Stash! Ephemera

Every year, I go to a military antiques show called Show of Shows. It's a show focused on military collectibles ranging anywhere from antique weapons to US Army patches or Tiger Stripe pants from Vietnam. I used to go looking for old food, MREs (meals ready-to-eat), or just general personal items like forks or prayer books.  The first year I was there, I happened upon a booth that had binders full of old money, old photographs, and paper goods that were mostly from World War 2. Since them I've made a point to stop and see what the guy has. I've bought coins from the beginning and the end of Nazi Germany (the metals are lighter as the years progressed), and stamps with Saddam Hussein's face on them which I will try to dig up and post at a later date. This year, I was looking through what he had and I found these postcards. They were in a small photo album with about 20 or 30 pictures that looked like they had been made on an island in the Pacific during World War 2. From...

 At one point in my life about a decade ago (yikes) I was living in Seattle. It had some of the best record stores that I've ever been to. One of the stores I used to frequent was Wall of Sound . It was a super small place in the University District that was highly curated with all kinds of music that I had never heard of, or at least explored at the time: dub techno, acid jazz, free jazz, ambient, industrial, noise, etc. It was one of the few record stores that I could still go into and just buy things to listen to because the album covers looked interesting. At some point, after frequenting Wall of Sound and perusing their wares like a lost traveler in Skyrim, I ended up getting into noise music somehow. I also picked up a few (free!) copies of a print magazine called Tape Op . I was pretty immediately engulfed in the idea of tape machines (cassette tape recorders) as a means to create music. I already had a guitar and some pedals. I also had a loop pedal, which allowed me to loo...

 These were some of the first items I picked up that got me interested in the idea of ephemera. There was a big stack of them, all one-sided, one color of ink each. I found them at an antique mall and couldn't help but wonder 1) where they originated from 2) what they were given to people for and 3) where they sat for years before they somehow ended up in a booth in an antique store in Nashville. I wonder if they were given out at funerals? Not too sure. But still on the lookout for more.

       First of all, it was someone's grandma's birthday...      And then of course, as any grandma would, she wanted a family photo.  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~  Then, in some other person's world, they went to a train museum of some sort. The grey engine on the left is what's called a "tank engine" because of the tank of water that surrounds the cylindrical boiler in the center of it. The one on the right...I'm not so sure of what it is. There are two sets of rails. Not sure if its some sort of incline railway or what. No date on the photo, no engine numbers, no way to tell. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~      Moving on...to Central America I believe? Maybe Spain here. I'm not sure. Not sure who these people are. I can't tell if this a party or a riot of some kind. Maybe a procession to a party that turned into a riot? ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ This is most definitel...

     Posted below are some pretty cool first day covers (FDCs) from St. Vincent and the Grenadines featuring stamps from one of the best TV shows of all time, Star Trek: The Next Generation. I don't generally advocate for television shows, but this is one of the few times I'll say it: go watch it. Go watch all of it. Watch some of the original series as well and see where that gets you.      I bought these at a local record store for next to nothing. The guy behind the counter didn't know what they were or why someone would be interested in them besides the fact that they had to do with Star Trek, which he had to know at least a little about.           What's so cool about these FDCs? Well, I think they're pretty sweet because they've been preserved, kept from the mail room, kept from someone's mailbox where they would sit until they were eventually ripped open and thrown away. They're kinda frozen in time (and space).

​I’ve been using a camera (called myself a photographer?) for roughly 6 or 7 years now. An ex partner of mine had cameras and I was given access to a 35mm Minolta. I really had no idea what I was doing. I remember really liking the mechanical, physical aspects of the hobby immediately. I was close to train tracks, and have always been slightly infatuated with freight trains in general…so I was off to the races  Most of the rest of the rolls developed at that time were my first foray into “benching”, which is a term used in graffiti and railroad culture that means to sit and take photos of shit you see in trains, whether it’s tags, throw ups, monikers, Simpsons characters, an array of expletives, or anything else. Some benchers you can find on Instagram have massive collections of tags from each artist that they’ve seen and captured with a camera of some kind.  Anyways, that was my original aim, to take photos of trains, which I did. But I also took some photos of other things ...

Hello to everyone who is reading this. I'd like to welcome you to this space, hiding in some server, probably sitting at the bottom of the ocean (it keeps the computers nice and cold). In this great new year of 2026, I'm trying my best to find a new place to post things that matter to me. I got sick of dealing with Meta's algorithm and feeling limited on how I interacted with people that I "share" with. There is also just too much digital yelling on those platforms for my liking. People upset about 15-second-long nothings. No conversations, just comments. I am completely over it. Anyways, this is a new place that I'm going to use to share photos I've found, photos I've taken myself, poetry that I've written, or as the title says, my STASH of EPHEMERA. What is "ephemera" you ask? As of 2026, Mirriam Webster's Online Dictionary defines ephemera as "items (such as posters, broadsides, and tickets) originally meant to be discarded af...