Do you have a box, or, say, 675 boxes of family videotapes gathering dust in your cupboards? Or under the bed? Or in the garage? What about your closet? There has to be somewhere to put your clothes, you know. You can’t go around just wearing a towel. Usually.

Do you worry about what to do about all those treasured taped memories of wonderful events like christenings, birthdays, Christmases, dance and music recitals, weddings, showers, Halloween and Easter egg hunts, weddings, funerals, and T-ball, soccer, baseball, football, basketball, track and other sport events, science fairs, talent competitions, the Weightwatcher meeting when you got the award for six weeks of faithful attendance and zero weight loss, Tupperware parties, dog spaying celebrations, and worming ceremonies? But now those dratted videotapes, precious as they are, are taking up room, and you don’t have a VCR that’ll even play them anymore? Well, you can relax. I have the perfect solution for you.

INCINERATE THEM. Do not delay. Do it at night while the rest of the family is sound asleep. In the unlikely event that anyone notices they’re gone, you can feign ignorance. If you think you’re not very good at feigning ignorance and innocence, trust me, it just takes PRACTICE. You can DO it. You just have to apply yourself.

If the day ever comes when one of kids wants to know, like, where’s the videotape of the time she won the Miss America beauty pageant in Atlantic City, either suggest the dog ate it, or you have no idea, but maybe it blew away in a fierce tornado while we weren’t looking. See? (Feigning ignorance has become one of my most useful and masterfully applied skills, along with the discreet belching and farting for which I’m secretly responsible but never explicitly blamed. Feigned ignorance is highly underrated as a survival technique.)

Just think how good you’ll feel to get rid of all that clutter! To free up all that space! To lose all that weight! You’ll look years younger. You’ll feel like you have money in the bank. Who knew you could get a whole new lease on life just by shedding a few hundred videotapes?

So that, in my wisdom, is what I advise you to do with your videotapes. I don’t expect you to thank me though, merely to keep me continuously in your prayers, because- alas! – that ISN’T what I’m doing with my own family videotapes. At least not yet.

When the wonderful world of videotaping was first introduced to me in 1987, I was completely sucked into it. No scene involving my family or any of our relatives or friends was too dull not to be captured in its entirety. Twenty minutes of my niece Liz shoveling horse manure in her equine’s stall was my idea of really sparkling, award-winning video subject matter. And I once videotaped my grandchild Arden bobbing up and down in a Johnny Jump-up FOR FORTY MINUTES. Trouble is, today, even Arden won’t watch it. A whole lot of my video footage is as exciting as the scene recorded when the camcorder is accidentally in recording mode while bouncing up and down in the trunk of the car on a 2,000 mile car trip.

I realize now, too late, that when some normal doting relative wants to preserve their child’s performance in a dance recital, for instance, she carefully records the actual performance for posterity. Well, that never even occurred to me. I recorded such events by visiting the dance school in advance so I could record the classes in which the little darlings were learning the steps, the makeup session and costume try-on, the full dress rehearsal of every single dance in the show, and finally the big performance including the overture, every single dance number, panning shots of the audience trying to stay awake, and the final curtain call. And the shows were THREE HOURS LONG. Following the big event I always tried to get a brief interview with whichever grandchild or stranger I could trap in front of the camera, to kind of round off my potential Emmy-award winning documentary.

You can imagine how popular I was in my family and in the world at large. Some of the children are still not speaking to me. And I used to have friends.

It went on like that for years. In keeping with my lifetime motto that anything worth doing is worth doing to excess, I somehow managed to amass a lot of videotapes. A lot of them. Like hemorrhoids, the piles of them grew and grew even when I really didn’t want them to. And their formats kept changing: from VHS, to S-VHS, to mini-DV, to DVCAM, etc. And with every format change, I also had to cling to each of the antiquated camcorders on which those formats had been recorded so that the tape could actually be PLAYED on something. Not that anyone ever wanted to. As far as the family was concerned, all those tapes were just the embarrassing paraphernalia related to Grandma’s annoying tapeworm affliction.

Finally, the only places left to store my tape droppings were the refrigerator and my linen closet. The situation was getting dangerous. It was finally my bulging clothes closet that forced me to face the issue. It wasn’t that I couldn’t get my clothes INTO the closet, I just couldn’t pry them loose to get them OUT. I had to DO something. I couldn’t just show up to shop at Safeway barefoot and wearing a pillow case, when they were used to seeing me there all dolled up in a muumuu and patrol boots!

Now I wish I could tell you that I did the sensible thing, that I used the maturity and prudence expected of all upstanding AARP subscribers, and murdered every tape in my collection by drowning, barbecuing, gouging, shredding, or pummeling it to a merciful death. But of course, such a decision would have demanded common sense, an attribute I have never been accused of demonstrating.

Instead, I proceeded to actually digitize, roughly edit, and archive every event I ever recorded on a database, which allows me instant access and viewing, and fast exporting when I want to edit them further, or forward copies to any of you via email. You don’t believe me, do you? But it’s the honest truth. Would I lie? Well, yes, but not this time. This time I’m telling the truth. And the Truth is that nobody knows it yet but me, but some of those tapes are priceless.

When I started spitting out this week’s blob, my plan was to make it a tutorial of how I’m actually performing this archiving miracle using the knock-down fabulous treasure of the software product world called NeoFinder. Windbag that I am, I’ve already used up all your reading time (thank you for hanging in there) but if you leave a comment that you’d like to read/see such a walk-through as to how I’m doing it, I’ll crank one out soon. You can learn more about NeoFinder at the link below.

https://www.cdfinder.de/en/en/networking.html

I wish I could tell you that I have completed my gargantuan project but I can’t. So far, the movies I’ve archived are stored on a 12 terabyte drive (priced at $ 380 on Amazon.com, and kept backed up on a twin 12 TB drive. Except for that and the $35 that I paid for the license to use NeoFinder (a free version is also available) that’s all the expense the project has cost me so far — if you don’t count the few thousand hours I’ve spent getting the movies ready for human consumption on the archive.

So far, I’ve used up 5 terabytes of my drive. A terabyte is equal to 1,000 gigabytes. A full length movie is about 2 gigs long. That means that so far, I’ve archived the equivalent of 2,500 full length movies. Of course, mine can range anywhere from a minute long, up to a half hour or so, and there are hundreds of them. And I’m only about 30% done! That’s why you might think twice about following my path, and using the incinerator instead.

I don’t really mean that, though. Some of the stuff you’d lose on those tapes are true treasures — and photos of the same scenes can miss some special moments!

As an example, take a look at this. My son Matthew keeps pointing out that my blobs are too long, so I’m trying to reform my style (maybe next time). But I got to thinking, maybe I should show him a look at one of the treasures of HIM that NeoFinder has carefully bottled up for my instantaneous retrieval.

When you watch it, you’ll be painfully aware of the VHS resolution we had available 33 years ago when I recorded it. And of the pixel dropout we had to live with at that stage of the technology. And you may wonder why I would choose such a mundane scene to show you.

If you already know us, I don’t need to explain it. The scene was recorded not that long before my beloved son was near death. He survived, but was permanently disabled, and will never be able to speak or walk again as he could in the video. That little movie can surely be classified as a priceless memory.

My final advice is this: treasure those tapes long enough to transform them onto a friendly database like NeoFinder.

And then, for heaven’s sake, INCINERATE THEM!