An Atari Baseball cartridge.

Three boxes of Betamax tapes.

There are days it seems the only thing keeping me from being homeless — aside from the paycheck that mysteriously shows up in my mailbox every week — is the realization that I'd never find enough shopping carts to carry all the crap I've accumulated over the years.

A 1970s Rainbow Man figurine. (Now what would June Jones say about him?)

Four Japanese coins a tourist once gave me and my cousin to smile for a photo one gray day at Hanauma Bay. (I'd better not see that on the Internet!)

Mental-health issues? Perhaps. I don't sweat the small stuff, I collect it. Grandma's recipes, my nieces' elementary school drawings, Mom's college pottery project — there's a (crowded) place for all.

Tax experts say we should keep our pay stubs for three to six years. But, hey, you can never be too safe, right? Should the IRS ever come a-calling (again), they're welcome to peruse my fat wad of Zippy's ($3.15/hour) pay stubs circa 1986.

Over the years, my house has become a horrifying actualization of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" and Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried." Call it "The Things I Remember Because I've Never Thrown Them Away."

I reason that my impulse to archive stems from the lack of storage space in my brain. The seemingly meaningless detritus of my past helps to ground my flighty memory, allowing me with glance and touch to unpack sounds, smells, emotions, bits of speech otherwise beyond my mental reach.

The blue-and-orange Mets cap I wore on the plane when the family moved from New York to Hawai'i in 1973. ("Let's go Mets, go!)

A dried flower from my mother's funeral.

My job as a reporter and my other life as an English major only make things worse. I have boxes and boxes of old notes and news clippings, hundreds of books with cryptic pencil messages — "POV shift?" "Crossing pattern." "Correlative?"

The thought of losing that one potentially crucial contact number, that one unrepeatable quote, is paralyzing.

My friends say I need to get a clue. Give me a minute. I know it's in here somewhere.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.