This morning, in the pretendy-cafe that used to be a locker room at the State Library, a young man with mop hair half-smiled at me as he took my order.

Young Man With Mop Hair is somewhat superior in the pretendy-cafe hierarchy. I've seen him giving orders before and telling people to go and clean up table four please and looking harried while reading rosters on clipboards and so forth. Young Man With Mop Hair is not nearly as lovely as the Cute Young Thangs who used to serve me coffee and complain about their hangovers and then go missing when the RMIT design course started back up again. He seems nice, Mop, but he's not exactly engaging. You kind of get the feeling he might be thinking he's heaps better than you.

Now, I know from experience that when you think someone thinks they're better than you, they're usually deeply self-critical and later, at the work Christmas party or whatever, you turn out to be best friends and they've liked you all along and it reveals only one thing: how shallow and stupid and self-obsessed you must have been to have taken offence at their entirely innocent and sometimes even affectionate gaze in the first place.

Having said that, Mop Hair is clearly Captain Cool. Now, usually, when I go to work or go out in the evening or whatever, I wear normal clothes. Nice clothes. Not, you know, fashionable clothes exactly, but I look okay. When I come to the library, and hence the pretendy-cafe, I wear tracksuit pants and a hooded jumper. I want to be comfortable while I work. Also, as I have stated many times, I would be happy to wear one of those stud-buttoned full body suits that babies wear if I didn't think it would embarrass my loved ones and bring shame upon my family. HOWEVER, I do not wear these things, and I only wear tracksuit pants and hooded tops when I'm writing or going to gym.

Last night, I was going to gym. A guy rode past on a bike. I kind of wasn't concentrating but was looking at Guy On Bike because I wanted to cross the road and had to wait for Guy On Bike to ride past. At the last second, Guy On Bike pretendy-smiled at me and I realised: Guy On Bike was Captain Cool Mop Hair Guy from the Pretendy-Cafe! For a few seconds I felt like a pillock for wearing tracksuit pants and a hooded top in the street as well as in the library and hoped vainly that he didn't think it was some kind of uniform, and then I wondered whether he thought I'd been staring at him on the bike, and then I realised I was an idiot for even purporting to care.

This morning, in the pretendy cafe, I deliberately went up to the other guy, who smiles a lot, and waited in line for him to serve me.

Suddenly, out of nowhere:

NEXT PLEASE!

It was Captain Mop.

Hello, he said. (Did I detect a bit of a tone of "I saw you last night in a different context - what an interesting development in our arms-length coffee-based social ritual"?)

Hello, I said.

What's your name? He asked.

I told him.

What's yours? I asked.

He told me, with a half-smile. If we weren't right in the midst of becoming friends, I would have sworn that smile was slightly mocking.

He gave me my change. I thanked him.

There being a big queue, he shouted NEXT PLEASE again and on he went.

The next customer ordered a coffee.

What's your name? He asked.

She told him.

He wrote it on a cup and handed it to smiley guy. Smiley guy called out my name. My coffee was ready. It's how they determine who gets what coffee, you see. Makes a lot of sense, actually.

I am, it is now painfully clear, a massive loser. Captain Mop has won.

Still, and I know I have a vested interest in this, regardless of how much sense it makes, it does somewhat devalue the experience of ordinary discourse, don't you think? What's your name? It's kind of a personal question, too. It's revealing. It establishes a new connection. A new level of intimacy. In certain contexts, it means a great deal.

You're in a cop car. "What's your name?"

You're chatting to someone who seems rather nice. "What's your name?"

You're sure you've seen this person before but you can't quite figure it out. "What's your name?"

They can't take What's Your Name. Can they? Can they do that?

It started with Huge Icey Juice in A Bucket With A Straw shops. That was okay, I could see there was (as we say in theatre) a fourth wall there - a kind of commercial buffer that made the question less intimate. But in real life? In a pretendy cafe? With a grumpy dude who thinks you live in a tracksuit? I don't know. I feel conversationally violated.

The big test will be if he remembers it tomorrow. Yes, I know, I know. I shouldn't go back. But hell, for a pretentious grumpy pants, he makes a good coffee.

Today, I'm back in the library for the first time since before our residency at Bundanon. It's exam time in here so there are lots of people asleep on desks, wikipedia open in front of them to an entry on the history of Russia at the turn of the century, iPods blaring into their exhausted sub-conscious minds.

For the entire morning, due to my computer having been reset when my hard-drive broke at Bundanon, I had no access to the library internet. This was obviously annoying to those thousands of people who were undoubtedly attempting to contact me, but it also led to me doing four hours of uninterrupted writing. Not since Bundanon etc.

The one thing I wish, sometimes, when I come to the State Library, is that I could play chess. Upstairs, there is a mezzanine level full of people playing chess (in their study breaks? on their days off? by mutual prior agreement? having just met?). Currently, two out of eleven of them are women. One is a child. One - a man who appears to be consulting a book - is playing against himself.

Perhaps this is what people did before the internet. Perhaps I should up the lady-count. How, though, does anyone have the time, when there is so much wikipedia in the world?

By the way, my grandma's operation went as well as can be expected. Thanks for the messages.

In the library when you are trying to write and someone is talking extremely loudly and it turns out to be the librarian, it is best to listen to:

1. Rachmaninov

2. The superman theme

3. My friend Liam

It is surprising how quickly the librarian becomes an actor in a wordless drama of my own making. Huzzah! Thwarted by music!

Working in a library is an interesting experience. For example:

- A girl just answered her loudly ringing phone right next to a sign that had QUIET ROOM written on it. Underneath that it said, "This room is a designated quiet area for silent work and study. Please switch your mobile phones to silent. Phone calls and conversations can occur in other rooms of the Library. Thank you for your cooperation".

I am sitting with some State Library regulars. It's like Cheers, for us. Where everybody knows your name. Well, not your name exactly, but there's a fair bit of genial nodding that goes on. We waited for a while and let Loudy Talky Girl alone in case she wanted to quickly tell the person to call her back in five. After a while, she got louder. The regulars exchanged looks. Almost as one, we turned around and looked sternly at her. I gestured towards the sign as though perhaps it was positioned inconveniently and she couldn't quite see it.

She waved at us crossly and left.

All she was doing was reading an MX anyway. Hardly even deserved to BE here.

Peehee!

- Another girl, earlier, was sitting back from her study, peering into her mobile phone. It took me a while to figure out that she had the camera function turned on and was using it as a mirror. My phone doesn't allow me to do that, thank heavens, but when I walked past her I realised she was looking at herself critically in the phone-as-camera-as-mirror device. She was beautiful. She looked completely revolted. After a while she stood up and left. I wanted to tell her she looked lovely, but it didn't seem to be something she would necessarily believe. I wondered if it was her own appearance that made her decide to leave, or was she going anyway.

- At 12.12pm, a man wobbled in to the arts reading room. "Anyone here know where the toilets are?" he slurred. We pointed him in the right direction and he went the opposite way. He was as drunk as a skunk.

- A bloke in the Arts Reading Room, a regular like myself, sits for a great part of the day conducting with one hand while he listens to music.

It takes, as they say, all types. Although those with loudly ringing mobile phones and Loudy Talkie Voices may take themselves elsewhere please, lest they face the pious wrath of the superior regulars. Like those people at swimming pools who grunt furiously at you when you're swimming too slowly in a lane marked Fast, we are your greatest critic. Approach with caution.

Dear The State Library of Victoria,

I heart you.

I heart your new slapdash cafe that you've thrown together in what was essentially the locker room. I heart that it's cheap and unpretentious and doesn't sell anything "on a bed of lettuce" or "drizzled in oil". I heart that it sells nutella and banana sandwiches and can all be packed away at the end of the day as if it wasn't there in the first place.

I heart that there were two girls eating their own food out of a lunchbox (they were sharing) in your little locker room cafe and you didn't go and arrest them or anything.

I heart that there is still a posh cafe and bar next door where you have to go if you're after a chai or a beer or something drizzled in something else.

I heart the boys who work there and I particularly heart the girl who works there who always looks like she's had a massive night out but she could probably surf a wave or run a marathon if you just gave her the right sort of lycra.

I heart the new system that discriminates against people who make noise by subdividing everyone into categories.

I heart that one of the quiet rooms is the arts room.

I heart that the arts room obviously used to be the outside bit of the library and there is an enormous downpipe that makes a racket when it's raining.

I heart the queue for the free internet that includes a sign at the front of it saying there are more free internet computers in the back room. I heart this particularly because the back room is always virtually empty whereas people in the free internet queue in the front room are confronting internet users for "CLEARLY HAVING BEEN HERE FOR SEVENTEEN MINUTES".

I heart the chess room. Chess!

I even heart your ridiculously early closing time on a Friday night because I am obliged to go outside and experience other people, and dinner, and drinks, and this means my primary experience of the outside world does not consist of a downpipe belting out a banjo-like arythmic overture to the quiet arts room, and me.

It's good to be back.

It's raining in Melbourne. It really is quite miraculous to see water falling out of the sky.

Not only that but the State Library's roof has a leak.

A two metre square section has been roped off with one of those "CAUTION WET FLOOR" signs with the man slipping amusingly over onto his arse inside a triangle. There is also a motley collection of buckets, an old shirt and a collection of (self-appointed? One can't tell) experts with clipboards, peering up at the very high roof, which reveals nothing other than that it is a roof and that presumably it contains a hole.

If it were an episode summary in a TV guide, it would say:

"A major storm hits town and the library cracks a leak. Hilarity ensues".

It's definitely the most excitement I've seen in here since the year twelves left.

My study habits, such as they are, were established over a decade ago in year twelve, altered slightly at university to incorporate a cafe that served beer and nachos and contained like-minded procastinators and a pool table, and honed in recent years on account of the age-old adage of self-employment (taught to me originally by my year ten maths teacher) that "the only person you're letting down is yourself".

The two things I now require in order to write are:

1. No distractions.

2. Inspiration to work.

The former is a source of constant frustration on account of my zero tolerance policy for libraries not being (as yet) universal law. Sure, it may be difficult to police a zero tolerance gaffa-tape-over-the-mouth policy across the board without running into trouble with civil libertarians and so forth but SURELY IT IS WORTH IT SO SOMEONE... ANYONE... CAN GET SOME WORK DONE.

Anyway, at the moment, I have to trick myself.

The library has internet. I have to make myself go outside to the cafe and have a cup of tea while I write things without the internet. Never has so much work been done as when I'm having a "break" from my work.

Looks like the internet might be the next thing to go. Right after the beers and the nachos.