why we collect I've been saving stuff since I was five, but I'm a major loser as a collector. Say my buddies were into baseball cards; I'd collect football cards to be different. Now I'm different: I'm not counting the money I would have made had I not been such a dumb fuck. My buddy Matt says he thinks collecting sucks, which is total bull, because if you've ever been to his apartment you can't hardly move cause of all the Hummels.
I got to thinking about collecting because I don't collect anything anymore. As you get older, it seems easier to grab a garbage bag and clean the closet right out. That's how the Closet Cleaner got its name: I'd return home every summer from college and look into my closet and roll my eyes at all the crap. Out went the fourth grade math papers, the brochures I'd received from the state of Montana as a class assignment in sixth grade, the ribbons I'd won in YMCA swim meets; and the dried leaves I'd pasted into my father's college notebooks. And that was just for starters.
Digging through my closet was a spiritual exercise as well as a practical one. I would turn each item and ask myself if I was going to wake up in the middle of the night kicking myself for throwing it away. Now I can't even remember anything I tossed. Goes to show you. Part of the reason I enjoyed cleaning my closet was I remembered all the relatives at my great grandfather's house with their U-Hauls after he died and all the stuff pitched in the dumpster. Saving a bunch of mementos hardly seems worthwhile knowing your kids are gonna send them to the Salvation Army. And let's face it, unless you're famous, who wants your kindergarten numbers exercises? At some point, we decide we don't need the baggage.
My theory is that collecting stuff is like trying to find anchors to keep you from slipping toward death. The leaving-something-behind theory. "He never did much with his life, but he left a lotta paperwork and trinkets in shoe boxes under his bed. He was a good man."
Looking at my inventory from the past two decades, it could have been worse. Consider what people have collected, according to my research: dirty diapers; plastic airplane windows; college students' shoes; women's glasses; snippets of hair; photographs of feet; chunks of concrete; an assortment of live and dead cats; breast milk; bags of garbage; and library books. When Jack Crain of Watsonville, California, died in his trailer home, authorities found 4000 model car kits stacked floor to ceiling. Lowell Davis of Savannah, Missouri, by 1991 had collected 4139 signatures in his project, "How Many People Do You Meet in Your Lifetime?" And Christian Sanderson, who died in 1966 and had so much shit that his house in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, that it's now a museum, saved everything from a piece of a plane that crashed into the Empire State Building to the match he used to light the candles on his 60th birthday cake to the shoelaces he was wearing when he saw Harry S Truman sworn in as president. Chris, we salute you! You were a good man.