This post is not about books but I need to use books to illustrate a point today.

Here is a photo of about half of our books.

Because we are in the middle of an international move, we had to go from living with this number of books (above) down to living for about five months with the bare essentials of this number of books (below).

Now before you report me to Child Protective Services for this kind of cruel treatment, please let me explain that we are about 1km from four brilliant libraries.  So we do have access to more books than just this little short stack.

The question is, what books would you put in your short stack of essentials?

In answering which books are in mine, I have to explain that I am from Arizona.  I know I’ve mentioned that before, but the contents of my short stack cannot be understood unless you really understand what that means when someone tells you that they are from Arizona.

For your future reference, Arizona produces outliers.  Not just physical outliers or statistical outliers but we are bred to be emotional outliers, which leads us to being social outliers, and basically that just means that we trust no one.  Not the pilot, the captain, the president, the doctor, the bank, or, I’ll be honest with you here, anyone.  We trust no one.  Just accept that without taking it personally.  There is nothing that can be done about it so let’s just all move along.  Nothing unusual to see here.

Now I know what you are thinking.  You are thinking of that friend you have from Arizona that is social, fun, normal, and gives standard-type Christmas presents.  But I’m here today to tell you that that friend is either not really from Arizona, as in generationally raised by a long line of Arizonans, OR that friend is faking normal.  Because a generational Arizonan is never truly normal.  We are outliers.  In this case, statistical outliers on the normalcy bell curve.

With that little glimpse, you should not be surprised that one book that made it into my essential short stack of books is this one on studying to take the amateur radio license exam.

Or this book on becoming an expert using the map and compass.

Look.  I live in a large city and have an iPhone on me 24/7.  I’m not out exploring or anything.  But if some day we are all out on some old container ship and I’m the only person left conscious and I need to be able to 1) get the ship in a certain direction AND 2) be able to use the radio on board, I’m ready.  In fact, I would probably save all your lives after receiving critical coordinates over the radio and then using the map and compass to thread the needle between Scylla and Charybdis.  With that kind of pressure and all you nice people relying on me, I simply could not pack up these books in good conscience.

It’s a bit of a curse.  We don’t sleep well at night unless we gave our friends this book for Christmas last year, which I did, and bought an extra one for myself.

And this book, same deal.  Christmas present for friends and an extra one for myself.

And another one.  Exact same.  Christmas gift plus one.

The answer is yes.  I could in fact save us all from a pandemic and perform the emergency wilderness tracheotomy on you after you choked on the steaks that I properly cut from some critter.  And so could my friends, IF they read the books that I gave them.

So the next time you see an Arizonan awkwardly sitting in a corner at a party, just know that we are probably mentally preparing how to safely evacuate everyone from that party should a meteor smash into the neighborhood.

Hug an Arizonan.  We work really hard in our imaginations for you.