Strange and Sundry

[rockwood]

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

Comments

[taimdala.livejournal.com]

I love your description of your old desk. I have pockets of 'memorabilia' like that everywhere around the house. On just about every flat surface, in fact. My husband is a pack rat like I am, only his pack rat tendencies differ from mine. He collects mostly comics. I collect mostly print media (other than comic books) and art supplies (of all sorts). We meet in the middle with our shared love of fine art images, mostly of the 19th century masters.

However, your comment of using this incident in your fic elicited a "Yes!" from me. I've found everything is useful for fic and nothing is wasted. After all, we're not out to alienate but to entice people to stop, sit a spell and enjoy the story. The more people can recognize of themselves and RL in the story, the more they believe in it.

What a great gift you gave yourself, squirrelling away all those odds and ends in that desk, to open up and relive those moments later on. As for what to make of the cheese wax, had it been me, I would have sculpted roses out of it and made a corsage...but that's just me. That wax is just too close to being art supplies to just throw away. LOL. ^_^