Andrew's 4 Rules for Keeping a Book (or, how I learned to stop being a book hoarder)

Anyone who has known me at any point in my life, probably knows I have a natural tendency towards hoarding.

I come by it naturally - it's something for which Blankenships have always been known.  When my grandparents died it took me months to clean out their attic.  I think they saved every pill bottle and medicine bottle they ever had. We had to buy extra trash cans just to dispose of it all.

I always thought it was because my grandparents had lived through the Great Depression but mu father had a history of the Blankenships with an anecdote about how in medieval England, a Blinkensop died (the English spelling of Blankenship) and his worldly possessions included various random bins of random useless material, meticulously sorted by type.

The book then went on to say, essentially, "Does that sound familiar?"

So Blankenships have always been hoarders, all the way back to the Dark Ages.  When I was a child my father brought home the vinyl library of rock albums the radio station where he had worked tossed out when they changed formats.  He built heavy wooden shelves to hold them and I grew up listening to Queen and the Beatles.  It gave me a knowledge of music that has served me well.

It was a good thing.

My freshman year of college an Appalachian Charity dropped a ballroom full of free books at the University of Kentucky and I picked up at least three boxes of books and packed them back to my dorm room. They were cut covered and stamped with "Not for Resale," but there were some interesting books.

They formed the core of my personal library, which I lugged around with me whenever I moved. At one point I had seven shelves worth of books, all alphabetized with the paperbacks stacked two deep and two high on the lower shelves.

My brother came by one day and said I had more books than I could ever read and asked me how many of them I had actually read. At the time it was two or three per shelf of between twenty and thirty books. In my shame, I reorganized my books. I kept my personal favorites on the top shelf of the first bookshelf and the rest in alphabetical order on the shelves underneath.

I kept all of the books on the shelf where they were, but when I finished a book, I would move it to the end of the shelf. So I would have the unread books in order followed by the books I had already read. I made a concerted effort to read through my collection and the next time my brother mentioned the books (a few years later) I was happy to report that the last time I checked, I was up to seven out of ten books and had finished some shelves completely.

By the time I started Journalism school (in 2003) I was reasonably well read, which is something I think all Journalists should be.

Then I started to Yard Sale.  It started when I found a bag of GI Joe parts at Goodwill one day and started to put them together to sell on eBay.  I could piece together a complete figure, match the accessories using the internet, and sell it for a large profit on eBay.

I discovered that I could buy toys as parts, figure out what they were, put them back together, and make money.  I spent so much time on toy web sites trying to identify parts that I had the idea to create my own web site, whereon I could post photographs of the toys, create an index of parts and accessories, then sell them.

That's where 3&3quarter.com came from.  It was an excuse for me to buy more toys.

And to hoard toys.

The business plan meant that I would have to stockpile parts of a toy until I found enough parts to finish it.  My house was covered with bins and baseball card boxes full of toy parts.

It was shameful.

But while I was out at the crack of dawn every Saturday looking for toys, I would happen across books as well. If a book looked interesting and was cheap, I would buy it.  Before I knew what had happened, I had too many books.

I had four or five copies of some books.  Books stacked to ceiling.  Books crammed into shelves.  Books holding up boards with other books on top of them.  It was out of control.

We had to start paring down.  Basically we spent two weeks hauling toy parts and books to various donation bins around Lexington.

By the time we finished the purge I had developed four rules to determine whether I should keep a book.

1) It's a book I haven't read yet, but am likely to read

A book should be read.  That is a book's intended purpose.  A book sitting on a shelf, unread is the saddest thing in the world.

2) It's a book I've already read, but it was good enough that I want to read it again

I do on occasion like a book well enough to read it twice.  Still Life With Woodpecker, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Prince Caspian are all books I've read multiple times.

3) It's a book I've already read, but it was good enough that I want to share it

This in my opinion is the only reason to ever have multiple copies of the same book at one time.  My wife and I gave out at least eight copies of Harry Potter books to various people through the years.

4) The book invokes genuine sentiment

The book in question conjures a specific memory. Either it was a well thought out gift, or it reminds you of the time you met the author.

One of my favorite books ever was a copy of Fatherhood by Bill Cosby that my parents gave me when Christian was born. They included a letter about what it would mean now that I was a father.

When I tossed out three garbage bags worth of comic books as a teenager, I kept three.  Two that had been Christmas presents from my mother (because I knew she went out of her way to find them for me) and an Uncanny X-Men Annual that my brother, John, bought off one of his friends at school because he knew it was the last issue I needed to finish my Atlantis Attacks set.  Every time I looked at it, it made me smile.

Which is why I kept it.

The Return of...?

I had a fight with my wife, Robin, today.

She feels taken for granted and used, like I'm not pulling my own weight.

She's right.

I can and should be working harder. As a journalist and a writer, I can work from the house. It never worked out before, because I'm easily distracted and distractable. I wanted a job outside of the house so I could spark my creativity, but mainly because I was scared.

I am scared.

I haven't written anything substantial in over two years, and that was a blog post about a flyer I found outside of Kroger. It actually got picked up by Fark.com and that was a professional high point for me as a writer.

Then I had the stroke. It took me months of therapy before I could read or write. My confidence was shattered.

I started on a book called Pants With No Pockets. It was to be a stroke memoir. I started this blog as a sideways way to eventually get a book deal. This blog was supposed to become that book. It might still become that book, but not any time soon.

Then I had the idea to do a blog about the background music in cartoons. Every time I hear a piece of music I look it up on wikipedia and track it down to its original piece. The problem is, my computer I write at doesn't have a sound card and the computer with sound has a bad keyboard. I can't write the blog without two computers and now that my 13-year-old son plays computer games, it's hard to get access to any one computer, let alone both at once.

But anyway, I'm going to try to write more, and sell some stories of some sort. I realize by not writing when writing is my only marketable skill that I have left, I'm actually being a burden to my wife and my family, which is the one thing I never want to be.

So, in conclusion, I am going to write like my life and wife depend on it. Because they do.

Handicapped?

I was only in a wheelchair for a (relatively) short time, but it felt like an eternity. I didn't have a mechanized wheelchair for fear that it would make me lazy, or I would stop trying to get better.

I've known several people who due to age or other factors, have no hope of improvement. I feel somewhat guilty now that I'm on the verge of walking unassisted, but I still have a long way to go.

The other day my next door neighbor mowed our lawn for us. We didn't ask him to, he just saw the lawn needed mowing and kept going. I appreciated it.

When my wife thanked him, he said he wasn't sure if he should have, but he noticed I had "a handicap of some sort."

My wife mentioned that I had a stroke and that up until then, I had mowed the lawn. I had also cooked, cleaned the house, washed the dishes, taken care of the laundry and half a dozen other things that likely contributed to me having a stroke.

Robin stepped up to the challenge and managed to take care of everything I used to do, handle the kids, work a full time job and somehow not crack. I'm very proud of her.

But, the point is, I don't even like her doing things for me, that's why I took on too much. Since my stroke she has had to help me in the bathroom, pick me up off the floor, and half a dozen other humiliating things that no wife should ever have to do for a husband.

Back when my right side was still completely paralyzed, I used to roll out of bed and be stuck in the floor. More than once Robin threw out her back trying to get me out of the floor.

I appreciate that.

I've known people who have had strokes and can't recover. I'm not sure why, physically, I had the stroke but I'm slowly coming back. I suppose if I'm forced to admit it, I am handicapped. I can think of things I still can't do for myself. So when I saw that New York is replacing their handicapped logos, I saw the new logo as inspiration.

It's a logo that implies trying. It's much less depressing than the old passive sitting in the chair-with-hands-folded logo.

Of Cabbages and Kings....

Kevin Smith tweeted that when he had the idea for Clerks 3, he woke up in the middle of the night, noticed the time was 4:20 in the morning, took it as a sign and went from there.

I just noticed that it was 4:11 in the morning, which is the number one dials for information, took it as a sign and started to write something.

I hope it's something informative, which is a bad segue, but if I stop now I won't finish, and writing is my central coping mechanism.

Lately I've been stressed, as stressed as I was before my stroke, which is worrisome because I'm on an antidepressant now and it shouldn't be possible for me to get depressed. The last time I was this depressed on my antidepressant, it scared me. I moved out of my parents' house, where I had moved with my family after my stroke.

Which wasn't a bad decision. Living with one's parents is never easy, plus just before I moved in I learned my father and mother had been lying to me about the biological parentage of my cousin, Michael. I needed space, before I snapped and said hateful things that I couldn't take back.

The situation in the last few weeks eerily resembles the time before I had my stroke. We're having money problems. A good friend of ours is having marital problems, so we don't see them as often as we used to, which leaves a big hole in our social calendar. Like last time they were our primary gaming partners and they had a young child, which is a serious situation when you have children and they notice the absence of this other child from their lives.

Also the one less child to buy a present for at Christmas becomes awkward.

But I'm meandering away from the subject, which (if there was a subject) would be that I am unduly stressed and worried about my health.

My chest has been sore for a week and I've been ignoring it, because Robin is stressed over work related issues and I don't want to cause her more stress. She's already told me that I'm not allowed to have a heart attack, and having watched how she coped with my stroke, I don't want to put her through that again.

Also like last time, my medical coverage is in limbo. My disability was recently cancelled and we got it reinstated, but they medical coverage runs out in July.

Which wouldn't matter, since I was about to go back to work and was about to get a driver's license, but I'm fairly certain that was tied to my being on SSI and since now I'm not (and since Robin hasn't mentioned it for a while and I never went to Lexington for my eye test) I'm pretty sure that dream evaporated.

Which causes even more stress.

Lastly and leastly, I said writing was my central coping mechanism, but in no way was it my only way to cope. I had comic books (which I haven't been able to pick up for three weeks because of our cash flow problem), cleaning (which Robin complains when I start to clean because she can't relax, regardless of the fact that I sit around and watch television all day while she drives across the state for her job), movies (Iron Man 3 has been out for two weekends and Star Trek 2 just came out, the last movie I saw at the theater was GI Joe Retaliation, and that was a once in the summer fluke) and laundry (which I can't easily carry since the stroke).

The Family Secret

When I was in the hospital, recovering from my stroke, my parents dropped a bombshell. My cousin Michael, was really my half-brother.

My mother gave birth to him before me, and my aunt and uncle adopted him straight out of the hospital and raised him as their own.

Suddenly, a lot of things from my childhood started to make more sense. My mother in tears because of a paper Mike had written when he was seven that said, I was adopted but that's okay because Superman was adopted, too, comes to mind.

After they told me this, I was still semi-verbal, but I had no "filter" on what I could say or not say. The very next time I was alone with Robin, I told her, "I have a brother."

"Yes you do," she explained. "John is your brother."

"No," I answered. "Michael is my brother."

"No, Michael is my brother," she said. "Your brother is John."

She has an older brother named Michael, too.

"No," I explained. "Michael is my half brother."

Again she responded that Michael was her half brother. Which he is. She does have a half brother named Michael that for various reasons we ignore, but somehow or another, and with much effort and comedic misunderstanding, I finally conveyed to her that my mother had another child, and that child was my cousin Michael.

"What I don't understand," she said, "is why they chose to tell you now?"

I don't know exactly, but over the next few weeks, my brain kept thinking about it. I'd wake up at three in the morning and tell Robin things like, "That's why Mike named his kids Holt!"

The next family dinner was awkward because I knew that Mike was my brother and he knew he was my brother but neither of us knew the other one knew that we knew.

I wrote in my blog about how awkward it was to know family secrets and not be able to say them out loud.

Mike's younger sister Kate emailed me, "Was that about Mike being adopted?" which sent me into a whole new frenzy of random thoughts. She had guessed it first thing, which I guess means either I wasn't being as vague as I thought or there aren't a whole lot of Holt family secrets. I'm assuming both.

Kate told Mike and she seemed horrified that John didn't know, so I told him. Neither of us told Elinor.

Kate said that Mike had been trying to get my mother to tell us for years, but that she wouldn't.

The first time Robin met Michael she told me, "You told me he was adopted, but you didn't tell me he was adopted from within the family."

This was years before I knew the truth, so this caught me off guard.

I'm pretty sure I said something along the lines of, "W-w-what?"

We decided he had been Aunt Carol's son, and that she had him out of wedlock.

The first time Glenna, John's wife met him, she told John he looked like Papa, our grandfather.

So now, Glenna, John, Robin, Kate, Michael and I all knew and it was starting to feel like a conspiracy. When we went to Berea to have pictures taken with the extended family my mother took us out to Cracker Barrel for lunch, had Robin take the kids to the car and gave the announcement that Mike was our brother. Robin, Glenna, John and I already knew this, so really Elinor the only person surprised.

She didn't take it well. Her boyfriend broke up with her after meeting another girl online and ahe posted, "Does anyone else have any secrets they want to dump on me?"

My mother was oblivious that one of those secrets was the news about Michael.

We moved in with my parents for the summer, because we had nowhere else to go. It was awkward. I couldn't trust them, and they couldn't figure out why not.

One day, when my mother, Robin and Christian were riding in the car together one day, and my mother and Robin were talking back and forth about "the situation" in veiled terms, after my mother left Robin asked Christian if he knew what they were talking about.

"Elinor is pregnant?" he guessed, so Robin had to include him in the conspiracy and now he knows.

John and I have bumped Noah and Calla up to full niece and nephew status as far as Christmas presents and birthdays go.

After Christmas, Mike and I had a brief conversation about it. We both acknowledged that he was my half brother and then I told him, "I was surprised to find out I had another brother, but I'm glad it was someone I knew my whole life."

Little Green Men and Such...

I'll admit I fell for the hoax about plastic being found on Mars, but for the first time in a long while I felt happy.

Why? I'm not sure. Maybe it just felt good to have something to believe, to know how I fit into the universe. If Mars had prehistoric life, if life was something that just happened, it would answer so many questions.

The scariest headline I saw all year was, "What if we're alone?"

It scared me.

I mean it's not that I was expecting grey aliens waiting to contact me, but the idea that in the vastness of space, humans are not unique, that Earth is not unique was somewhat of a comfort.

I don't expect an intergalactic federation of alien life or anything, but it would be nice to know that in the grand scheme of things, life can live or die, and then live or die somewhere else. That extinction of life on Earth wouldn't mean the end of life.

Lies, and the lying liars who tell them (part 2)

Yesterday's blog spawned an email or two from worried relatives worried about whether or not it was about them.

It's not. Nothing happened over Thanksgiving, no one person caused it.

I wore out before I could get to the point so I'm going to start with the point and then explain it from there.

I was watching the television show Psych the other day, and Sean's father taught him how to beat a lie detector test. Basically if you want to lie convincingly, you need to come at it from a place where you believe the lie.

I looked around the room in a panic to make sure Christian hadn't seen it. He hadn't. I was safe.

It's not that I don't want him being able to beat a lie detector test, I just don't want him to develop a lying habit. I've seen from experience what it does to a person's mental state. They believe one lie after another until they break with reality. They lose their grasp on what's real and what isn't.

As far as I know, my mother only told one lie ever, and it was a big enough lie to mess her up.

Lying is bad.

My son thinks it's as bad as swearing and I'd like to keep it that way.