A sad farewell

My brother is moving out of a 3 bedroom house with a huge bonus room and a large yard into a roomshare situation where he just has one bedroom and bathroom. The result for him is that he had to leave a lot behind. The result for me is that I had to go and clean out all of the shit that I had stored in his garage, lo these many years.

I’m not really going to miss all of the old college textbooks or the games missing half of their components, but I’m really going to miss the novels. I had a collection of what seemed like every pulpy science fiction novel written before 1995. There were just a massive number of books. And all of them good. Well, maybe not all of them. Some were downright bad. But that’s beside the point. They were mine! MINE!

Sure, they hadn’t been read for years, since I put them into storage, but the knowledge that they were there, should I ever want to go read them, was reassuring. Now, they’re going to be gone forever, probably into the grubby little hands of some pimply adolescent nerd who’ll never love them like I did. Damn kids. They ruin everything.

I can’t even tell you how traumatic this was. I went through and winnowed the collection down to just one box of the really, really good stuff. But just looking at that wall of books that would soon be gone forever… it was a tough moment for me. Now my dreams of having a comprehensive sci-fi library someday are dashed forever. And even more tragically, I own less stuff now.

Man... I love stuff.

*sniff*