Weird 1993 Photo Album Thing.

While cleaning out some old bins, I came across this photo album. Pretty sure it’s from 1993. Only around a fifth of its pages were used, and only half of those pages were used for actual photos.

I vaguely recall putting this together, and it’s jusssst weird enough to be worth archiving here.

For the first chapter, I glued blue construction paper over the album pages, and turned it into a sci-fi scrapbook. Most of the “decorations” were lost over the years, but you can still see some clippings from old Starlogs, complete with handy marker-drawn titles!

I’ve been a Metaluna Mutant fan for a long time, even though I’ve still never seen This Island Earth. I guess this magazine clipping was how it all started?

I’m sure most of you have at least heard of Starlog Magazine, even if you’ve never thumbed through an issue. Every time I walked into a comic shop, I walked out with a Starlog. In the best cases, the comic shop would’ve been selling older issues on the cheap. Comic books increased in price with age, but the magazines only seemed to get cheaper.

This photo album only hints at that old obsession. In 1993, my bedroom walls were covered in Starlog clippings. Didn’t matter if I was a fan of the featured movies or not. I just liked having a wall full of monsters, robots and aliens to stare at. Those bastards knew how to spike my dreams.

Most the album’s pages consist of photos from some random car show my parents took me to back in 1991. My father was big on car shows. To this day, I have no idea why. He was by no stretch a “car guy,” and now that I think about it, he barely seemed interested even when we were at these shows.

And no, they didn’t go for my sake. It shouldn’t surprise you that I didn’t care about cars.

Still, I didn’t mind the shows, and like any freshly minted teen with a shitty camera, I strolled around taking pictures of the same cars that were on all of my book fair posters. Corvettes, Lamborghinis – anything that looked like something I’d race in a video game.

The most interesting photo is of the Back to the Future DeLorean. No clue if it was the real deal or a facsimile. God knows how many replicas were built over the years. Given the signage, it looks like this was there to promote Back to the Future: The Ride, which debuted that same year at Universal Studios Florida.

I’m pretty sure I’d remember sitting in the BTTF car, so the fact that I can’t probably means that I didn’t. Damn.

Moving past the car show, here are four pages of Sandy.

Sandy was our dog, and though this album is clearly from the ‘90s, the photos of Sandy are much older. My brother took them when she was still young and spry. They must be from around 1985.

Because Sandy was a typical suburban mutt of the ‘80s, she got out a lot, and got knocked up almost as often. She had at least four litters of puppies over the years, and despite my best attempts, I was never allowed to keep one.

My only other big Sandy memory is of chasing her around the house with a plastic lightsaber, and running forehead-first into the edge of our kitchen table during the process. I absolutely deserved that lump.

Then, randomly, is this picture of pro-wrestling’s Ric Flair. Not sure what the deal is, here. I liked Ric Flair, but if only one wrestler was going to make it into the book, I could name twenty others that I liked more.

What strikes me most about this book isn’t its contents, but rather the memories of the stupid things I used to do to fill my days. With no Internet, few friends and a pool that I wouldn’t go in alone because I envisioned sharks materializing the second I stepped foot into the water? Okay, then let’s go wreck a photo album. Me and me.