No Accounting For This

Strewn about my office in various slidover piles are one-hundred-twenty-three Dungeons & Dragons books which, until today, had been sleeping in boxes in the closet. I threw away one box along with some of its contents because they were damp to the touch and smelled icky. The rest I have piled and sorted, catalogued, and eventually will sell or give away. Some I will keep. Most I will not. It's satisfying to throw away things I have held onto for so long. Who needs all these books, anyway? Nobody. I have no use for them. Few who play Dungeons & Dragons even have use for them. The books have nostalgic value, but little practical value and almost nil monetary value. (You almost can't give them away, like genre paperbacks.) I have itchy toes and hot ears. A strange phenomenon, Reynaud's. The capillaries in my fingers and toes (and ears and cheeks on occasion) constrict involuntarily in response to changes of temperature and mood. When the capillaries relax, however, the inrush of blood brightens the skin and it feels hot. But if you were to touch one of my burning ears, it would not feel hot to you. The human body is such a strange contraption. I am currently reading Richard J. Evans' The Third Reich at War, the final volume of a three-volume work detailing the rise and eventual downfall of the National Socialists in Germany. This historical work is amazingly easy to read; the research is meticulous; the sources, which include scholarly works, war- and holocaust-survivor's memoirs, soldier's diaries, archived memos and reports, intelligence service records, sermons, and many others, detail the German war machine through so many different lenses that the statistics and passive voice one generally finds in books on history become invisible. Reading Evans' work is not a struggle but an engaging and unabashed presentation without embellishment or opinion to cloud the view of a terrible moment in history. I'd better stop. I keep coughing up adjectives.