So The Wife and I spent much of the day cleaning out the cave below our apartment, preparing to take untold treasures to Columbus next weekend for the garage sale my parents are hosting. This is a chore we’ve put off for years, partly because the basement is a dark, scary place … and partly because it’s a complete clusterfuck … stuff stacked everywhere.

Digging through boxes we haven’t seen in years is always an interesting experience. We had a general idea of what was down there, but some of the specific things had escaped our memories. So, among the coolers, old golf clubs, camping gear and mountains of Christmas shit, we found:

• A beer tap, one of the heavy-duty ones you get from the distributor when you bring home kegs for a party. Probably stolen from a party in Athens.
• A stack of my now 22-year-old senior pictures. If you want, I’ll sign one and send it to you.
• Three sets of drum sticks and a practice pad. My career as a band geek was short — I think just the first two years at Hastings Junior High — but I remember putting a lot of time in with that pad. Probably would have been more productive than the football career I gave it up for.
• Three copies of Tom Robbins’ Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. I mean, I liked the book, but three freaking copies?
• Many of the Vonnegut books I had been meaning to dig out anyway. Breakfast of Champions. Cat’s Cradle. Player Piano. Wow.
• A stack of letters from the high-school girlfriend. The Wife was significantly less amused by this discovery than I was.
• Miles and miles of coaxial cable. From, uh, borrowing cable service from the house in front of the West State Street efficiency in Athens.
• The only remnants of my Wisconsin fishing days: a cigar box filled with about a dozen lures, including a Rapala minnow still in its box, a couple Little Cleo spoons, a few spinners and my one and only Johnson Silver Minnow. I looked at these things and thought, “Damn — I should go fishing again.” And then I remembered the hours Dr. History and I lost, suffering under the delusion that there were actually fish in those fucking lakes…
• The copy of Archie: The Archie Griffin Story, signed by Arch and given to me for what was probably my 10th birthday. That one will not be going back to the basement.
• Every single goddamn souvenir cup I’ve kept from every single Ohio State, Cleveland Indians and Cleveland Browns game I’ve attended in the last 20 years. Seriously, there were hundreds of them.

Most of that stuff won’t be making the trip to Columbus, but we found a lot of neat shit that will. So if you have a couple extra bucks, stop by Mom and Dad’s house on Saturday and buy a piece of Uncle Crappy’s past.