The Patreon Letter - 22nd August, 2020

Hello, Em here, saying thank you to everyone and welcome back to me writing Patreon letters after some time off. I apologize for how much time the physical and mental toll of my problems this summer has taken from my focus on stuff for the site, but now that I’m feeling better physically I am ready to come back and write again! Also, for once, I’m not doing this the very last week of the month when I have an Abnormal Mapping edit on my desk. Next month I’m going to aim for having this out by mid-month, but I know better than to make promises when it comes to things like this.

If you don’t know, my roommate Destiny is currently recovering from a surgery at her grandmother’s, which means that the apartment is exceptionally quiet. Since this has coincided with me feeling like a normal person again for the first time in a month, it’s imbued me with a manic energy that would normally have me out and about living life and having a good time. 

Alas, as they say, there’s a thing on.

Instead that’s meant that I’ve been trying to clean up around the apartment, which had fallen into quite a state of disarray with both me and Destiny being in a lot of constant pain for the last few months on top of all of our job obligations. The thing they don’t tell you about work from home is that there’s a lot of ambient mess that comes from spending most of your waking life at home but on the clock. Mess accrues. 

I’m not a particularly tidy person, on the spectrum of people, and I tend to enjoy a sort of ordered chaos that comes with a properly maintained set of piles. But every once in a while I really get it in my head that I need to Get Things In Order. This is partially a way to reassess that chaos to make sure it’s still working for you, it is equally a great way to throw all your anxiety down into the deepest hole at hand and pretend you’re being productive instead of hiding something. 

But hey, if you end up with a cleaner living room afterwards, who can say what is maladaptive and what is a burst of responsible energy?

The main problem with this current bout of cleaning is the state of our bookshelves. See, when Destiny moved in and we combined all of our stuff, we were compressing a lot of stuff she had in storage and a lot of things I had stacked to the ceiling in a closet and tried to turn that into normal person media shelves. Specifically, in our case, bookshelves. Despite trying to buy ebooks when I can for space and convenience reasons, sometimes you just end up with a few dozen (certainly not more than a hundred, no I will not count) books, especially when you shop at used bookstores regularly. And that’s just speaking for me, Destiny is something of a book hoarder, not to the point of being a problem but definitely to the extent that it drifts out of a delight at the piles and into concern at the number of piles when it comes time to move them and store them and display them. 

It’s fine. Books are good.

Two and a half years ago, when we were getting the apartment set up, we got the most efficient shelves I could think of at the time. Those shelves were these large but affordable metal monstrosities known on Amazon as 5-Shelf Adjustable, Heavy Duty Storage Shelving Unit (350 lbs loading capacity per shelf), Steel Organizer Wire Rack. Here’s a picture.

See, I had had great luck organizing my overburdened closet with one of these and I was sure it would be a great way to get all of our books out of bins and put up on a shelf. They are also relatively affordable as shelves go. One of these can hold many more books as your average wood bookshelf, which are often triple the price. Obviously we should just get two of them one for each of us and load them up with books. Easy, right?

There are obvious problems here if you look at these shelves and think about book storage. I’m not even talking about the wire shelf itself not being a good fit for books, which are often thin objects that would easily slip between the wire slats of the floor of each shelf. That was easily remedied with some pieces of foam board I just cut to make new floors for every shelf. No, it is that these are multi-purpose storage shelves, with five shelves each, more than a foot deep. They’re meant for holding plastic bins, or laundry detergent bottles, or maybe some board games or spare gunpla boxes for kits you haven’t built yet. They are not for displaying books, which is done by stacking them upright horizontally.

No, these shelves suggest a much more cursed choice, to stack your books vertically. Which, with such roomy shelves, is great right? Except the relatively small footprint of such a pile then suggests that you can stack books two or three such piles across, and then two deep, because one pile does not take up more than half of the depth space of a shelf. Which means that one shelf does not hold one or even two rows of books but instead six high columns, three of which require you to remove the column ahead of it to even see what’s on the pile, and then carefully extract whatever volume you want to get from underneath the ten books stacked on top of it. 

It turns browsing your library not into an adventure in discovery but the world’s worst game of jenga, with objects you’d like to not bang up as the pieces. It’s miserable. You forget what books are even in the piles if you aren’t diligent about paying attention to your library. We are not very good at being diligent. In fact it’s the one thing that having a lot of books makes basically impossible. There is nothing quite as embarrassing and going out to the book store and picking up a book or two only to realized that you already have that book it’s just buried 15 deep in a pile you never look at because it’s surrounded by other piles. This has only happened twice, but it felt bad both times!

The problem is that we put up those shelves first thing, and in the two and a half years after have build the rest of the main living space of the apartment around them, so they not only dominate a wall but they take up all the available free space along that wall. Because they’re Too Much of the Wrong Kind of storage, we never left space for other shelves really, because these shelves truly can hold a fuckton of books. 

But they’re terrible for actually enjoying having books, or interacting with them, and 30 months in all I really want is to be able to put my books in neat orderly horizontal rows like the library gods intended. Such paradise is closed to us, though, unless we get rid of these shelves, order probably four much more expensive shelves to replace them, and then reorganize our entire living space to reduce the amount of non-shelf objects to fit new less efficient shelves. We’re not going to do that, for cost reasons and also for space reasons. Maybe if we move some day, we will take that as an opportunity to just keep our books boxed up while we get better shelves. Who can say.

But in the meantime, I have all this organizing energy, so what am I to do?

The other option that suggested itself to me was to just clear out my shelves by finally reading all the books on them and getting rid of the ones I don’t find good or useful enough to keep around. I’m not much of a re-reader, so in theory I could easily cull 80% of my shelves, leaving only some hard to get graphic novels and art books and the odd non fiction book I might find myself compelled to reference in the future. Sure, maybe I’ll find my new favorite fiction book, but it’s unlikely. Also most of my shelves are nonfiction because fiction is much more reliably available for good prices in ebook form. Which has just made my shelves look insufferable, to be honest. I swear I love novels!

So that’s how cleaning up turned into reading books, and how organization led to me creating a new reading excerpt twitter account devoted entirely to keeping me honest. You can follow it! It’s at @ems_book_pile, and while it’s locked it’s open to anyone to request. I just don’t want people RTing manga panels when I read manga on there and spoiling stuff I’m reading. People are ridiculous on twitter, they love to tell you about a thing clearly in the future of what you’re reading. 

I swear this is not just an ad for my book twitter, it’s just that this has dominated my attention for the entire week, and so it’s what I’m writing about. Really I wish I could just pitch all our books into the sea and start over, but that’s not like … responsible. Or normal. And so this is the compromise I’ve settled on, to just get these books out of my life the old fashioned way.

Which means that two nights ago I dreamed about having nice normal bookshelves. And of course, because I’m reading a lot again, the childlike part of me instantly began longing for buying new books. I blame the pandemic, and how I haven’t been able to go to a store in five months. But god I’d love to go find a nice used bookstore and browse for a few hours. 

Much like having good shelves, this is just a nice dream. For now.

Until next time,

Em

PS: this piece brought to you by The Killers’ new album Imploding the Mirage. It’s pretty good! It’s no Sam’s Town, but also I’m not 20 anymore like I was when Sam’s Town dropped, and it’s hard to recapture the ways you love music when you’re a sad twenty year old.