Saturday, March 20, 2010

Future Fossils

I was down in the garage the other day, doing a little routine auto maintenance, when I noticed a bit of something in the dust underneath the storage bins. I scuffed my foot at it and found an IndyMac Bank lapel pin. It had to have been mine, I don't know that anybody else in my building has ever worked there. It was under five years of dust, dirt, cobwebs and kitty litter, which the guy parking next to me uses to soak up the oil from his leaking car. It was well on its way to being preserved in the strata of the ages until I disturbed it. Which got me to thinking. In ten thousand years, what fossils of mine would future scientists find?

   Old stamps. One-cent and two-cent, which you used to have to buy when the Postal Service raised rates. I'm thinking about using them all on one letter.
   Obsolete video games. These ran on computers that I long since trucked to the recycle place. I don't know what I'd run the games on, and I'm not really interested in playing them again, but they're in the closet just in case.
   Recipts from years back. They say you only need to keep the past seven years of tax returns, but I still got 'em all, going back to the 90's.
   College textbooks. For some reason I still have many of them.
   Acres of comic books. This would be the King Tut's treasure of my tomb. 'I see things. Wonderful things. All bagged and boarded.'
   Sweaters I never wear any more.
   Fast food wrappers.
   Old, broken sunglasses.
   Decks of playing cards with at least one card missing.

Kind of a pathetic haul. But maybe it'll provide a PhD thesis for one of my distant ancestors.

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