I decided to take a break from writing wedding vows to try to unpack some boxes from the corners of my brain. Speaking of boxes: for as long as I can remember, I’ve had boxes of stuff. All kinds of stuff, most of it garbage. Regular readers of my nonsense/knowers of me personally are no doubt already aware of this, but I’ve always been a nostalgia junkie/pack rat/sentimental fool, and throwing things away just does not come easily to me. The number of boxes has fluctuated over time, but I’ve always had at least a few, and I’ve often had a lot. They’ve gone with me every time I’ve moved, out of one closet and into the next, sometimes under the bed, sometimes in the basement, one time in a pyramid in the middle of my bedroom that I had to walk around to get from one side of the room to the other (that was a very sad year for me).

Nineteen years ago, while packing up to move back home from Texas, I chose five boxes at random, taped all of them shut without opening any of them, and threw them into the dumpster at the apartment complex where I’d been living with my soon-to-be ex-wife. This was the absolute peak/nadir of my box-having life. I left at least eight more boxes (probably closer to twelve) in the walk-in closet, also without opening any of them. My reasons for doing so were threefold:

1. I simply didn’t have room to bring everything back with me. Some of the boxes would have to stay behind, full stop.
2. If I’d started looking through all the boxes to decide which ones were most important before loading up the truck, I’d still be there today, living with a new family and internally debating whether I should continue to hold on to my fourth grade report card, or my birthday cards from 1993, or my official Mason Shoe salesman certification that I signed up for as a joke in when I was 12 years old.¹
3. A teeny tiny part of me wanted to be a petty bitch and make my ex have to deal with some of my collected detritus and ephemera.²

I know I left some good stuff behind, and every now and then I’ll remember something specific, and I’ll get a lil sad, but by and large, it was all garbage, and should’ve been disposed of much sooner. I currently have the smallest number of boxes that I’ve had since I first left home in 1996, and it’s a nice feeling. There’s still plenty of stuff in those boxes that I do not need to hold onto (I’m looking at you, SAT results from 1994 and cheap acrylic paints from 2007), but some of the stuff is quite essential. For example, I have a shoe box full of letters my dad wrote to my mom when he was deployed in Vietnam in 1965-66. She kept every letter he sent to her, and I have all of them, and that’s pretty awesome.

Speaking of non sequiturs, I’m gonna see Clutch live this weekend, and I’m incredibly stoked for that. It’ll be my 13th time, and my first in nearly two years, which is pretty long time for me to go without seeing Clutch live these days. They’re touring on the 30th anniversary of their massive self-titled second album, and that just happens to be one of my favorite Clutch albums. They were originally talking about playing the album in its entirety, which would’ve been extremely cool, but they apparently decided to not do that, and have instead been favoring songs from the album on their setlists, which is still fine by me.

They’ve opened with “Animal Farm” a couple of times on this tour, and I can’t begin to imagine how I’ll survive an entire show if they pull that insanity with us.

One of the cool things about seeing Clutch live is that you legitimately never know what they’re gonna play next. The four members take turns writing the setlists, so every stop on a given tour gets a unique set. They have some standards they almost always play, and large stable of songs that they often pick from, but they’ll drop a legitimate deep cut into the set surprisingly often.

I didn’t get to see em play “Rats” until my twelfth time, and it’s not even really that deepa cut.

They’re playing some casinos on this tour, which I’m pretty sure is a first for them, and the casino nearest us, which happens to be one of their stops, also happens to be the casino we visit most often, which happens to be pretty fuckin rad.³ We don’t go there terribly often, but we go often enough to get free or discounted rooms, free slot play, and free food when we do go. I know it’s not really “free” if we’re spending money every time, but we’re basically breaking even, and we’re having fun without hurting anyone, so as far as I’m concerned, everyone’s a winner.

I gotta wrap this up. As far as I can discern, enchiladas haven’t figured out how to make themselves yet, which is too bad. There’s some AI I could get behind. Thanks for reading. Sorry if you were expecting a nice tidy conclusion. That’s not really my thing. Before you go, dig this screenshot from the Wikipedia entry for “Yabba Dabba Doo”. It made me snort-laugh.

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1. Undoubtedly, I would eventually decided “yes” to all three, and when I finally made it back to Bloomington, I would have to use those boxes to build a shelter, because there’s no way I could afford to live in this city if I wasn’t already established here. ↩︎
2. A few months after I moved back, I saw a post on her Myspace wall asking if anyone was interested in a loose box of football cards from the 1970s, so I was at least mildly successful. That’ll teach her to cheat on me. ↩︎
3. That sentence could’ve been much clearer, but here we are. ↩︎