Deatomize your bookshelf

 

You could, provided you’re provided extra time to dilly-dally, examine your bookshelves in an exhaustive manner. Thumbing through each page, checking for creases, stains and the always shocking dog ears. They are the unlucky antithesis of the rabbit’s foot, a keychain charm whose popularity should’ve ended with the War in Vietnam. But what person alive has ample freedom in the day to wallow in such a luxuriant process of studious analysis?  

I don’t. When I first heard about decolonizing my bookshelf, it sounded like a great idea. I had no idea what it meant, but words that start with “de” have been good to me through the years. Why would this one be any different? Family dinners need decompression time – as well as dessert. Scenic detours encourage the misuse of maps. Fights demand deescalation. Imagine being denied the ability to delete? Or decide? Since Dee Snider wasn’t going to take it, neither would I. In his case, it was the abstract control wielded by overbearing parents. In mine, it was checked luggage, thereby opting to fit everything in my overloaded carry-on.

Choosing not to define decolonizing was a marvelous decision. Once a word is limited to what the dictionary says, it loses most of its power. When I started doing some research into what it meant, I saw the amount of work such an undertaking would invariably take. Me alone, leafing through a stack of paperbacks, checking the names mentioned in every Acknowledgments to see if they correspond with the most updated list of international war criminals. It seemed like a lot of effort. Not only that, it would mean reading everything again, or in most cases, for the very first time. For a complicated set of reasons based mostly on ignorance and laziness, I decided against decolonizing my bookshelf. Instead, I’ve found something far more satisfying.

I call it, deatomizing my bookshelf. For someone like me, cultivating artifice is a pastime, deliberately lathering on another coat of intellectual stucco before the rising sun bakes it into place. It’s not easy. And it is very time consuming, but when I’m finally done, just think of the shelf space I’ll have. Books are wallpaper - a way for people to enter my home and think, “he’s not so dumb, after all.” What if they don’t get that idea and wonder about the contents or worse yet, the words lurking inside each text? It’s a risk I can’t risk.

You need alien technology to get started. Ray gun, vaporizer booth - really anything that breaks down objects into their simplest form. Naturally, a sizable chunk of my library is what you might already consider primordially basic. I won't name names. Even in those special cases, there are always a few extra particles to tease out. I’m happier, clearer and my shelf is roomy enough to sleep on. Some people, not me, like snorting their favorite books. It’s a different way to grapple with the material. Whatever I consume now is in one ear out the other incinerator.