I spent some time today going through some boxes in the junk room and picking out things to haul to the dump. Among the things to go: Oracle 7 documentation, freebie CDs from trade shows seven years ago, lots of floppy disks, papers, bags, trash. We have a reasonably-sized room in the basement that’s almost completely filled, floor to ceiling, with banker’s boxes, and in those boxes you are liable to find anything.

One of the boxes — long since sorted and discarded — famously contained:

1. A complete set of Simpsons dolls, missing only Maggie;
2. A glass Garfield coffee mug, offered as a premium at some fast-food restaurant in the 1980s;
3. A plastic-coated-wire dish drainer;
4. Two 9×11 darkroom trays;
5. A Swedish gasoline-fuelled blowtorch, of the kind you see cartoon characters using.

The box was labelled “Miscellaneous”.

The problem is that few of the boxes have labels that are much more helpful than that. A good quarter of them are labeled, literally, “Random”, and a lot of the others have labels like “Gadgets (broken)” or “Wires, probably useless”. Somewhere in that room, there are at least three toasters, and one toaster oven. Some of those boxes are full of old newspapers — and I don’t mean ones with stories about us, or things like the Washington Post from September 12, 2001; those tend to get thrown away. I mean, they’re full of just random newspapers that were thrown in a box because we were too lazy to do anything else with them. We have paid movers to move such boxes from house to house. I once opened a banker’s box only to find that it was full of miniature bags of snack chips. Judging by the dates on the things, we’d moved that box three times.

Anyway, once in a while you do come across a gem:

This is an excerpt from the first page of a diary I found in a box that otherwise contained old shopping bags.

Particularly interesting is that this diary was begun exactly nine years ago today. I don’t generally keep a diary, so this is particularly serendipitous.

It’s amazing the difference nine years make. In 1995, I had a gray BMW and a PowerBook. Now, I have a different gray BMW and a different PowerBook. The superficial details of my life don’t change all that much, I suppose. But nine years ago, I never would have guessed that today, I’d be living in the middle of nowhere in fucking Virginia and sorting through boxes of old junk.

Some of today’s other activities drove home the theme of how time changes circumstances. One of the things I was trying to root out from the junk room was my collection of seriously obsolete software and documentation. I estimate that I threw away CDs, floppy disks, etc., etc. with an original retail value of about $20,000 (there were some copies of Oracle in there, which tends to push the price up pretty rapidly). Today, they’re worthless. The 80 mb hard drives I didn’t throw away; I just can’t bring myself to do it. They’re the blowtorches salted through this year’s generation of boxes, I suppose.

It all makes me wonder — I realize that this is hardly going to come as a surprise to most readers — what I might be doing nine years from today, in 2013. I might be dead by then, of course, but the odds are against it.

Presumably I’ll be chucking today’s 160 gb disks into boxes and sneezing from the dust. I only hope that some kind of hover-belt is invented by then, so I can do away with the step-stool.