Over the past couple of weeks I’ve taken three different loads of books to Half Price Books to sell. Probably about ten parcels in all, a parcel being either a liquor box or a grocery sack — they’re roughly equal in volume. I would like to say that I didn’t do it for the money, but I needed the money, scant though it was. (I used to work at Half Price Books, so I won’t complain about the pittance they pay, but I will say that even I was shocked by how low the last offer was.)

Mostly, though, I just needed to unload some inventory. It was starting to get oppressive.

I’m not nearly as manic a buyer of books as I once was, but I can still walk out of Half Price with six or seven volumes under my arm and think nothing of it. The money isn’t the issue; sometimes those books are only a few bucks apiece. The problem is that books are to be read, not owned, and keeping a personal library of books I was never going to read had begun to gnaw at me. I felt increasingly guilty about buying new books while their predecessors sat unread, and the booklover’s wall of denial had started to crack.

Consider: post-purge, I still own somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 books. (I probably got rid of at least half that many.) If I were to read one book every day, it would take me two years to get through the books I currently have sitting in my house.

Sure, some of them are reference books you’d never read all the way through, and some of them I’ve already read. (Not many, though; I tend to get rid of them once I’m done. I’m not much of a rereader.) The point stands: I have way more books than I can possibly read.

I’ve been acting like I’m eventually going to get around to them. Only someone suffering from a similar delusion could identify with my fantasies about being quarantined or put under house arrest, just so I’d have an excuse to get through some of these bloody books.

Bibliomania aside, there’s another reason I keep so many books around, and it has to do with keeping my options open. I mean, god forbid I should have to read a book that doesn’t exactly suit my mood of the moment. And furthermore, when I get an urge to read a certain book, I want to read it right now. Not an hour from now, after I’ve run to BookPeople to buy it, or two days from now, when Amazon delivers it. And don’t even bring up the possibility that it’s out of print and the library’s copy is checked out and I might have to wait weeks to read it. That’s just too horrifying to even think about.

All of which makes me a good American, which is to say I have a strong sense of entitlement and am easily discontented. Barry Schwartz can explain why too much choice is a bad thing — and I recommend his book on the subject – but given that I was born into the upper middle class of the most affluent nation in history, any limiting of my own choices is going to be self-imposed.

I remember coming back from Czechoslovakia in 1992 and realizing how battered Americans are by extraneous choices all day long, and I remember the revelation that followed: You don’t have to take everything that’s offered. Sometimes the best choice is no choice at all.

But if you’re going to make a choice, Schwartz says, the best choice is the one that you don’t second-guess.

One way to not second-guess your choice is to know everything about the ramifications of every possible choice so that you can know for certain which is the best one. Good luck with that.

But the other way is just to decide to commit to your choices and affirm them once you’ve made them. (Remind you of anything?)

I still find myself trolling my own shelves for something to read and then gathering six or seven books to take to bed with me, unwilling to commit to one until I’ve dipped into several of them. At times like these I’m pretty sure I’m less interested in reading than I am in being well read, and if I could just lay my hands on the books and have their contents appear whole in my head I would. This is reading as acquisition, not as interaction.

But the other night I actually opened a novel, Brian Morton’s A Window Across the River, and then read it through in one sitting. I had gone to the library looking for another novel of his, referred to as “near-perfect” in a review of the filmed adaptation, but it was checked out. So I settled for one with a plot I was less interested in.

It didn’t change my life or blow my mind or even make me think things I had never thought. It was just a well-written, unpretentious novel about believable people — New York artists, but still — trying to figure out work and love and whether one always has to trump the other.

And I sat up in bed with a book that was not my first choice and read until I was done, and not even the heavy reproachful slience of all those neglected books in the other room could stop me.

A friend has written me telling me he expects me to post every day in public, which is interesting. His take on it is that NaBloPoMo is a game, that I’ve signed up for the game, and that therefore I need to play it. A legitimate point. 

But one of the perks of getting older is that I no longer feel like I need to finish everything I start. I can’t tell you how much of my life I’ve reclaimed by learning how to put a book down when I realize it’s going nowhere. More cruelly, I have far less problem bailing on a conversation, or even a friendship, once I determine that the connection has gone dead.

Another benefit of aging is realizing how often I play by someone else’s arbitrary rules instead of taking a second to think about what I actually want or need in a situation. I think this is pretty common: we’re bludgeoned with so many nonnegotiable agreements every day of our lives — when was the last time you read the fine print on the licensing agreement that pops up whenever you install new software? — we just assume that this is how things work. It is, but only because we agree to it.

So posting every day just because I signed up on a whim on a particular day last month doesn’t strike me as a moral imperative . . . particularly since I didn’t make the promise to anyone but myself. Sure, it’s a game. But it’s one I make the rules for. And my rule is that I’m going to write every day this month. Not for you. For me. 

I’m pretty sure everyone will find a way to muddle along even on those days my brilliance goes unrefracted through the ether. And for my part, I’ll get to write about things that are important to me, like who I’m fucking and who’s fucking me, without worrying about who might get upset, or hurt, or offended.

I must be cruel only to be kind;
Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.

So in a fit of something or other — distraction? hubris? self-flagellation? — I signed up for NaBloPoMo a while back . . . and haven’t posted since, except to correct that 3 for All story when Tim wrote me.

And that’s okay, since posting to my blog is not automatically by definition a good thing, like meditating or exercising is. Even when those things aren’t enjoyable, I benefit from them, regardless of the quality of the experience. Whereas if I fire up MarsEdit and burn an hour or more of my limited lifespan railing about something, there’s not much value to it beyond the quality of the post itself. And therein lies my problem with blogging.

I’ve tried to do this three or four different times now, and this is my longest sustained run yet, but eventually the same thing happens every time: my writing is taken over by this very distinctive blog voice that I really don’t care for. It’s hard to define, but the adjectives that spring to mind are pedantic, judgmental, glib, overemotional, and easily offended. In other words, just like I get on message boards.

I don’t understand what it is about online communication that brings these qualities out in me, though I suspect a variation on the distancing effect, in much the same way that normal people turn into homicidal pricks on I-35. Whatever it is, I’m starting to question my ability to transcend it.

And I’m also asking myself what the point is. This blog made a lot of sense when I was in Chicago, because my busy days were of specific practical interest to a lot of people. I felt like conveying what I was doing was useful and appreciated, so I felt an obligation to the people reading. And writing helped me to clarify some of what I was learning.

But now that I’m back home, the informational quality has dropped to essentially zero — it’s not like I’m posting tips on adding zest to your sentence structure — and I have become what I so often derided, a navel-gazer with a bullhorn.

Before I did this I was keeping a journal more or less regularly, and that’s completely fallen off, for obvious reasons. And I don’t like that trade-off. Because for everything I post on my blog that might be of use to other people, there are nine or ten things that are only of interest to me, or that I don’t want to say in public, and those things are lost when blogging has replaced journal entries.

Bitch, bitch, bitch. Reading back over this, it sounds like I’m soliciiting testimony about how awesome and relevant my blog is and entreaties to keep it going. I AM NOT. Soliciting, I mean. I’m just thinking out loud, because I promised someone (myself) I was going to do this every day for a month and I would like to know why I’m doing it.

Or not doing it. The compromise I’ve landed on is this: blogging every day is not necessarily a good thing, but writing is. So I hereby declare November to be National Journal Writing Month. I’ll be writing every day, just like NaBloPoMo; the only difference with NaJoWriMo is that you won’t necessarily be able to read all of it. I need to be able to freely discuss who I want to fuck or fight without fear of the ramifications, and that’s what my journal is for. I’ll post the ones I think should be public, and I’ll probably be wrong about some of those, too, but what the hell.