I’m cleaning house, both literally and figuratively. We unpacked the last of the moving boxes from eighteen months ago over the weekend after getting many new bookshelves at Ikea. (50 years of socialism in Sweeden and the accomplishments? Abba, A-Ha, Roxette, and Ikea . . . oh yeah, and high literacy, low poverty, and . . . snore . . .) We have more than enough space for all of the books now — a first for Lisa and I in our many years together — but I needed to clean out the files and the stacks of newspapers and periodicals to really complete the project.
Plus I’ve been needing to unencumber myself of close to a decade of tomorrows and best intentions and random interests. I’m never going to get around to that second draft of my Worcester v. Georgia paper . . . or write that comparative history of dispossesion of Native Americans in the Early National Period and Pacific Islanders on test site islands in the early Cold War . . . or vindicate myself for dropping my physics major in 1994 by getting a handle on quantum mechanics . . . or become proficient in graduate level taxonomy . . . or understand “Islamofascism” by reading every New York Times article (A Brilliant Mind style, of course).
After throwing a lot of stuff out, I pared down my big folder of Stuff to Read to a smaller folder that I’ve been grazing over the weekend.
So did you hear the one about the guy who golfed across Mongolia?
