Two very significant things happened during these few years at IUS. One was Dr. D, as described above. The second thing is that my home library, which at the time might have included two or three hundred books, began to grow.
It all started in the parking lot of Kroger on State Street in New Albany. I had exited the store with a couple of my kids, and had picked up the latest Scientific American at the magazine rack.
Flipping through it as the kids piled into the back seat, a card fell out – you know, those annoying cards that they stuff into every magazine, the ones that irritate the daylights out of everyone who ever reads a magazine? Well, this time was different. There was a monthly science book club, with two regular selections and many alternates offered. Intrigued, I signed up.
And it wasn’t enough for me to have two new science books a month. I began returning to Hawley-Cooke, a bookstore chain across the river in Louisville, every Saturday.18
And I learned that if I came across a reference to a book of interest in whatever book I was reading, I could call Hawley-Cooke on the telephone, tell them I wanted the book, and they would order it for me and have it ready for me to pick up the following Saturday.
From 1995 to 1998, my home office in Greenville went from two bookcases to six.
This began to happen at work, too. The Internet was now a thing, and both Royce and I would turn to it for inspiration and how-to in our robot motor design endeavors. And there, too, I’d see mention of this book or that. And I’d get on the phone to Hawley-Cooke.
I bought books on robotics, obviously; and books on heuristic programming. And genetic algorithms. And the nature of artificial intelligence. And neural networks. And operating systems. And superconductors. And the cerebral cortex. And the nature of human intelligence.
And then – everything changed.
The Internet was now a thing, and as 1998 dawned, I discovered a new website:
Amazon.com.
Wait a minute! I can go to this website, look up a book, and order it right away? I don’t have to pick up the phone and call Hawley-Cooke? I don’t have to wait till the weekend, then drive over to East Louisville???
To say this was life-changing is to grossly understate. Damn that Jeff Bezos! The man’s a demon!
In the 23 years since I discovered Amazon.com, I have bought tens of thousands of books there (and a lot of other stuff, too). As I write this in July of 2021, I have already put in 180 orders this year alone, thus far. That’s very close to one per day.
Is there something seriously wrong with me? Absolutely.
But this two-decade marathon effort to buy – well, all the books – has resulted in the crafting of an ADD heaven on earth. I have all the hyperfocus material I could ever want, at my fingertips; and when my brain craves distraction, I have tons of that, too – and it’s all useful, high-quality distraction.
My home, put simply, is a place that ADD brains live for. There are more than 5,000 books in it, filling more than 35 bookcases.
It is a cliché in the ADD universe that such people are natural clutter machines. We not only create clutter, we thrive in it! Our desks are messy. Our rooms are messy. And this is because, well, our brains are messy. Delightfully so.
It is also a cliché that one of the most common forms of ADD clutter is... stacks of books! And that’s been true in my world now for decades. Yes, there are bookcases everywhere, but I’m constantly pulling books off of them for this project or that, creating stacks. These stacks are, of course, constantly shifting, and I am constantly re-shelving the books, but from where I’m sitting at this moment in my office, I count six cluttery stacks – two right next to me, one on the sofa, two in my reading chair, one on the coffee table.
Earlier this year, I reached a point where there is literally no more space anywhere in my home for a new bookcase. This stands as a metaphor, of course, for the human population explosion. New books have nowhere to go, once they drift over my transom.
I must achieve zero population growth. What to do? Get rid of some old books.
This was worse than surgery, of course, but I managed. For each of the 300+ books that have arrived in recent months, I have disposed of a corresponding number. It’s painful, dreadfully so, but humans have to live here...
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