11.20.02

Hey all! How ya been? Still pretty worn out here. While I’m feeling better about my Borders job, it’s still taking a lot out of me. When I work Fridays from 8AM – 11PM (including my regular job) and then have to wake up for a 9AM-6PM shift on Saturday and then a Noon-6PM shift Sunday, I really don’t feel like I have much of a weekend left. And the scary thing is, I think it’s only going to get worse once the big holiday shopping season begins. We’ll see.

I’ve been doing some Fall cleaning this week and I gotta say that I’ve come to realize one thing: I have too many books. You have no idea how hard it is for me to say that; I feel like I’m standing up in an A.A. meeting for the first time and saying, “I’m an alcoholic”. The funny thing is, I’m finding that I’m becoming a collector. For example, I have first printings of “Red Dragon”, “Silence of the Lambs” and “Hannibal”, but I also have paperback editions of the first two. I’ll never read the hardcovers, they’re strictly for collector’s sake. Michael Chabon’s incredible, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two Jewish boys in 1920’s New York who begin building a comic book empire at the tender age of 13, called “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” – I have a hardcover copy and a paperback copy. Why? I read the paperback and was so enamored with it that I felt I needed a hardcover. I haven’t read the hardcover – probably never will because, hey, I have a paperback copy.

And don’t even get me started on my comic books. I currently have four “long boxes”, which hold around 200 comics, and I’m working on my fourth “half-box”, which I’ll let you do the math on how many comics those hold, all jam-packed. Now the thing is – a lot of these comics aren’t worth a damn, but I’ve held onto a lot of them for over 10 years now. Do you have any idea how difficult it is for me to throw these comics away? I’ve hauled them from my Dad’s house to this being my fifth apartment in the seven years since I permanently left the nest. Other than a few of my VHS movies (and my books, of course), there is nothing else that comes to mind that I’ve carried with me through all these moves. That’s a commitment that I have a hard time breaking just because they’re worthless according to some fat guy who still lives in his Mom’s basement and can quote the entire first season of Star Trek.

However, as I sit here wondering about my next career step – if I should ever feel that I’ve gained enough experience to try my hand at looking for a GIS job again – I realize that my next move to a new apartment might not be a situation where I can take my time moving little things at a time. I might have to pack light to fit it all into a U-Haul – and all these books and comics are not going to make that an easy task. So, I’ve decided I need to somehow lighten the load.

I’m going to start with comics simply because of the things I’ve mentioned those are the more important to me for them to find good homes. Whether I am able to sell them to a comic book store or if I donate them to a Boys and Girls Club, I refuse to simply throw them away. Once again, they mean too much to me to be tossed aside like so much garbage.

Books, on the other hand, I feel like I’d have a better chance of selling to a used bookstore or, if push came to shove, a lot of these dog-eared, Schnuck’s-purchased paperbacks could be tossed or donated to some other charity and I could really care less. I’ve also heard of a website, the name of which is escaping me right now, that encourages you to give books away, literally leaving them to be found by others; I think they call it “free range books” or something clever like that. The cool thing is, you leave a note inside the book with the website address and a tracking number written on it and hopefully the lucky finder will go to the site and tell you he has the book. The idea being, when he’s done with the book he leaves it lying around for someone else to find. It’s a great idea and something I could definitely get behind, especially for some of these mass market paperbacks I have that won’t go out of print anytime soon (i.e. Lord of the Rings, the Hannibal Lecter series [which it wouldn’t matter anyway, because I own them in hardcover]).

I know I’ve preached using the wise words of Tyler Durden from “Fight Club”, “The things you own end up owning you”, and this time I’m allowing something to own me – or at least my living space. But when it’s something as vital to our existence - our ability to communicate through the written word - I feel like it’s one time where I feel ok about being a hypocrite. Books, even fiction, are a very important part of who we are as a culture and as a species. Some animals can sing; all of them “act” in some form or another; elephants can paint pictures; some birds can speak; some chimps can communicate through sign language; but the only animal that can write is man. To me, that’s something worth making a fuss about.

Space Monkey X