From the Nogglestead Archives

As I mentioned, one of the benefits of Nogglestead is that I can easily lay my hands upon lots of the ephemera from my life that I have collected over the years and refuse to part with. The second thing, aside from the spaciousness of the storage, is that I pretty much have not reorganized or moved anything since we moved in, so these things are generally in the last place I saw them, ten years ago when I put them there.

So when my beautiful wife found and old business card and posted it on Facebook, I immediately took it to be an Old Business Card challenge. So I went to the cubby where I keep ticket stubs and whatnot and came up with two within minutes:

At the top, we have my second technical writer position circa 1998. I would later become an automated tester there before leaving for a startup that only left me with a worthless stock certificate.

Below, we have the business card for my magazine which I published in 1994 and 1995.

I am pretty sure that I have other business cards around here; when I remembered my little business cards book, I found another from my days as the director of quality assurance for an interactive marketing agency circa 2005:

I also have a large number of other business cards that I printed on a little vending machine at the Grand Avenue Mall in Milwaukee. For a buck, it would print out four business cards for you, so I have a number proclaiming me a freelance writer, president of Triple N Enterprises, the lawn mowing company we had in the trailer park, and the bassist in a band called Ghostriders. Which don’t count, but I still have them and at hand.

Then, Friar posted about about a self-made audio cassette (I, too, shy away from mixed tape as nomenclature for this endeavor), and I was able to easily lay my hands on a couple I made in the early 1990s:

Theme Songs contains:

• “Carry On Wayward Son” by Kansas
• “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake
• “Foreplay/Longtime” by Boston
• “Feel Like Making Love” by Bad Company
• “Hard to Handle” by Counting Crowes
• “I Go to Extremes” by Billy Joel
• “Show Me The Way” by Styx
• “Somebody Save Me” by Cinderella
• “Electric Blue” by Icehouse
• “It’s a Sin” by the Pet Shop Boys

Almost thirty years later, two of those are on my workout playlist and another was on it for a while but got removed because it’s not angry or fast enough.

Rain Songs contains:

• “I Love A Rainy Night” by Eddie Rabbitt
• “The Soft Rains of April” by a-ha
• “Storm Front” by Billy Joel
• “Another Rainy Night (Without You)” by Queensryche
• “Crying in the Rain” by a-ha
• “Rain Down On Me” by RTZ
• “Falling of the Rain” by Billy Joel
• “I Wish It Would Rain Down On Me” by Phil Collins
• “Riders on the Storm” by the Doors
• “After the Rain” by Nelson
• “Here I Stand And Face The Rain” by a-ha

Face it: a-ha did a lot of rain songs, and I really liked a-ha in those days. I still do, but not like I did then.

I easily laid my hands on these because they were in the tape bins under the bed.

Note the Huey Lewis and the News album Sports, the first full-length album I bought at a garage sale in the trailer park in the middle 1980s and the a-ha album Scoundrel Days, the first a-ha album I got for $2.99 on a reduced price tape rack at Walgreens in 1990.

We’ve got a couple of those, and my beautiful wife has a number of tape organizers in here office where they are on display. A number of years ago, she set about to ripping the audio cassettes to MP3s (perhaps MP2s–it was a while ago). Which is why we still have the audio cassettes–they’re the source of the MP3s, and if we donated or sold them, we would be honor-bound to delete the ripped music from our iTunes libraries.

But I still listen to them from time to time.

For example, I’m listening to Night Ranger’s Big Life right now, which features the song “Rain Comes Crashing Down”:

Given that I bought the cassette on the discount rack at Walgreens about 1990, it seems odd that “Rain Comes Crashing Down” did not make it to the Rain Songs cassette. Perhaps I ran out of room or didn’t think so much of the song at the time.

Note that “The Secret of My Success” would be on my gym playlist except that songs ripped from audio cassette play back at a lower volume in iTunes even if you set the audio volume to auto-correct. So it would not be loud enough for exercise. Perhaps I should buy a copy of the song or the CD so I can get it appropriately loud.

At any rate, what was my point? Oh, that I can lay my hands on a lot of personal relics. As my family and the number of people who knew me back when continues to shrink, I rely on these relics an awful lot to prove that I was then and that the eternal now wasn’t all there is.