Cleaning Out the Basement of All Basements

I spent a few hours of my Sunday this week helping my dad sort through about 30+ years of basement junk, oddities, memorabilia, and minutiae from the olde family homestead. Believe me when I say this is one dense storage space--the surface debris represents the most recent years' collections--address books, college textbooks, miscellaneous documents and post-secondary fodder, but delve a bit deeper and you'll find artifacts dating back to high school, grade school, kindergarten, toddlerhood, infancy and even birth. I found old sketchpads from my angsty tweens, teeball uniforms, blankies, yearbooks, polaroids and various other, semi-meaningful ephemera representing half-recognized phantoms and mysterious youthful ramblings. Knee-deep in the physical manifestation of my existence, I could almost hear the booming intonations of an unseen narrator: "Katie Beach! This is the stuff of your life!!" Once we scratched the surface we began to realize that this is indeed a monument that goes 10...15...20 layers deep into the defining possessions of me and my older brother's life and times. We didn't even come close to the central nervous system of this titanic beast of a clutter, and I suspect we won't for many weeks. Maybe months.

Anyway, i thought I might highlight the best of the found artifacts here for your enjoyment:

A VHS tape of the 1976 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Cincinnati Reds. I can't wait to watch this again, as I have many happy memories of playing it over and over again as a kid. I believe the narrator is the immortal Joe Garagiola. It'll be nice to see the Reds wiping the floor of Riverfront Stadium with the Yanks--4 games to zero, an embarrassing Series sweep for NY!



A "brand new" original, mint-in-box April O'Neil Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figure, complete with action camcorder accessory! This is apparently a Christmas present that was never given, perhaps hidden too well in the depths of the basement. Anyway, if it was actually received I can tell you, it would not still be in the box.

Now this is an excellent example of a post-college professional development artifact. A complete set of training VHS videos, loaned to me by a former employer. From 2002-2004 I worked as a retail assistant for an art supply store, and this is a series of instructional videos for the "Creative Products Salesperson." I never watched 'em, but I'm sure I did just fine selling watercolor supplies to housewives without the excellent advice of the first tape, entitled "Say 'Hey' to the Customer!"

Groovy late 1970's family photographs. For some reason I've never really been able to unearth many baby pictures of myself (or many from my toddler years either, now that I think about it), so it was nice to find some of these and see that there are, afterall, records of the second Beach child to be found.

Army men! Firemen! Dinosaurs! Farm animals! Cowboys & Indians! All mixed up in a giant bag o' plastic fun, all ready to fight to the death for my amusement! An amazing find that will definitely bring me hours of crazy, mixed-up diorama enjoyment.