From the “If You Can’t Laugh At Yourself” file, I submit the following photograph:
Look at all the little losers
The funny thing is, pretty much all of these clothes are somewhat in style again in one way or another. There are a couple of shirts in that photo that I wouldn’t mind having now.
If anyone can point out which of these little urchins is me, you win a prize.
I was digging through a box of stuff from my youth the other day1, and among some bits of junk, lo and behold, I found the first issue of Moon Knight. Wow.
I found it to be in surprisingly good shape. I say surprisingly because I had tons of comics when I was a kid2, but I wasn’t one of the kids who kept their issues in nice mylar sleeves. No, I read them and folded them and stuffed them in my bag when I went to grandma’s and dog-eared the pages and lent them to friends and kept them in untidy stacks in my drawers and closet. The box or two of comics that still survive from that time are yellowed and worn and torn. ”Heresy!” I hear the comic snobs cry. And don’t even get me started on what kind of shape my Star Wars toys are in; there’s not a single figure or vehicle still in an original box. I’d scorch and paint X-Wings to make them look battle-worn. Armies of Stormtroopers would be caked with the dirt and detritus of wars fought on some godforsaken swamp planet (i.e. my backyard).
And all things considered, I like rediscovering things that way. They may have been abused, but they were used. They were the fuel of my imagination, and when I come across them again after so many years, they help remind my why I do what I do, and how I became the person I am. I don’t want to see an old comic of mine in a sleeve – I’d much rather see it bent and softened and remember the family camping trip that it accompanied me on. I don’t want old toys in a box on a shelf, untouched - I want to find a carton of defeated plastic Imperial villains, worn and dirty from some epic battle fought with all the action figures of all the kids on my block, out in the big field behind the school.
My office closet is fairly deep, more like a small storage room than a typical “closet”, and the back of it acts as a repository1 for all sorts of random things.
Yesterday I had to mount an expedition to its farthest reaches, in search of something. I now forget what, exactly2, because I never actually found it. I got distracted when, at the back of the room, I dug up one of my old messenger bags. One that I hadn’t seen or touched in almost four years. I took it out and opened it up, and it still had a good amount junk in it.
I found it odd that it would still have so much flotsam in it, especially writing materials, as that’s the stuff of my work and I usually treat all my bits of paper quite well. I vaguely remember having bought a new Powerbook around then, so probably in my excitement I stuck the new computer in a fresh new bag, grabbed what I thought I needed from the old one, and then tossed it into the closet.
Nothing I found in the bag was particularly important3, but it’s an interesting snapshot of the moment. I probably spent a good hour just looking at the stuff and trying to mentally reconstruct what I was working on at the time. It’s funny how you can find “treasure” like that from just a handful of years ago in your own life. It was fun.
[ click on the photo for the marked-up version at Flickr, where there's notes on some of the stuff that was in the bag ]
