I’m trying to get rid of as many things as possible because I’m unnerved about the number of “baby boxes” that are shipped to my house everyday. Candyce and I made a pact that we wouldn’t purchase anything unnecessary for our newborn, so I trust that these boxes contain only the essentials. But those essentials are adding up fast.

Since I cannot stand clutter, I’ve spent the last three days exploring my house with hopes of finding unnecessary possessions. If this new stuff has to stay, then this old stuff has gotta go!

I’ve already eliminated 99% of my “nostalgic stuff” from my home shortly after I got married. That means I trashed at least 150 pounds of stuff from The Real World, college, Boy Scouts, high school, and various art classes. These all were fished out of the boxes marked “keepsakes” that I dragged from house to house. I could not have been happier than the day I dragged my black trash barrel to the curb because I knew that once the trash truck flipped that barrel upside down, there was no turning back.

So honestly, there wasn’t much left to throw away. That is until I decided to see what was inside a footlocker my dad gave me two months ago from his years in the Navy. For the record, my dad brings stuff from his house in Georgia every time he comes out Arizona. My guess is that Mom wouldn’t let him throw the stuff away and muscled him into bringing it out to me. So as their house became more simple, mine became more cluttered.

Junk in the Trunk

I popped the latches open and then lifted the lid and got a waft of crypt-like air from Mom and Dad’s basement. I lifted away the layers of old T-shirts, yearbooks, photo album, CD cases, and letters from girls.

Over the next two hours, I held each item and tried to remember the moment in my life when that item meant a lot to me. Once the nostalgia evaporated away, I ceremoniously dropped each item into the metal trash can. That includes about 75 CDs.

I mean really, what do you do with old CDs? I converted most of my music to MP3s two years ago, and do you know what? I haven’t touched those MP3s since. It seems like too much of a hassle to go digging for them on my hard drive. All the music I could ever need is on Rhapsody.

I decided to sell those grunge/alternative CDs to a trendy music store in my neighborhood. He slid the stack back across the counter and flatly stated: “I can’t do anything with these.” I ended up donating them to a music store on 7th Avenue downtown because the store was cool (think High Fidelity) and I knew they needed a lot of help to keep their doors open. So here I am on my second round of music, and I didn’t even bother ripping them onto my hard drive. I just threw them away.

Welcome Freshman

The last two items in the footlocker were two yearbooks from a huge part of my life:

  1. Young Harris College 1996-1997
  2. Georgia Tech 1997-1998

Young Harris College had a fantastic program that allowed local high school students to attend classes like college kids. This was a big deal to me because I had too much ambition to sit around my senior year and pretend to be king. In a lot of ways, YHC was the high school that I always wanted.

First of all, I couldn’t believe that these things are 10 and 11 years old. A lot can happen in eleven years. A couple weeks ago I hosted a week at Camp Covecrest for teenagers who were toddlers at the time that yearbook was printed. That blew my mind.

I eagerly flipped through the pages of both yearbooks and saw the names and faces of classmates I’d forgotten about. This made me happy. So I went on Facebook to look up some of my favorite people and see what they are up to. I could not find anyone! What’s the deal here?

Everyone in those yearbooks are around age 30 now, and maybe they don’t waste their time with social networks. Who knows? I’m concerned that this is becoming a trend in my life. Nobody from The Real World New Orleans cast showed up for The Real World 20th Anniversary earlier this year. It was just me representing the seven of us. It seems like everyone I met between ages 18 and 21 have disappeared from the face of the earth. I care about these people and it would be nice to know how they are doing. (So if you are reading this and you were in one of those yearbooks, send me an email!)

So now my teens and twenties are reduced to a cardboard box just large enough to hold a pair of Dr. Martens. ;)