I happen to have had a very forgiving set of parents.  They put up with my playing loud music (live loud music, not just recorded loud music) and they would also put up with my thundering down the stairs when I descended from the second story of the house.  As a teenager very few things I did were quiet.  They endured it all and never allowed my brother to kill me no matter how much he might have wanted to end my noise at any given moment.  One other thing they allowed me to do was to completely cover my walls with memorabilia from events in my life.  I had everything up on my walls.

It all started with eight pieces of paper that I drew a face on with chalk.  I took those six pieces of paper and made a large rectangle out of them (assuming 8.5″ x 11″ pieces of paper edge-to-edge that’s approximately 34″ x 22″).  Then, next to the chalk drawn face things began to be stapled up.  I initially wanted a ‘nook’ of focused cluttered above my desk but it didn’t take long before the organism grew to take up much of one long wall.  After several years time I had stapled, tacked, taped or nailed pretty much everything onto my wall leaving only small bits of actual wall showing.

Ketchup flavored potato chips my aunt gave me, an engineers cap that had died throughout my junior high years, pictures, receipts, ticket stubs, advertisements, drawing and other assorted things arrayed my walls.  People would come into my room and just stand there taking in the volume of crud that was mounted in the room.  I have zero aspiration to replicate that cacophony of ‘decoration’ but it was fun while it lasted.  It was passed onto me later that my parents were heard mumbling, grumbling and groaning as they patched the hundreds if not thousands of holes in the walls to repaint the room after having to remove the wallpaper.  I got off easy simply removing the junk from the walls and putting most of it into garbage bags when I moved out 🙂