(Back as a teenager, I had a beat-up Pentax K1000 camera with a slightly wonky light meter.  I used up a whole lot of film taking pictures of random crap around the house, repositioning lamps, holding my hand over part of the flash, etc., to get a sense of how the thing was calibrated.  Mom got on my case at the time for wasting a shitload of film on this, but I'm glad I did now, because I now have pictures of what my childhood house actually looked like on an everyday basis before Mom started redecorating it to try to sell.) 

The Northwest Corner of My Bedroom, October 1995

The troll doll I bought at either Wall Drug or the Corn Palace in 1993 while on vacation to the Badlands/Black Hills/Devil’s Tower with my family.  I turned 13 on that trip.  That was the second-to-last big vacation we all took together.   The last was a year later, to the Rocky Mountains.  After that, we took one three-day-weekend in October of 1995 down to Bowling Green, Kentucky, to go to Mammoth Cave.  I remember that we ate at a greasy-spoon restaurant called Judy’s Castle that had “broasted” chicken,  and that my undying, all-consuming seven-year crush on one boy had abruptly shifted only a few days before to another boy, so I was half-daydreamy and half-pissed off about having to be shut up in a Holiday Inn with my family who all thought I was being anti-social and weird.

The curtain is made out of a bedsheet because Mom bought the material to make the curtains for that room but never actually got around to sewing them.  I took the material a few years ago and I now have a whole bunch of napkins made out of it.    

I got the Magic Eye poster for Christmas one year but never was actually able to see anything in it.  The posterboard in front of it has Far Side cartoons dealing with chickens rubber-cemented to it. 

Behind the computer monitor that green-and-white thing taped up is a road map to Decatur County, Indiana.  Hanging on the yarn-and-clothespin contraption is a flyer for something called “Mission Impossible.”  This was an ecumenical church youth group hayride/scavenger hunt/capture the flag thing that happened in the woods out on someone’s farm.  I went with Jana Lecher and that wallet you see sitting on my desk fell out somewhere in the woods.  I think there was all of six dollars in it and some random crap, including a card with a picture of St. Mary and “I AM A CATHOLIC—IN CASE OF ACCIDENT, PLEASE NOTIFY A PRIEST.”  I think I originally found that being used as a bookmark in something, and it tickled me so I filled it out and put it in my wallet.  I assumed it went missing in the woods until three months after Mission Impossible when the farmer who hosted us called me to say he’d found my wallet.  Everything was waterlogged except that card, so I carried it in my other wallets until finally my wallet was stolen in 2009. 

The desk was my Dad’s in high school.  The lamp burned really hot, so I never put a bulb in it. 

On the walls—a Garfield poster, something cut from a catalog of t-shirts the ecology club was selling, a postcard from South Dakota, and the instructions from an erector set knockoff.  Hanging from hooks on this (out-of-frame) shadow box I built in eighth-grade shop class:  a creepy old lady half-mask, a medal for reading a shitload of books in the sixth grade, a sandwich board sign declaring myself FUTURE DICTATOR OF THE WORLD, and a leather pouch I bought at the Hispanic Fest in Indianapolis the year before. 

That boot-shaped plastic mug came from the Forethought Christmas Party.  Forethought was one of the Hillenbrand Industries, along with the Batesville Casket Company (self-explanatory) and Hill-Rom (one of the world’s leading manufacturers of hospital beds).  Forethought sold funeral insurance.  Mom worked for them as a claims processor for a couple of years and told about how she’d get forms with embalming fluid stains on them. 

The half-shelf I built myself out in the garage, and painted with the logo of the Indianapolis Indians, then the farm team for the Cincinnati Reds.  Underneath it there’s a baseball autographed by a couple of their players , a beer koozie from another Forethought party, a jewelry box Mom gave me and which I never actually used, a catapult built out of the erector set knockoff, and a Simpsons/Butterfinger candy bars piggy bank, on which Bart, dressed as a pirate, is making Homer walk the plank for laying a finger on his Butterfingers.  Homer is staring down at Blinky. 

The Tupperware container in my desk was a Christmas gift from Mom the year before.  It is supposed to be a make-up box, but to Mom’s chagrin it contains more erector set pieces.  On top of it is Grandpa Nolting’s WWII Army mess kit which was supposed to go to Eric but which I commandeered. 

On the second shelf there’s a crate of CDs.  The one you can see just peeking out is John Cougar’s American Fool, from which his breakout hit “Jack and Diane” is track #2.  Next to that is a black box of cassette tapes.  Inside the lid of that is a sort of shrine to the boy I was in love with from the first day of fourth grade until sophomore year of high school. 

On the bottom shelf is a Lion King-themed popcorn bucket from a movie theater in suburban St. Louis, Missouri.  We went to the movies on the way back from Colorado. 

On the floor is a nail-and-hammer box I built using instructions from a 1950s-era children’s encyclopedia called The Book of Knowledge.  I don’t know what’s in it other than three more cowboy-boot shaped plastic mugs, these from the company picnic of the Batesville Casket Company, where my Uncle Jim was one of the head maintenance guys. 

The stereo originally belonged to my little brother.  He bought it in 1990 with his First Communion money.  At some point, he broke mine somehow, so he gave me his old one and bought a nicer one for himself.  It’s sitting on top this red-and-blue plastic suitcase thing which is full of back issues of Newsweek.  That is sitting on top ANOTHER file box full of more back issues of Newsweek.  I competed in speech and debate in high school, freshman and sophomore years in U.S. and Foreign Extemporaneous.  That was where they’d give you a question about some political issue of the day and you’d have 30 minutes to write a 5-7 minute speech on that topic.  Everyone that competed carted around whole libraries of years worth of back issues of news magazines.  After a few meets I figured out that they never asked questions that necessitated going back more than six weeks into the file, but I nevertheless didn’t throw away the old magazines . 

The bit of Mexican blanket there is a blanket Grandma and Grandpa Nolting brought me from Tijuana in 1984 or so, the green blanket came from Grandma Abplanalp’s house, and I still have and use both them and those Star Wars sheets.

Same spot, December 27, 2010