shadow of the MetroMall. In the early 90's you would have seen MetroMall open for business with at least a minimal amount of busy work in the small, bottom-feeder shops that ringed the atrium. Don't get me wrong; there were never lines to get into the MetroMall, but it used to be a working mall with working people inside helping working customers.

Pops tells me its been shuttered for the past 8 years and I remember that during that time he ran a 20 person operation for an Indian expatriate with a PhD in Physics named Michael. This was before he moved into the Seybold and went to work for himself, so I must have been twelve or so when he ran a whole operation up on the third floor of the MetroMall. You look at the building now and all you see are sooty grates.

Later that day, Pops took me on a tour of adjoining ecosystems and buildings to the Seybold. So we walked down NorthEast First Street, sharing shoulder space with the Dupont Building on Second and Flagler. We passed a trendy Italian restaurant and pops threw his hands up at the cooks in the back as if he played futbol with them on Tuesdays and shouted, Rosario, como estai? To which a stout little miscreant that should have shaved this morning shouted back, Chai, Horacio, como estai?

Pops tells me that on the weekends there are Ferraris and Lambos throwing up their doors to get a space by the curb, and yet the inner repository and sanctum of the restaurant, their jazz catacombs is and has been condemned by the city of Miami. And yet, on the day when we went, the restaurant was doing a brisk sale of Sicilian pizza with soy instead of cheese and I am sure looking forward to globular wine glass sales later on that night. We passed the building with little discs pressed into the face of the building, across the street from the Dade Commonwealth Building and hung a right into the 777 International Mall

Inside, I can not tell you the horror of vacancy, the silence of the dirty panes, the manner in which shops are closed, the debris and detritus of having to close a shop in a depressed city center. Regardless of whether the stores were former nail salons or gold-plated purveyors, their doors were closed and debris lay strewn on the ground as if the owners had left in a hurry. You could taste the soot on the plastic shutters or at least it seemed like that to me. I had the feeling that we were excavating this mall instead of passing through like a errant breeze.

These are taken inside the 777 International Mall.

Yes there were workmen painting some of the shops on the second floor, but for the most part the mall was dead, the dream of this place as a money-making waterfall was more than dead, and here we were getting a rare glimpse into the

These are taken inside the 777 International Mall.

These are taken inside the 777 International Mall.

The author and Pops inside the 777 International Mall.