Strange and Sundry

I spent part of today rooting through some of the drawers in my old desk---the OLD old one, a wooden writing desk my parents got me in the fifth grade. Today's goal was to clear out the junk and salvage what I might want to keep; no small task, considering the strata of faded movie stubs and stale cough drops.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the junk was related to writing in some way. Dozens of broken pencils and empty pens, half-used notepads, ancient homemade business cards....the detritus of a childhood spent daydreaming novels with half-plagiarized plots and shallow characters. But some of it was much more bizarre. Highlights include:

--A packet of 8 bee's-wax candles, one of which is slightly used.
--200+ prize tickets from the arcade at the old mall (you know, those tickets you can spend on junky plastic toys?).*
--A keychain shaped like a gecko, and another with smiley face.
--A half-sized velcro wallet with dinosaurs on it.
--The torn-off-and-saved pages of two calenders, with Dilbert and Garfield comics.
--A melted candy-cane

And my favorite:
An old pencil case containing a paper towel wrapped around several small pieces of wax; specifically, the kind of wax that those mini cheese-wheels are wrapped in. I was a strange kid. Am a strange kid, really, unless you believe all these people who say I'm an adult.

I did find some things worth keeping, notably a bunch of my old buttons. They have slogans like "To Save Time, Let's Just Assume that I Know Everything," "Paranoia is the Delusion that your Enemies are Organized," and "I don't go Postal; I get Medieval."

I guess my family's pack-rat tendencies show themselves in ways like this. However, despite the fact that I'm glad to be getting rid of the stuff I'll never really use, I did enjoy looking through the drawers and sorting the items. Some of them brought back memories. Mostly they were things I'd never have remembered otherwise, and which weren't important, but I'm glad they all got one more moment in the light before I let them go. And I'm glad the junk got saved until now. It needs to be cleared out to make room for MORE junk, but having a physical record to prompt sudden recollections---sights seen, ideas fostered, old friends who disappeared into the aether---makes sense to me.

Maybe I'll find a use for some of these memories in one of my stories.  Maybe in one of my games (some of the notes I threw out were equipment lists for RPGs; what'd you expect from a middle-schooler Nathan, emo poetry?**). But whatever else they've done, they've reminded why I like to be a pack-rat.

Except for the cheese-wax. That just reminded me not to be a moron about pack-ratting.

*I think the arcade, Boardwalk Boulevard, closed a while ago. Darn!
**Okay, there was ONE emo poem I found. But there were a lot more game design notes. :-)

Blessed be,
~Nathan