A certain sense of dignity and respectability comes with almost* any job. I respect the kid or the senior citizen that must ask, “Do you want fries with that?” at McDonald’s. The same holds true for janitors (they do a lot of nasty crap for a living), phlebotomists (I might be a dentist in Kenya**, but that doesn’t mean I can poke a vein with a needle very well), gardeners, teachers, computer people, the list goes on. Anyone who works to pay the bills is worth their weight in something they like. I’m currently valued at 142 lbs. of cinnamon bears.

That doesn’t mean that I want whatever job some of these entirely worthy people have employed themselves in. It also doesn’t mean that outside of needing a source of income to retain their cars, houses and relatively healthy diets, I understand why some people do what they do. I would never desire to be an accountant. I don’t want to work in the restaurant business ever again. I have no ambition to be a librarian.

I assume that librarians suffer from OCD and want a big, dusty space to take it out on OR they have a desire to maintain cultural artifacts such as books, magazines, newspapers and lists of people who have kept their books too long and will soon be contacted by a repo company who will force them to return the borrowed item. Each idea may be partially true.

Libraries house so many items, I wonder if they all matter. The library at my old school maintains what might add up to miles of microfiche representing decades upon decades of forgotten newspapers reporting on events that could probably be erased from time with little to no disturbance in the time-space continuum. It also holds books that even though the library has owned them since their publication in 1945, nobody has checked them out. Books that are never bought except by libraries that won’t ever stamp a single date on that awful little card someone glued onto that single blank page before the title page go out of print for a reason. This leaves us with one question:

Clearly, nobody cares.

Should we waste space and try to preserve this fart-in-the-night

that had minimal impact on our world?

I bet most librarians would say, “yes”. If they didn’t, and we lost another book, I’m sure somebody would write the same thing, just using different words eventually, so let’s save time and maintain the original crappy version***. Do librarians do the same thing with their lives? Do they catalog the minutest events including conversations, commercials, scenes and emotions? I’m really asking how much do all of us keep crap on the shelves that should be forgotten? Have we made something minimal into a monster that doesn’t need to live with us anymore?

Our testimony helps defeat the devil, there’s no getting around it (Rev. 12:11). We have to remember where we’ve come from, but I don’t think we need to maintain every little detail. Especially the ones that leave us with complexes. We can probably get rid of any scene we were afraid would be burned into our retinas, too. How do we do this? Copious amounts of beer seems to work for some people, as does hypnotism, but I don’t recommend either. I would suppose we learn to lay those things down at the foot of the cross. We don’t give them the attention they demand and kick them off the shelf.

You’ll need the space for the new stuff anyway.

*Pimping, selling drugs, thieving and writing Geico commercials are not respectable forms of earning a living.

**Pulling teeth in a third-world nation does not qualify one to be a dentist. Let them believe whatever makes them feel better though, if you choose to do this.

*** Whether or not something is valuable is 90.2% subjective. Everyone who wants to, or who has something to say should try to be published. If I don’t like it, then so what?