My Big Chest

Nothing makes me nostalgic like a bunch of useless junk. My mom made me go through all the crap that I had been keeping in her shed for years and decide what I was going to keep. The problem was, most of the crap I had saved was awesome.  Emphasis on "was".

My old Aunt Elanor gave me this weird treasure chest before she passed away. That, and the fact that she worked at the pioneer museum, is literally the only thing I remember about her. It's pretty awesome though, mainly because that's where I'd put all my stickers. I thought this was a good time for a blog. Did I mention I'm unemployed?

Here's a nice arial view of the surface. Some stickers that immediately pop out are the KISN 97 FM, White Sox, and old Utah Jazz logo. I don't know how the State Farm ones in the corner made the cut. The Eagle in the upper right hand corner was my first trunk sticker ever. 

Here in the southwest region, we see a lot of TMNT including three shredders clumped together. Anyone who has taken Visual Design Basics at SLCC will tell you this was a bad move. These stickers came from the Ninja Turtles trading card packs. If you didn't collect trading cards in the early 90s, you were just an a-hole. You'll notice though, that the shinier, smaller TMNT stickers above the top shredder feature a different type of artwork. That's because they came free in packs of Bonkers. I also like the old MLB logos and the Joker sticker from the first Batman movie. 

I must have collected Dick Tracy cards at some point, because that's where the Faceless Felon came from. You'll notice the Mr. Belvedere fan club sticker at the bottom left. I lined the entire top of the trunk with these babies circa 1988 with zero intention of being funny or ironic. I loved that show so I joined the fan club. What some emo kid working at Grey Whale wouldn't give for fresh sheet of those. That's enough of my stickers. 

I probably hadn't opened this thing in almost 10 years, so how happy was I to find my vinyl single of Nirvana's Sliver? Pretty happy until I pulled it out and it was broken. Garbage. 

How about my short lived collection of Saturday Night Live trading cards? Chia Head, Mel's Char Palace, Victoria Jackson...the list goes on. My favorite part was how I put them in an album with spaces for the ones I didn't have yet. As if someday I'd have them all and wouldn't have to go through the trouble of arranging them when the time came. Garbage.

Somehow, a mounted stamp set from the mid-nineties made its way into the chest. I'm only guessing it's from the mid-nineties based on the fact that it features bears doing cartwheels and the classic font-with-dots at the end of letters. If this was in mint condition, I could probably get an overweight lady with sweat pants and seven cats to pay fifty bucks for it. Sorry Stampin' Up, you can't fire me again. Garbage.

An 8x10 photo of Bobby Hansen. Kept it!

I forgot to take a picture of it, but behind Bobby Hansen, you can see the the entire bottom of the chest was filled with notes from when I was like 14. A lot of them were folded in pretty cool ways, but I started to read them and they were pretty much all the same thing over and over. "I can't believe Melissa told Candice that I said that"..."Weezer is so cool"... I had to throw them out. 

Four magazine holders full of Mad from the late eighties and early nineties. You bet your ass I kept these.

In seventh grade, giant jawbreakers were the trendy candy of the day. They took forever to get through. I was working on mine one day at lunch, and my buddy Sean said something along the lines of "I bet I'll run into you like 20 years from now and you'll still be working on that". Then Geoff said, "knowing Jim he probably will just to try and be funny". So I kept it in a Ziploc bag, just waiting for time to pass. The reality of it is, or course, that I'm the only one that remembers that conversation, and if I took a trip down to Las Vegas in two years just to break it out, I'd look like a huge jack ass. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I kept it. 

I found some old vinyl records including my limited edition Tool EP! I thought it was gone forever. Too bad it's so warped from the heat. When Tool released Aenema, I ditched school just to be one of the first 50 people to purchase it at Best Buy. That's how I got the record. I kept them all. 

Ticket stub from Bad Religion on their Stranger than Fiction Tour at the Huntridge. My first concert ever. I kept it. 

Here's a rabbit pelt that could have come from any of the several Boy Scout jamborees I had attended. I don't remember exactly how many wooden nickels it cost me, but I do remember it serving as the main ingredient for a crude loincloth as Rocky and I ran bare assed through the campground. Garbage.

I bought this Soundgarden Superunknown Guitar tab book when I was 15. It was shortly after I learned to play the guitar, and shortly before learning that you need to retune a million times until you break all your strings to even attempt to play any Soundgarden songs. I kept it.

I kept this picture because I realized that I still wear that shirt.