I know, I know, that’s the line for when you show the bedroom on MTV’s Cribs. But I’m talking about a different type of magic, and I kind of like this picture for what’s in the background. I’m in my office, which is, by any measure, a small room.

If you had visited when I lived over on River Lane in Guerneville, you might remember the five (or was it six?) bookshelves worth of books collected over too many years of school and pleasure reading. Moving necessitated divesting myself of nearly all of the books, whittling the collection down to just the books that held a lot of meaning to me. It’s a hard process, but sometimes you need to have that literal letting go of your history. I’m down to two bookshelves (three, if you count the one that serves half as cookbook storage and half as make-shift panty) and as you can see they’re a little, err, crowded. That visible top shelf has my JD Salinger paperbacks, my original copy of Jimmy Buffett’s Where Is Joe Merchant?? as well as John McPhee’s La Place de la Concorde Suisse I bought at a used bookshop after my first work trip to Switzerland – I still haven’t actually read it. I’m of the opinion that it’s healthy to have books you’ve bought but haven’t read yet – it’s aspirational and, well, comforting to know when I’m ready to pick it up, it’s there. There’s a copy the Jane English translation (my preference)of the Tao Te Ching,  (which, seriously, everyone needs at least one copy of – know where it is, and read a passage at random. Trust me.), Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet I hurriedly bought from Book Shop Santa Cruz when a long-ago girlfriend said it was her favorite book and I, the lit major, didn’t want to cop to not having read it. This reminds me that while my Kindle collection is likely rivaling my actual print book collection, I can’t tell you when. Where, or why I bought the digital copy of Logan Hunder’s Witches Be Crazy, but I can tell you with certainty that I bought A Crash of Rhinos by the poet Paisley Rekdal from the Utah State University bookstore when I took a creative writing seminar that reignited my muse.

There’s cardboard magazine holders for my collection of the now-defunct Lucky Peach magazines, as well as Craft Beer & Brewing, and Woodcrafters issues. I love getting magazines and most are disposable, but some you hang onto. These aren’t your parent’s hoarding every copy of National Geographic, but rather useful magazines I revisit fairly regularly.

Of course, there’s bric-a-brac and assorted electronics crowding all the available shelf space, but the last thing I’d like to draw your attention to are my devout companions, my 1988 Fender Telecaster electric and my 1991 Fender Montara acoustic guitars. I bought the Telecaster shortly before my dad passed away, and the Montara about six months after. They both mean the world to me and have been wonderful company over the decades. I have other guitars that hold their own meaning to me, but these two… Yeah.

Thanks for joining me on this examination of a corner of my over-crowded office. What’s not seen is what’s behind the camera, namely my PC that I’m typing this on as well as my recording gear. Hopefully you’ll have the opportunity to hear that put to use sooner than later!