Ok, I don’t know if it’s like this for all geeks, but damn we have a lot of crap.  A LOT of crap.  We’ve been going through boxes and closets, and trying to divest ourselves of a good chunk of it.  I don’t know if all geeks are packrats like this, but an awful lot of the geeks I hang with are.

Part of it, geeks are information hoarders.  And yes, while technology is somewhat more compact than it was, I know I’m not the only one out there with a 12 year old computer sitting in my closet because it’s the only system that will play an old favorite game (Blood Bowl) and there’s a bunch of stuff on there I would like to retrieve one day, but I just haven’t gotten around to it.

Another form which information takes is books, and we have… many.  We have applied a second layer of insulation, in the form of bookshelves on every flat wall, to our living space.  Now, some of them I’m not ever giving up:  my copy of “Unicorn Variations” signed by Zelazny, my collected works of Manly Wade Wellman, the hardcover Little House on the Prairie books my grandmother bought me when I was little, the complete L. Frank Baum Wizard of Oz, and I could keep going.  We have gotten better in recent years about culling the collection every so often and selling them off or donating them to a library.  But still, after about six months of the Geek Husband What Rules picking me up at a Barnes and Noble after work, yeah, those shelves fill right back up real quick.

In addition to information, we also have music.  The Geek Husband What Rules is a Music Nerd of the first water.  He used to DJ at a college radio station and occasionally at the club where we both worked.  As a result, we have a couple thousand CDs, most of which we got for free.  We have a HUGE Reggae and Dancehall collection, as well as Industrial, Heavy Metal, Nu Wave, Punk, Ska, my chick rock, Rockabilly and the classics like the Beatles, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Sr. and Patsy Cline.

After that come the comics and comics-related collectibles.  I have the wall of Nightcrawler, which is not quite complete, but getting there.  We have a Man-Eating Cow action figure, lots of Spawn, the Hansen Brothers from Slapshot and lots of other random things that catch our fancies.

I also collect fountain pens, hedgehog figures and Devil Duckies.

THEN we have the gaming shelves.  Traditional, Indie, weird, all sorts of RPGs populate the collection.  Early White Wolf, two editions of GURPS, two editions of Warhammer FRPG, ASL, dozens of copies of White Dwarf and Dragon magazine all grace those shelves.

We really do have an insane amount of just crap, but we’re getting better.  In fact I spent this evening going through a bunch of my writing from jr. high and high school and tossing out old notebooks.  I have not yet decided whether to throw a dramatic reading or a bonfire.

G.I. Joe fanfic with a serious Mary Sue, anyone?