Losing track of it all

I've been trying to get the comic and movie collection in some kind of order this year, and figuring out what I've actually got, and it's probably going to take me a lot longer than 12 months. Because after decades of collecting, there is a fucking shit-tonne of stuff.

As I'm going through it, there are genuine surprises, I find copies of Flash comics from the Silver Age and random Michael Moorcock novels I didn't know I had. My memory ain't what it used to be, and I have no recollection of actually buying them at any point. 

I used to be able to confidently say exactly which individual comics I had, even when I had thousands and thousands of them. I could tell you what one issue of Jungle Action I had buried in a box, or how many issues of Booster Gold I had.

That kind of useless information has definitely been under pressure in recent years, with brainpower more likely to be devoted to things like 'making sure my kids are not playing in traffic', or 'remembering when they need to take $3 to school for a sausage sizzle'.

I do know some things for sure. I know in the room downstairs there are exactly 2351 issues of 2000ad in a number of genuinely life-threatening boxes, and that all the Hitman and Grendel and the first 25 issues of The New Warriors are carefully boxed away.

But I can be surprised by what I actually own when I crack open dusty boxes, and sometimes I just can't find very particular things that I'm sure I had.

I've totally lost track of who I've leant stuff to over the years, and sometimes I get a pile of DVDs or trade paperbacks returned from family and friends, with profuse apologies for taking so long with them, and I didn't even know they had them in the first place. I knew my boxsets of The Wire were somewhere, I just didn't know they were at my sister-in-law's house.

I know a lot of people have databases and spreadsheets to keep track of it all, but that turns it from a hobby into a chore. The closest I ever got is a list of all the individual comics I need to complete various series, still printed out on paper and shoved into my wallet for the next time I stumble across a pile of Jonah Hex comics from the mid-2000s.

In the end, I'm not actually that bothered that I can't keep track of it like I once did. I've already outsourced all sorts of things like movie knowledge to places like the IMDB and wikipedia, and I long ago made peace with the idea that I can't own everything and know everything. 

A little mystery is good for the soul, even if it's just the mystery of what I did with that issue of Amazing Heroes with the Alan Moore interview in it that I've been looking for. I'm sure it's somewhere.