Living Out Loud

Organizational Therapy

opt-2025-10-21-%1

I've never read Marie Kondo's book on organizing, the one where she talks about only keeping those things that "spark joy" in you. Furthermore, I've never been to the container store. When it comes to tasks like finding cleaning supplies or, God forbid, first aid stuff, you'd better ask Wonder Woman, because I don't have a clue. I occasionally sort out my collection of cables, keyboards, old mice, and external hard drives, but I'm not anal about that stuff.

I needed to preface this post with that information so that I sound less crazy from here on out. I am, in fact, manageably crazy, and the one activity that I find soothing like no other is collecting and organizing anything with words and language. I either own or have owned a massive collection of comic books, baseball cards, movies, music, and books—the latter three as analog and digital media.

My brother and I started with comics in the early '70s when you could buy the latest Batman or Superman (Action and Detective) comics for fifteen cents. We branched out to both Archie and Richie Rich as well but decided to avoid the Marvel Comic Universe completely. There was no Spider-Man, Incredible Hulk, or Fantastic Four for us. That stuff was modern and gimmicky, and we wanted a collection with historical substance. We had hundreds and hundreds of comics organized by title and date. We regularly begged our folks to take us to the used bookstore some thirty miles from home whenever we had any money. My brother, who just turned 59, still has the damn things. I gave up my share in an extortion scheme he concocted after catching me smoking while we were in middle school.

I collected baseball cards twice, once in middle school and again in my twenties when I had disposable income and there was a sudden glut of companies making cards after decades of it being a single-player market. If I hadn't grown disgusted with the sport because of doping, I'd probably still be buying boxes of cards to this very day. I had some really nice older cards of Hall of Fame players like Jackie Robinson and Mickey Mantle. I kept them all organized by manufacturer, year, team, and player. I owned a specially made tray nearly three feet square that allowed me to sort and organize hundreds of cards at one time. In the end, I gave them away for next to nothing just to get them out of the house, but the person who bought them still has the whole lot.

Like a lot of Gen X kids, I got a ton of records from Columbia House when they'd send a 14-year-old 11 albums for a penny and the promise to buy more in the future. And because I'm Gen X, I got to buy the very same recordings on cassette and on CD; thus, my rationalization to go absolutely nuts when Napster and BitTorrent became popular at the advent of the broadband era. I have nearly 40K songs in my digital collection, and every single one of them is properly named and tagged with the artist, album, track number, and release date. Some recordings, like concerts and bootlegs, are hard to classify, but I still have a system. I have a pretty good idea of almost everything I own. It all eventually gets played.

My latest passion is electronic books, mostly in EPUB format, although I do have several hundred audiobooks too. For years, I dutifully paid Amazon for the rights to read books on my Kindle. As more and more stories came out about how horrible Amazon is to work for, I became less inclined to spend money with them. Then they took the step of preventing people from downloading books they had already purchased. They had the ability to totally remove my access to thousands of dollars' worth of books whenever they felt like it. Fuck that.

I use a couple of sources that allow me to be anonymous while downloading practically any book I want. I still buy books at the bookstore to support some writers, but my complete collections of Raymond Chandler and Robert A. Heinlein aren't making money for their heirs. I have thousands more books than I will ever be able to read, but I keep downloading more. I love having a library that is so big and well-organized that I can suggest something to just about anyone based on their interests. I send books on religion to my sister, who is a pastor, and books on birdwatching to my brother, who is a nature guide. I send my art-loving son books on Jackson Pollock and Renoir and my daughter books on just about anything.

Every book in my collection is labeled with its title, author, publisher, release date, a synopsis, classification tags, and an image of its cover. That makes it easy for me to tell you that I have:

I read a lot of books, obviously, but I also spend a lot of time reading book reviews and chatting with other bibliophiles about what we've read. And, like I am with music, I know what books I have and what I'm looking for. It's not just mindless hoarding of digital media for its own sake. What fun would that be?

Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇

#Books #Music