efore we get on the subject of junk I'd like to make one thing clear: I'm not a hoarder.  I can't think of anything more dreary than to live life in a perpetual state of nostalgia, surrounded by worthless objects—assuming that nostalgia is what compels hoarders to hoard in the first place.  No, a tidy home is a happy one, I say, lest we forget the story of the Collyer brothers, history's most notorious hoarders.

Homer and Langley Collyer met their fates in March 1947 after Langley was found crushed to death beneath a pile of debris in their Manhattan home while trying to find food to save his starving brother.  Homer, unable to navigate his way to the kitchen amid the maze of decades-old clutter, died eight days later for lack of food.  When the authorities were finally able to retrieve their bodies (they couldn't get in the front door, it was blocked by heaps of newspapers) they found inside the home an estimated one-hundred forty tons of junk, including twenty-five thousand books, fourteen pianos, a closet full of bowling balls, five-hundred yards of unused silk, thousands of tin cans and bottles, shelves of human organs pickled in jars, hundreds of outdated phonebooks, stacks of orange crates and lampshades, the chassis of a Model-T Ford, a heap of horses jawbones, a stockpile of kerosene heaters, innumerable photos of pin-up girls from the early 1900's, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, an army of department store mannequins, several X-ray machines, trunks full of taxidermy, eighteen grandfathers clocks, five table clocks, two cuckoos (four if you count Homer and Langley,) an array of glass chandeliers, three dollhouses, two baby carriages, eight live cats and a rusty bicycle.  It was a feat so remarkable that the city even named a park in honor of the brothers, situated on the exact spot where their house once stood.  It makes you wonder what you'd have to do to get an airport named after you.

I bring this up because what you are about to encounter is the online version of an actual museum—measuring all but two and a half square feet, dedicated to my junk drawer.  Since all judgments are comparative, and, by way of introduction, I thought that I'd mention the Collyer brothers so as to make the things that I've accumulated over the years seem perfectly normal by comparison.  While I am not a hoarder, I admit that if there's a junk drawer equivalent to being one, then I might be one of those people.  But a hoarder?  I don't think so.  In the pages that follow you will be guided through My Junk Drawer Museum where you will discover the strange relationship we all share with our junk drawer junk.  Along the way, you might get the feeling that you have something in common with the Collyer brothers.  But if you do, let's hope it's just a little.