A Leisurely Stroll Into the Past

*canned laugh track, "womp womp" horn go here*

In April, I’m taking a trip to Ireland and England to visit my brother, finally presenting me with an opportunity to use my passport. I got my passport about five years ago when my friend Logan and I were planning a trip to Canada that never came to be, and since then it’s gotten less foreign exposure then [FIND NAME OF BAND/MOVIE/BOOK THAT ISN’T POPULAR OUTSIDE OF UNITED STATES FOR JOKE – DON’T FORGET]

There are usually two categories that items you rarely use fall into. There are the things you never need but come across every single day to the point of annoyance, until the day you actually need said item, at which point it retreats to the deepest recesses of the space underneath your bed. Then, there are the items you never see, never use, and never give a single thought to. These items either find their way into a Goodwill bag without your knowledge or are consumed whole by termites. After five years, which included two more years of college and a handful of moves after that, my passport was dangerously close to falling into that second category.

Following weeks of searching my house and my grandmother’s house, I finally decided to give our basement another good once-over before I paid $60 for another copy of my passport. As it happened, there was a tied-up grocery bag in our basement holding several important documents (my social security card, my birth certificate, my Klub Kool-Aid membership card), including my passport. SUCCESS.

My attention turned to the mess that begat my predicament. In the year and a half since my roommates and I had moved in together, our basement had become a labyrinth of months-old junk mail, dust-coated furniture, tangled AC adapters, seldom-used sporting equipment and assorted personal memorabilia.

In searching my grandmother's basement for my passport, I'd come across a pseudo-collage (there's another word for it but I don't care) an old friend of mine had made me for my high school graduation, compiling photos of us on a piece of construction paper with the lyrics to the Friends theme song written in the middle. Basically, exactly the kind of gift high school kids make for each other, given how out of whack our time-to-money ratio is. Surely there were gems I’d neglected in our own pit of paraphernalia.

You can probably guess where this is going: Matt looks through some old stuff in his basement, unearths a few trinkets from his childhood, gets nostalgic, finds a gram of coke hidden in some couch cushions and spends the rest of the day doing lines and trying to have sex with the water heater.

Um...I mean, just those first three. Those three things only. Yeah. Them.

What follows is a list of some of the most notable things I found and some stories about them. For those of you concerned that a blog post centered on a bunch of old mementos that bear no emotional significance to anyone other than the blogger himself is trite and without much potential for entertainment, your concerns are 100 percent warranted. So let’s do this.

Forget Madden - THIS is the pinnacle of football simulation. "Foto Electric Football" is basically a large box with a light inside that illuminates a transparent screen at the top of the box. Each player reviews a selection of plays, illustrated with lines and dots on a piece of paper, and, when both players have picked their plays, lay them on top of each other on top of the lit screen to see what happened on the play. If the line showing the ballcarrier runs into a defender, that's where he's tackled.

If this sounds simplistic and hopelessly outdated, then GO TO HELL. This game is AWESOME. This used to belong to my uncle; eventually, my grandparents let me take it home one time when I was a kid and I never returned it. I am the Bill Walsh of Foto Electric Football and I will accept all challengers.

Guitar tabs - because reading music can go right to hell! This is a binder of tabs I had printed out for years ago, when the only songs I was interested in learning to play were either horrifically difficult ("Second Heartbeat" by Avenged Sevenfold) or simple to the point that I really could've learned to play it if I'd just listened to the song more than once (every single Bowling for Soup and Good Charlotte Song in here).

One of my late grandfather's many hobbies was woodworking. He had a small workshop in his basement where he would retreat many evenings to fashion pieces of novelty furniture and meticulously craft models. This often led to my irate grandfather kicking me out of the basement for trying to crush my own hand in a set of clamps, but sometimes, his passion for carpentry manifested itself in the form of gifts like these.

My brother and I received these boxes with our names on them as a Christmas gift when we were young, and they became storage units for knick knacks and trading cards. For a while, I was convinced my passport was in here until I remembered that I used my "Matt Box" exclusively for fun, random stuff, like...

...a souvenir baseball from a Reading Phillies game. The AA affiliate for the Phillies is now known as the "Reading Fightin Phils," which pulls me in two directions. On one hand, the cool train logo has been abandoned. On the other hand, OSTRICHES.

Another souvenir baseball. I believe I had this signed at an Orioles game years and years ago, but I could not for the life of me make out who the signature belonged to, so I'm just going to assume it's Frank Robinson. (It's definitely not Frank Robinson)

My grandfather also helped my brother and I make our Pinewood Derby cars for Cub Scouts. We used this same simple, aerodynamic design every year - by that, I mean my grandfather told me we should do it this way and I agreed so long as I got to paint it and put on all the decals. Ridiculed by one snot-nosed brat in our pack as "a wedge of sticky cheese," my cars nonetheless did well pretty much every year but never finished higher than third place. In short, my grandfather and I were the Andy Reid and Donovan McNabb, respectively, of Pinewood Derby racing.

There were also plenty of pictures, like me showing off some SICK KARATE MOVES in my Blue Ranger costume behind my neighbor's house...

...me in New York when the Mathcounts team visited the New York Stock Exchange, and me playing guitar in one of the music practice rooms at school. My friends and I referred to our weekly get-togethers as "Poker Nights," even though we never played poker, and thus one year, our friend Andrea took a bunch of our photos and framed them in those little poker hand frames as Christmas gifts. *turns on "Aww" sign for audience*

This was a gift from my friend Dave, currently a seminarian. You never know when you'll need a spritz of the holy stuff in the morning. Dave drew this from a spring someplace with some spiritual significance (maybe in Spain?), but since I can't recall the place exactly, I'm going to take a guess and say it came from Scottsdale, AZ.

Speaking of Dave...

In high school, Dave and our friend Ellyn formed the "Best Friends 4 Eva," a confederacy of unprecedented exclusivity (membership was limited to "Dave and Ellyn") that ruthlessly pursued their small set of objectives (come up with inside jokes, bag on our friend Jeremy, find new was to cut class, bag on Jeremy some more, etc.) At some point, the two decided it was time to expand and rushed me like a fraternity brother.

In many of the Hold Steady's songs, lyricist Craig Finn sings about n'er-do-wells doing nefarious deeds in the back half of the theater during matinees. Little did he know he was actually singing about the lives of the "Best Friends 4 Eva," who completed and signed the above contract (complete with Latin, which got smudged but appears to start with "Bring thee into the order by virtue of this") in the back row of a Regal Cinema theater on a Sunday afternoon.

My dad compiled this DVD of performances by my high school rock band Visibly Blind to remind me and my brother that even though we were terrible and woefully unfocused, at least every minute of it was recorded so we could never escape it. Even if you have no discernible musical ability, you and your friends should start a band. It's so much fun. We only learned a few songs and rarely practiced, and when we did practice, we mostly just ordered Chinese food and played video games. Nevertheless, we have at least a dozen stories of gigs and practices that we still recount to this day. And you never know when you could pull a "reunion tour" together. (It totally won't be weird if we try to play the local YMCA as a bunch of twenty-somethings, right?)

Our marching band went to Disney World during our senior year for a few parades , and we were scrambling for ways to keep ourselves occupied for the 24-hour bus ride. My friend Charlie suggested we all log 50 hours in a new game of Pokemon and then have a tournament on the trip. I bought a copy and Charlie supplied me with an extra Game Boy Color (yes, an extra Game Boy Color. As in, he had one just lying around and was like "Here! All yours!"), and it was on. While more responsible high schoolers in my position honed their college essays, I honed my team until the wee hours of the morning (and look where it got me today, kids!) and stomped everyone in the tournament.

When I found this, I had no choice but to replace the batteries and boot it up. The sound doesn't work unless you plug in headphones and the game freezes when you move the actual Game Boy too much in your hands, but otherwise, all works as it should. Naturally, I went and beat the Elite Four again once more for old time's sake. Suck it, ASSHAT!

GADGETS! I won the flip cam in a raffle a Society of Professional Journalists convention. One day prior, they had shown a video about how to use flip cameras and how useful they could be in the field. The elder statesmen of SPJ took notes diligently and expressed genuine fascination with the device, while the younger members...um...didn't. I spent the night mocking the video and the excruciating detail with which they explained concepts like "Don't jiggle the camera!" and "Turn it on before you use it!" The next day, I was "awarded" the camera. Karma is a bitch.

The second item is a slide clicker for Powerpoint presentations. I so thoroughly enjoyed using the economics department's clicker for my thesis defense that I asked for one for Christmas. It probably says something about the quality of my thesis that every other student assertively defended their research while I was going, "Look at this clicky thing! Guys...GUYS, are you watching this? Whoa!"

The two items on the right are voice recorders I used for recording lectures, interviews, and rounds of the Antiques Roadshow drinking game. (I actually found the copper one a few weeks ago, but just unearthed the black one today) For every five interviews and press conferences on the recorders, there's one two-hour sound clip of my two roommates and I drunkenly howling over elderly men and women having their furniture looked over by pretentious, middle-aged appraisers on public television. I regret nothing.

Press pass from the Atlantic 10 men's basketball tournament, proving that I was once a legitimate journalist, or at least someone who was capable of e-mailing a request to get my name on a laminated press pass. There are few things better than sitting courtside at a college basketball game, talking to players and writing about it...for your job.

Lastly...

BOOKS. Man, were there a lot of books. Among them were notables like:
-An Alice Cooper autobiography that also includes golf tips
-Two copies of the Bible
-A John Grisham novel NOT about corrupt Wall Street bankers or attorneys called "Playing for Pizza," about a former NFL quarterback who gets a job playing in Italy
-Several Nick Hornby books, because he's the man
-A big book of Rolling Stone interviews
-A John Lennon book with interviews from "his final days" (judging from the back cover, it looks like he spends the whole booking bashing everyone in the band except Ringo, so I'm pumped)
-The Daily Show "America" book

These came in an awesome box set designed like Zim's house, but it got wrecked at some point in transit during one of my moves. If you don't like this show, I am no longer interested in associating with you. "GIR! RIDE THE PIG!"

This is our last stop. Thank you for riding the Nostalgia Train. Please exit through the doors on your right and remember to take any belongings with you as you depart. We know you have many choices to travel down Memory Lane, and we're grateful you've chosen us today. Have a nice day.