I've collected many odd things over the years. I still think collecting oddities is a good thing. Collecting things like baseball cards never interested me. They're made for the sole purpose of being collectible. So I've always gone for other sorts of things.
Are all collections, especially the eclectic ones, "clutter"? No, they're not. And I have a strange sort of admiration for truly eclectic people who particularly collect things that you never heard of people collecting before. But to paraphrase a line from Clutter's Last Stand, there's the mistake of using the term "collection" to mean "an accumulation". This is something to keep in mind.
I've collected soft drink bottles here and there over the years. At my last place, they ended up accumulating and collecting dust on one of my few available surfaces on my kitchen counter. And just at a point when I was trying to get rid of them, my brother came in with a new one. I said "Oh, I was trying to get rid of them." "But I carried this one with me over half the country for two months!" he protested. So it joined the ranks.
But when it came time to moving out of my last place, I just had to admit that this accumulation wasn't big enough to be a collection, and was taking up just enough space and collecting enough dust to be called clutter. So, screw it. It was time to get rid of them once and for all.
One particular line of sodas bottles I had came from a Californian company called "Eat Me Now". I found these around 1991 at Spencer Gifts. And yes, this was long before the actor Jack Black was known to the world. I haven't really seen them around since then, and I couldn't find a company website. But sure enough, somebody still sells them. They were certainly different, not only in the aesthetics, but the taste. I may just try them again. In the meantime, I figured that I didn't need to pack and move all these glass bottles, and I sure didn't have time to put them on eBay (where they probably wouldn't get bid on anyway).
In retrospect, I'm kinda kicking myself for getting rid of them. Maybe my anti-clutter crusade has been driving too far. Oh well. I got less and less hasty about things as my deadline for moving out got closer and closer. I'm glad I at least took some photos.
In closing, I shall now shamelessly end this blog entry with an extremely geeky joke that probably only mathematicians will understand:
Q: What is the world's longest song?
A: "Aleph-Naught Bottles of Beer on the Wall"
(OK, OK, in over-simplified layman's terms, "Aleph-Naught" means infinity.)
