I drove out West to the town where my Mom lives yesterday to pick up a turntable from a dude that posted it on Craigslist a while back. I went there a week ago to check it out and he wanted too much for the whole package. I could tell it was a little cheap looking when he showed it to me. He emailed me over the weekend and said he’d cut the price in half so I loaded up the dog in the pickup and drove out. You get what you pay for, but more on that later.

On the way back from the turntable excursion I stopped by my mother’s house and let my flatulent dog do whatever the hell his body was beckoning him to do the entire ride out in my two-seater truck. Blarrrfh. I also stopped by to get a box of records that my mom had buried in a spare room.

Underneath the box of records I noticed a box labeled: Photos. Memorabilia.

I had to check it out.

There were photos that I hadn’t seen in over 20 years. Photos of relatives I’ve never seen before. Photos of people I grew up with that I had forgotten existed. But the craziest things were greeting cards and letters from relatives written to me over the years, letters from an 8th grade girlfriend to me and vice versa, a little autograph book signed by all the neighborhood kids back in ‘89 when I first moved to Charlotte from MA. I have no idea how these are even still around, much less in a box at my mom’s. I guess I put everything in a box back in the day and forgot about them. Gotta love time capsules like that. You get nice gems like these:

My first mullet standing strong. I kind of look like Dwayne Schintzius.

Apparently I used to be a girl. Even then I was into metal.

Nice shorts, buttneck. I’m most likely playing a Megadeth riff right here. In fact there’s nothing else I could be playing on that guitar.

There are hundreds more in that box at my mother’s house, and in the hutch in the living room there are even more in various albums that are even older than these. It would take me a couple full days to go through everything. I dread to think what kind of stuff I’ll find in the baby photos.

I only looked through a few bags of loose photos yesterday since I wanted to get home and try out my turntable and listen to all the ELO albums that have my Mom’s maiden name scribbled on the covers in marker. I got back and cleared out my studio space and made room for the player and the speakers. It took me four albums to realize that the thing plays everything slightly fast and gives it a faint “chipmunk” effect. You get what you pay for. Least I got some funny photos out of the trip.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 8:29 am and is filed under Uncategorized.