Staring down at the lapels of my jacket I explained that I had that badge for ten years, hence the bright, sickly rust stains that seeped into the edges of the badge. This moment prompted two things: the first being that one of the head silhouettes portrayed in the graphic reminded someone of one of their ex-boyfriends and secondly, it made me realize that this badge was one of the very few that I had left — one of many of those little things that had stabbed holes in numerous jackets and bags over the years. Where did they all go? I swear I used to have some good ones and thinking about them I had no idea where they went.

A few days later that whole question, “where did they all go?” — ripped open some giant new wormhole of questions; things gone missing and even weirder the surprise realization that I even had those long gone items in my possession. There was no pining for material loss — more so the events of the time that those things were in my possession, knowing that if I randomly came across any of those items digging through boxes or some freak physics rip in space dropped an old shirt thousands of miles over in here over the Atlantic it would likely be a theoretical key to open up some weird and likely totally irrelevant memories of actions from that very long time ago.

You often hear stories from time to time of someone running into a charity shop or some other unlikely place and find something they once owned on sale. Suddenly a mental portal was open showcasing a lost, mythical room of JJD inventory that had made some sort of memorable exit out beyond my existence, or for some reason just vanished over time with no reason:

• 1 Gibson Epiphone Ripper string saddle (G string) / Lost fall 2001 at the Pilot Light in Knoxville, Tennessee. We rocked out on a track called “Aftermath” that employs the use of two bass guitars. My string broke and the saddle went flying across the stage or into someone’s beer unknowingly. I had to get a replacement that didn’t match and since then and I’ve had numerous recommendations of “you should fix that, man. The action on that thing is insane…”
• 1 Mac laptop and Hard Drive / Fall 2007 on Staten Island, NY. Extremely time crunched re-pack of overly crammed rental car. This one was so mindless and dark that I think I’ve blacked out parts of that in my mind.
• 1 Ranger Coat with faux fur black collar / I remember this being attained sometime in 1999 but lost, somewhere, somehow in some inky night out on the tiles in 2000. It seemed that that style of jacket was experiencing a renaissance of popularity at the time.
• 1 BC Driver’s License / The Brickyard in Vancouver in Fall 1999. This was during the shining era that was called “$2 highballs” whereby you and a select group of friends would saunter in and on about $10-$15 get smote by the hammer of drunkness. Losing my ID would warrant enough stress, but not the panic that occurred as I realized it was missing en route to the Canada/US border for a West Coast US tour. The cold sweats and the half concocted ideas were flowing like wine in this fifteen minute gap between the realization and meeting some staunch US Customs guard face to face at the Peach Arch where the I5 begins. But with some strange motion of fate we made it through the border without having to present ID.
• 1 Public Image Limited t-shirt / Purchased summer 2000 in Toronto, Ontario. A simple case of this being there and all of a sudden not and with no linking event to it’s disappearance.
• 1 The VSS t-shirt / Ordered from Bottlenekk in 2000 or so? This was pretty rare and it looked pretty good. My last memories of this item was it being strewn somewhere in some fire trap of a rehearsal place I shared with about three bands (all friends) in a random pile of miscellaneous items that we had in a corner. Maybe the pile absorbed the atoms of this shirt and it forever returned to the realm of physics.
• 3 metal friendship bracelets / Lost through 2002-2004. I have concluded that I have highly acidic skin and over the course of time will erode through any type of cheap metal that has the pleasure of being within the company of my skin for an extended period of time. I had these for years and one by one they eroded and fell off without even noticing the actual event of their disappearance.

And of course the buttons: lost in bags, ripped of jackets, metal bits warping and bending and fatiguing, falling down cracks in the walls, sitting around in my mind.