A character reproduces memorabilia like buttons and broken pistols. This involves acid washing metal to make it look like it is old. No one (in his universe) values excellent condition old items. No. They want stuff that looks like it is old. Wicker hampers, “antique” jewelery, butter churns, wood-pegged tables, vegetable dyed goat hair rugs, victrola cabinet.
And there is a whole industry that replicates these old items, makes forgeries of them.

What is a forgery and what is authentic? And why does it matter? Why do old things, old junk, old pennies, have any value at all?

2> The second pop fiction example is the recent Pixar/Disney film WALL-E. Wall-e is a robot who spends his time compacting the garbage mankind left behind. But…he has developed an ability to separate garbage from…non-garbage. Now, there are no humans left on earth and the robot does not eat, so why would he collect and separate plastic spoons, forks and sporks? Why would he collect anything. It is ALL garbage, isn’t it? Well, Wall-e doesn’t think so. He is curious. His first “directive” is to compact and stack the garbage. His secondary, self-assigned, directive is to determine the meaning behind these pieces of memorabilia. And if he can’t find the meaning then he will create a meaning.

A second robot, EVE, arrives. EVE also has a directive: To find plant life. WALL-E tries to entertain EVE by showing her the bits of memorabilia he has collected.

Now, what are we to take from these two references? That our bits of trash will persist for 700 years? That Robots can develop personalities? Does our memorabilia create our personalities? Does our quaint, if forged, Americana define our loyalties? Do we define our own “directive” or does our economy and production stream define our directive?

The country has run amok and so have the collectors. A 1953 Fender Strat, that hangs on a wall, isn’t much different than a 1953 wicker basket with no bottom. WALL-E found a 4 carat diamond ring…and only kept the box because it had a hinge. Maybe the lesson is that it is all valuable. A penny must be reunited with it’s brothers. I, for example, would not rest until Roger Waters’ songbooks for Amused to Death and The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking were on my shelf…touching each other. They had to be physically reunited. That’s my directive. What’s yours?

Set up a live webcam that points out in front of your house. Every day, you put some of your junk out front and wait to see who comes and snatches it up. To stir the pot (if needed), you throw an ad on Craigslist. While you wait for people to show up, you can do some entertaining stuff like invite friends over to get drunk or whatever. Maybe you do nothing but wait.

When people show up to take the stuff, you have all sorts of opportunity for entertainment. You could interview the people and build up a sort of ongoing documentary of people with the same obsession you have. To keep it fresh, you never let people take stuff more than once. OR, if someone does come back more than once, you shoot ‘em with a bb gun!

There’s at least some advertisement money to be made there, not to mention publicity for MRIP. Plus, you could put your documentary on the festival circuit and perhaps get some cathartic value out of it, too.

The best part of all, more incentive to sift through refuse!

I don’t think the guitar collection ever ballooned past 40 guitars. The room was maybe 12×12, not a warehouse

Hobbies, to me, are activities that help to pass the time and bring some sort of personal satisfaction. I suspect your father is getting satisfaction as a conduit for obscure coins onto the larger market. Plus, if he has hundreds of thousands of coins, by reason his collection must be worth at least a few thousand dollars. Perhaps when his time comes, you can make a bed of his coins and bury him with them, thereby creating treasure.

Any three of these responses, whether value, cool or useful, make people hold onto things. You could say they point to someone’s self esteem or perhaps measure their fear of the future. I had the honor of visiting with a newspaper hoarder once. Her apartment was waist high in stacks of newspapers, the couch and coffee table had been engulfed, there was just a small walking path from room to room. It seemed to me she wanted to hold onto the past. “I didn’t get a chance to read them all,” she told me.
When I’m at the dump and a really good load comes in I get a rush. I ignore all bodily functions making demands on me and stay for hours crouched down sorting through bags of garbage, believing I am going to find a treasure. I mean I could be holding back explosive diarrhea.My body shuts down and it’s a mental game from there. Like when you’re really stoned and fixated on carving your girlfriends name into a wooden box for her birthday. You are making love to her in your mind, you’re a nobel prize winner, a celebrated craftsman, the weather is perfect, your brain is so fucking happy with you it is telling you all these lies. That’s how I get when I am rooting through garbage.
I inherited the losing hobby gene. Your father apparently has a winning hobby gene. Some people are lucky. Collecting guitars wouldn’t give me any thrill at all.
One last difference between our fathers. I well remember the “rock room”. I don’t remember what you called it, but it was the guitar center. At the height of his collection, did he have over two hundred guitars? Perhaps. Selling two hundred of anything isn’t so hard. Especially when the return on the invest is thousands of dollars per item. My father is collecting coins. He has HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of them. In order to get top dollar return on an item, you can’t sell it as a collection. Individuals lose value when lumped in a group, for the most part. So for him to get the three dollar profits out of his nickel investments, he has to post HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of auctions on eBay. He will be dead before it is physically possible. I will be too. Then my mother, who knows nothing about coins, or my sister and I, who also know nothing about coins, will have to sell this collection off. Again, the shear volume of the collection makes it impossible to research each item and estimate a value. So a coin dealer will come in, make an offer we don’t understand and away it will go.
I’m not trying to be a downer on my Dad, I’m the same way. That’s how it is. My collections will bring in about one thousand dollars at my estate sale if I die tomorrow. The dumpster they brinig in will be filled. Homeless dudes and tweakers will have a field day climbing in that dumpster and taking all the cool broken trinkets out.

It sounds like you value your time. That’s a good thing, especially for an artist because you’re devoted to your writing and that holds value to you beyond monetary terms (I made some assumptions there but I think they were safe to make).

The thing about time is, it’s spent no matter what you do. So, if you care enough about money and you don’t have other plans, you might as well go after the $3, especially if there’s some additional thrill out of the experience. If the alternative is sitting on your ass in front of the TV, why not paint the trim or sift through junk?

As far as collecting goes, why not collect items that you can make use of while they’re in your possession? The porn obviously has uses but I suppose there’s risk of harming their value while in use. You’re a musician, how about collecting some instruments? They take less time to look for, they don’t require entering the dump, and they tend to pay off well down the road. Plus the value you get from spending your time playing them probably covers the cost of finding (and maybe paying for) them. My father is selling off all but the essentials of his collection now. He expects to take in enough for a down payment on a retirement home and from what he’s telling me about individual sales ($5K+ for a 1980′s PRS?!?!?!), he’s right. I don’t think this was ever the intent when he was compiling the collection (back in the day he talked of passing it on to his kids) but that’s what makes sense today. That sort of collecting seems a lot more fulfilling than some of the knick-knack crap I see in Wisconsin. I once bought a car from a couple who’s living room was covered in Pillsbury dough boy figurines. I find it aggravating that a company even bothered to make that crap at one point.