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SGTDF #5: I Love STUFF 📚🧸📦

I love stuff. LOVE IT.

I collect comics, movies, toys, books, games, Mondo posters, comic book art, Magic Hat #9 bottle caps, records, and weird Power Rangers merch (on which I plan to write extensively in the future).

I also collected every movie ticket stub from 1997 until whenever movie tickets just wound up as an app on our dumb phones.

But collecting is one thing. The larger issue is I also save… everything?

The combination of these traits can make organization, moving, and even LIFE difficult, but thankfully Amanda has truly astonished me with her empathetic understanding of my predisposition to nostalgia and sentimentality. 

I am very grateful to her for this—and many other things—as sometimes this characteristic makes me feel like a freak toeing the line of being a hoarder.

  I swear I'm not a hoarder

At present, I am not technically a hoarder because all of my “stuff” resides in a few different places: 

• Our home

• My parents’ home

• A storage unit in my hometown

• My ex-girlfriend’s mother’s house on Long Island (I have to imagine these items have long since been burned in effigy)

• My cousin’s house in Queens where I lived for a couple of years. (I think? I don’t know, I’m afraid to ask)

Now that we’re mostly settled in our new home in Maine, each trip to visit my family in the Berkshires also includes just a little bit of sorting through the stuff in my parents’ house and my storage unit.

The end goal, of course, is to have my stuff in one location (or at least, one county) and to have sifted through it so I know that what I have is exactly what I want.

Storage is mostly full of stuff I've intentionally collected rather than stuff that is just still lying around—comic book long boxes (30 or so), toys still in their packaging, and some other collectibles that I plan on selling but haven’t gotten around to yet. 

Our last trip, I sorted through my childhood closet and took home some stuffed animals from a trip to Disney World 30 years ago, their tags still attached, along with a bloated freezer-size Ziploc bag filled with seemingly every note dropped into my locker from the 7th-10th grades. 

I found a piece of pottery my friend Renee made for me in high school, a box of loose action figures of all different eras, and a VHS tape of 9th grade history project that went above and beyond the scope of the assignment (we got a 96!). 

I also took my laptop from freshman year of college that somehow still boots up and has black-and-white desktop wallpaper of Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates having fun behind-the-scenes on Gremlins and an AIM shortcut that almost made me tear up when I saw it.

The track pad was broken so I couldn’t click around too much, but I look forward to unearthing 20-year-old abandoned screenplays and who knows what else.

Along with the computer I found a box of floppy disks labeled with the enticing possibilities of "Lightsaber Pics," "Star Wars Film Resources," and "AP English Docs 2."

Contained within are most assuredly masterpieces.

No, really, not a hoarder

This, unfortunately, barely scratches the surface of what I know is still lurking. I look forward to doing deeper dives on some of this stuff as I sort through it.

Among the as-yet unsorted items, are:

• A decade’s worth of GamePro, Nintendo Power, Nickelodeon, and Disney Adventure magazines

• Literally all of the school notebooks I have ever used in my life, from elementary school through college

• VHS tapes upon VHS tapes, both official and taped-from-TV

• All of my CD cases—separate from the actual CDs, which reside in a massive CD book that is also… somewhere

• 16mm negatives containing my film school masterworks

• Crates of unopened Star Wars toys from the Power of the Force era through at least the Episode III era

• A complete run of Goosebumps books through #42, Egg Monsters from Mars

• Complete sets of late-80s Burger King kids meal toys (my older sister worked there)

• Every board game I ever had as a kid, from TMNT Pizza Power to 13 Dead End Drive to Star Wars Trivial Pursuit and beyond

• Newspapers from 9/11 (??) and newspaper clippings that include any mention of Nirvana (there’s one about a lawsuit being settled from 2001) or Superman (there’s one about Superman’s classic costume returning following his short stint as Red/Blue electric Supes in the late nineties)

• Every poster that ever hung in my bedroom (this includes a Korn poster, I’m sorry to say)

• Calendars from 1996-2003, rotating between Star Wars, The Crow, and James Bond

• My collection of magic tricks (still in an old briefcase, along with homemade flyers for a backyard show that never happened) which was, at one time, my intended career path

• A complete set of Hardees-exclusive Gremlins storybooks-on-vinyl 45s (my Mom worked at Hardees for a time growing up, and as evidenced by my college laptop wallpaper… I really love Gremlins)

• Random prizes from a childhood spent in Las Vegas’ then-family friendly casino midways, still with tags on

• A Commodore 64 computer with a shoebox full of games on floppy disk, including Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex, which I was always too afraid to boot up (also WHY DID WE HAVE THIS)

• Complete sets of Batman Returns and The Rocketeer trading cards

• Seemingly any Star Wars-themed USPS stamp that has ever been released

• Baseball cards. So. Many. Baseball cards. 

• Plastic mini baseball helmets from Ground Round, in which they used to serve ice cream sundaes

• Every scrap of literature and/or garbage from Star Wars Celebration III in 2005

• Coloring books from pre-kindergarten complete with psychotic outside-the-line scribbles

• A rock collection, I guess??

• Random flyers from anywhere I ever traveled as a kid, including the riveting Silver Springs State Park in Florida (in which was also one of those novelty stamped pennies)

• A collection of silver dollars inside an old jam jar

• Unopened Star Wars: Episode I fruit snacks

• Unopened Star Wars: Episode II cereal (I guess I must’ve eaten the food tie-ins for Episode III)

• A New England Patriots Starter jacket (I have never been into football)

• Handmade birthday cards and Valentines from old friends and exes

• Boxes to obsolete computer software

• Sand art I created at an elementary school fun fair

• No to mention, PILES of loose action figures, from WWF to Power Rangers to DC Super Powers to Ghostbusters to TMNT to Terminator 2 to Batman ‘89 and beyond. 

I could go on, but you get the idea.

 Everything brings me joy

It’s not that I’m unable to part with

anything

—in fact, I got together a solid donation bag from the items in my closet that included some very cool stuffed animals, a Survivor board game, and some middle-grade novels—it’s just that I love

everything

. 

Collecting things like toys or comics or whatever is one thing, and not uncommon. While there’s certain sentimentality attached for sure, they can also purely be a hobby (or a job). 

A lot of times, specifically toys, they bubble up into sentimentality for something larger.

For instance, I don’t necessarily have a palpable connection to a particular unopened Lando Calrissian-in-bounty hunter gear action figure from the Attack of the Clones-era toy line—though I can definitely tell you where and when I bought it—but the real emotional connection in this case is to Star Wars itself. 

Star Wars: Rebel Assault II — The Hidden Empire

However, something like the box to the PC version of Star Wars: Rebel Assault II — The Hidden Empire? Holding something like that in my hands is fucking time travel, more than even playing the game would be.

Because the game, probably, doesn't hold up. But the memories of playing the game are still right there in that box.

It’s been tucked inside the same computer desk in my parents’ basement since we got our first PC in the mid-90s, and holding it takes me right back to sixth grade, skulking around in Babbage’s and eagerly reading the back. 

It’s using birthday money toward buying it and sitting side-by-side with my dad playing it, both of us so frustrated trying to fly the

Corellia Star (it's identical) out of a mining tunnel in Level 3—and then being ecstatic when we

finally

cleared it.

That’s such a specific memory I’m not sure I’d ever conjure again if I didn’t come across that box. Maybe I would, if the game came up in conversation or something, but it’s very different to have the tangible item in your hands.

It’s like a smell making you taste something your grandmother used to cook that you haven’t eaten in years.

Going through those middle school notes, most from my first love who later broke my heart before a Foo Fighters show, took me right back to 1999. (That show, by the way,

had a fantastic setlist

)

I could remember how to fold the paper into dumb little squares, what my classrooms looked like, who sat next to me, and how HUGE the stakes were for whether or not we were going to get to hang out on a weeknight. 

I suppose this could teeter on dangerously nostalgic, but I’m not really interested in trying to recapture the past or anything. It's just really important to me to be able to remember it.

The state of the world and overall disappointment in humanity aside, I am more than happy with how things have turned out within my own little sphere—I get to hang out with my best friend every single day, we have a home that we love, with pets we adore, and close friends who mean a lot to us and are happy themselves.

But I think, for me, having STUFF connects me to the past in a way that doesn’t feel so distant. 

It’s a physical, tangible connection to a memory. It's like taking a memory out of your brain and giving it physical form that you can touch and smell. It’s powerful to live in those memories every now and again, as long as you don’t let yourself drown in them.

I’s important that I remember how I felt when I was 13, or 20, or eight, because it helps me better understand and reflect on where I’m at now.

Where do YOU stand on stuff? Clutter or time travel? Would love to hear your thoughts.

At the end of the day, I guess I just really love my stuff. I think it's totally okay to have a lot of it. Marie Kondo would probably hate me. 

-Joey

P.S. Thanks to those who followed along with my

Shocktober programming

! I had a ton of fun, particularly rewatching all the Nightmare on Elm Street movies.

My definitive Freddy ranking: 

Dream Warriors

Original

New Nightmare

[a gap the size of the Grand Canyon]

Dream Child

Freddy's Revenge

Dream Master

Freddy's Dead

Here's a photo of our house dressed up for the occasion: 

The next chapter of "The Murder Club" by me and Vasco Georgiev drops December 20 in BATMAN: URBAN LEGENDS #22! This is my favorite issue of the arc, so I hope you'll check it out. (This rad variant cover by Travis Mercer)