Jimmy's Terrible Library Card Dilemma

I was at the library and overheard some kids talking about this. One of their friends, 17 years old, is restricted on the books, CDs, etc., that he can check out from the library. Yes, it seems that's one of the rules in place, thanks to the library and his idiot parents.

I didn't hear much -- I'm not an eavesdropper by nature, I really have to work at it. But according to them, and I think this detail is essential to get out there, the poor kid's name is Jimmy. Jimmy as in "I'm an adult baby, or maybe more accurately, a baby who will never grow up." Thanks to his idiot parents, that's probably what'll happen to him, like this guy (40-50 years old) I saw on a "Taboo" show who sits in an enormous highchair that he himself built and wears big adult diapers by choice. A formerly homeless woman with problems of her own changes him, lovingly, I might add.

Anyway, Jimmy, that's what you have to look forward to! You have problems now with your library card and what you can look at, so you also have a life of weird fetishism ahead. The bright side is there's always some merciful enabler who will gladly change you.

Getting back to the rule. Here's the rule, word for word, from the library's "basic information" page:

A parent or guardian must accompany a child under 18 to approve their child's card and can choose to restrict it to materials from the Children's Room.

Obviously, at some point in the library card getting process, during the tricky negotiations, Jimmy's parents made a conscious decision to restrict their son. Why precisely they would do that, since I don't know them, I can only guess. And honestly I don't have the first clue. But let's just assume they're crazy or sadistic. Maybe Mom's crazy and Dad's sadistic, or it could be the other way around, or it could be that both are crazy and/or sadistic. It makes good sense. They don't want Jimmy in the big-people books looking up things about his batty dingbat parents!

But 18 is coming, you crumbs, then he'll show you! Unless he chooses to self-restrict his library use to the Children's Room as some perverse, sick, infantile submission to their authority, which would be too bad. Because there's a lot of good reading in the big-people section. And I hope he has the chance to discover that.

It's too bad the library doesn't help ease him into the big-people section. My reading of the rule doesn't seem to exclude that as a possibility. Theoretically, he could be reading books in the big-people section. The way I read it, he can only check out books from the Children's Room. So if he wanted, he could be reading all the volumes, say, of Frazier's Golden Bough, definitely a big-people set, then taking home the latest exploits of Where's Waldo. If you want to get technical about it.

But perhaps, probably that would violate the spirit of the rule, which he probably shouldn't do. When he gets home, Mom and Dad would see a guilty look and that would be bad. He might get sick and spit up pabulum all over Mommy's nice clean dress.