The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that one of the descriptors I assign myself up there at the top of this page is “pack rat.” As long as I can remember, I’ve had an almost existential dread of throwing away anything that might later prove to have some sentimental or historical value. That’s why I still have a comic book my dad bought for me when I was six years old.

In addition to this natural tendency toward hoarding, I also picked up a collecting hobby in college. Tracking down, acquiring, and owning all manner of pop-culture memorabilia has proven to be immensely gratifying, for a number of reasons. But there’s a big downside to being a collector, and that’s the difficulty of storing and protecting all your possessions. This point was driven home rather forcefully a little over a year ago, when I experienced an event I like to think of as The Great Water-Filter Containment Failure and Basement Flood of 2006. Briefly, if you don’t recall and/or don’t want to follow the link, my water filter developed a major leak in the middle of the night, and by the time I woke up and noticed it, I had several inches of water throughout the entire basement. This would’ve been disastrous enough if the only possessions down there were my own, but I was also storing a lot of stuff my parents left behind when they built their new house. And most of that was sitting in stacks and heaps right there on the floor, right in the water.

My parents and I lost a lot of belongings that day. I can honestly say without exaggeration, that the flood was one of the most traumatic events of my life, at least in recent years. But in a way it was also a good thing. It was a tipping point that finally started the three of us on the long-procrastinated job of getting rid of our respective junk and organizing whatever was left over. My folks also stepped up their efforts to move the last of their things out to the new house. And, for me personally, the flood provided a much-needed dose of perspective.

I realized, you see, that it wasn’t the collectibles I was most worried about saving from the waters that day. The action figures still in their original packaging, the Franklin Mint art plates and trading cards and first-issue comics with the foil-variant covers — none of that stuff even crossed my mind. What really made me feel sick to my stomach was the possibility that I might have lost the letters from my first love, or my high school yearbooks, or the Miami Vice poster that hung in my bedroom when I was fifteen, or that tattered old copy of Marvel Team-Up #41 that my dad brought home from the drugstore one day when I was six.

I’ve thought a lot about that realization in the months since the flood, as well as the fantasies I used to have about what I was ultimately going to do with my collections someday. I used to think it’d be neat to have my own personal version of uber-fan Forrest J. Ackerman‘s famous Ackermansion, a residence-cum-museum stuffed to the rafters with every imaginable piece of memorabilia and monuments to all the movies and events that he has deemed significant in his life. But you know what? I don’t think I want that any more, at least not on that kind of scale.

I never thought I’d say this, but the time has come to let go of some of my stuff. There are many, many mementos and collectibles down in the basement that still mean too much to me to get rid of. But there are many more that I bought simply as investments, or because I was struck by a passing fancy, or just because I felt like going down to Toys R Us and spending a few bucks on something. And I don’t see any logical reason to continue storing those things anymore. So over the next few weeks, I intend to post a lot of stuff up for sale on eBay and possibly craigslist. Hopefully, the majority of it will find a new home with somebody who will love it as much as I love the items I’ve decided to keep. But either way, it will be out of my basement.

The bidding is already open on the first handful of items, some wonderfully sculpted action figures depicting the classic Universal Studios Monsters — i.e., The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Karloff’s Frankenstein, Lon Chaney, Jr., as The Wolf Man, Claude Rains as The Invisible Man, etc. They’re truly beautiful items, but after long consideration, I’ve decided that the classic movie monsters aren’t my primary interest when it comes to collecting, so off they go to someone who is more of a monster buff. If you’d like to have a look at them — and I hope everyone reading this will at least go have a look — you can click on the “Bennion’s eBay auctions” link over there in the sidebar, or click here to take the direct approach. I’ll announce here when I put up fresh batches of stuff. Keep checking, because you just might see something you can’t live without!