Little Insanities in the Storage Closet

My fingers are black because I'm digging through hundreds of alternative newsweeklies and throwing away any pages without my name on them. It feels as narcissitic as it sounds, but I've been hauling around an entire issue of every publication I ever wrote for or edited, and the box count is up to "fill a small closet." Since we will soon need our small closet for our small person, it's time for me to scrape through every Go-Go and Good Times and just keep ... whatever it is I need (?) to keep. 

I know I need to hold onto this stuff for myself, but in my head it's for my offspring. I imagine them pushing open the stuck door to a musty attic, waving hands through the floating motes of dust and clapping eyes on a trunk that's covered with stickers. They undo the clasps and lift the lid to find half-crumbled broadsheets from the early 21st century. I picture them poring through every issue, carefully absorbing the words I wrote on water redistricting, light brown apple moth spray, Pajaro Valley Unified School District's deputy superintendent, and the rave scene in late '90s Denver. Then they'll know how cool I was.

Or, if they're anything like me, they'll skip the articles and gaze in wonderment at the advertisements, the prices on things, the silly looking outfits, the fact that words were struck on filthy paper at all and distributed freely in the streets on the off chance that a newspaper might make someone want to buy an ice cream cone.

Truth is, my words are only precious to me, and I suppose that's fine. These articles are my sea monkeys, ossified in the bottom of a dry fishbowl but each one still with a fake name and a fake personality. I also stumbled upon a thick green three-ring binder full of baseball scoresheets for simulated tabletop baseball games I played, solitaire, for the better part of a decade, complete with elaborate statistics and team records. This would be charming if it were a relic of my childhood, but this was something I played and made in my twenties. I spent the healthiest, most energetic decade of my life entranced by a random number generator for a fictional sports universe. That binder was the hardest thing for me to throw away.

Up next: how to catalogue and store the ephemera of an ex-marriage.