pack rat

When it comes to hoarding stuff, I've gotten better over the years, but I'm still a fairly impressive pack-rat. For instance, I've got boxes of newspaper clippings in the basement dating back to the 1980s, when I wrote for the local daily paper.

Do I need this stuff? No, but it's part of my history, so I hang onto it. Maybe at some point in the distant future, I'll make a bunch of nice scrapbooks and pass them on to my kids. Then they'll have to figure out what to do with it. Isn't that how it works? People just keep handing their stuff down through the generations, and no one knows what to do with it. Eventually, no one even knows who it belonged to in the first place, and maybe it'll get tossed out.

But I must say, after watching A&E's Hoarders, I feel downright neat and tidy.

Who knew that Dick Clark was a pack rat? It makes sense, considering he's been in the presence of stars ranging from Little Richard to Jay-Z; if I were in his shoes, I'd like to save momentos from those occasions too. But according to this AP article, he also has almost every issue of Life magazine and Playboy ever produced and many years of Fortune magazine. I swear, if he wasn't rich enough to rent out a warehouse to store all of this, he'd be one of those guys buried alive by his stacks of newspapers.

But I guess he's decided to simplify; he's putting a lot of this music memorabilia up for auction, including the first microphone he used on American Bandstand fifty years ago, a Michael Jackson sequined glove, and a bass guitar Paul McCartney played during the Beatles era. It's a no-reserve auction, and most of the profits will go to the T.J. Martell Foundation. No word on if his huge rubber band ball will go on sale, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.