Slowly The Book Collection Dwindles In Physical Form

I've been busy lately. My plan is simple - get rid of all the books.

Well, maybe not all. But roughly 95% of them are going out the window.

I've been throwing everything up on Ebay. The last four boxes of comics are almost on there. I started throwing a lot more of the books and collected editions. It is time for them to go.

Why the big purge? Because I decided to go digital. Also, in part to go a little more minimalist as well. Having been in Austin with a bunch of my stuff in storage has made me less fond of having to drag all that stuff out and around whenever I get settled in. I'm still in a state of being in-between places but hopefully that will be done shortly.

The plan is to get a Fire HD 10.1 screen from Amazon. Why that one? Because it becomes very close to a comic book size and digital comics look amazing on it. I'm tired of lugging around all the books and having it take up space on a bookshelf. Let me cut it all down to the ones that I have some sort of personal attachment to and get rid of the rest. For what I can sell it on Ebay, I could easily buy it again in digital form for about a buck an issue. What does that get me? A lot less stuff to carry around, a glorious device to read them again if I need to, and some cash in my pocket.

I figured I would start with the books and then slowly move over to the video games as well. There is a little more work to make sure I have everything backed up the way I want it, and I want to make sure that I don't miss the systems as much as I think I do. There are some games that I want to get, and I would hope to get a Retron 5 to be able to but some of the older systems to the side and have the gaming area take up less room next to the TV.

Am I missing the comics as they are going out the door to the post office? Not so much. There are some things I am missing, but I've sold them before and gotten again later when I had the cash and desire to re-read them. I've been in a mode for a while where I just want to experience the new things and cast aside the old things. The world is just a little bit bigger, and there is more that I want to experience and see and learn. Re-treading on familiar ground is comforting, but I don't always want to fall in to the trap that the past can become.

Each box I deliver out the door is a little less weight that I have to deal with on my shoulders. When it is more of a relief, I figure that must mean something.

Optimism Being Shot Down

I've tied a few times more than I should at trying to put together a Facebook post about the recent shootings by the police on American citizens. I want to scream and shout in to the void that black lives really do matter. That those who are supposed to uphold the law are not above it. That when we see murder, we call it murder. It isn't a debate about what exactly is pornography here, this is quite simple.

I've never understood racism. I disliked people because of what they thought, or what kind of asshole they are. I'd make fun of groups like hipsters because I treated them like a group and ignored any individual. Through it all, I knew I wasn't perfect myself. I know that we are all the same and that we can spend our time in life doing whatever we want and we should do it without outside fears. Internal fears should be what we fight, not each other.

I think of the radio host who said that the Blue Code of Silence is something that exists, and cops don't call each other out when there is a bad cop among them. We should be striving to be better than average, but it seems that the lower end of the spectrum drags us down way too far.

I don't want my friends to live in fear. I don't want them to have to be someone different other than themselves because they may do the wrong thing in front of the wrong person and then they are dead.

I just get frustrated and lost. This isn't the way the world should work. When we see the things that make us different, it should be embraced instead of treated like the enemy. All these imaginary lines between our physical boundaries and our personal boundaries and we forget that it is all in our heads.

I'll never have the magic words to put it in to some magical perspective or have a full understanding of the situation. I can only be here to help others who don't have the same platform that I have to get that voice. Damn it, it shouldn't be this way. Everyone should have the same say.

I look at my Bernie friends tearing apart Hillary with such unfounded hatred and anger. I see the Trump fans do the same on their side, as well as trash each other. There is so much that people are against that it is hard to remember what we are actually fighting for.

I don't have the answers for how to fix things, but we better start doing something outside of spinning our wheels continuously in the dirt, fingers in our ears, and blinders on our eyes.