I collect stuff.

I have been a collector of things since I was very young. I think everyone starts out with rocks, since they are free and plentiful, and goes (or doesn't) from there. I also think that there are two separate kinds of collections: one is gathering together stuff just to look at and admire, and the other is gathering together stuff to use. I have been both kinds of collector in my life, sometimes within the same collection.

My first big collection was baseball cards. I loved opening the packs and hoping that I got someone good, or someone from the Yankees. Plus I really loved that gum with all that disgusting powder on it. The cards didn't really have any useful application in my life. I used to watch a lot of baseball games then, and I would take whatever players from the two teams that I had cards of and pit them against each other, somehow. I was only 12, remember. I lost interest in high school and sold all my cards to my friend Russ.

One of my first dates with Sarah was at the big comic book convention in New York City. She collected comics, but I did not. I bought quite a few Batman graphic novels after the 1989 movie came out, but that was the extent of it. I started going to comic book shops with her and got sucked into collecting them. At first I only bought the ones that I enjoyed reading, but then I was buying some and putting them into a bag and backing without reading them. This went on for awhile, until we moved to Delaware and couldn't afford it anymore. We were spending up to 50 dollars a week on comic books! We still have them, but many have been marked for disposal. Unfortunately, the bottom fell out of the comic book market years ago, and many of the books that we held on to that were worth a lot of money, are no longer. Oh well, live and learn.

I started collecting action figures soon after I began working at Kay-Bee Toys in 1991. I had no intention of playing with these of course, I just bought them to hang on the wall. I bought all of the Batman figures that came out (and I mean all of the figures in that line), plus some other ones that I thought were cool (I had 8 different April O'Neill figures!). Sarah and I both worked at Kay-Bee at the time, so we got a pretty good discount. Once we stopped working there, we stopped collecting. I sold every last action figure I had on eBay in 2000, and the only ones I wish I still had were the April O'Neill figures. One of them had real hair!

My sister and I got an Atari 2600 in 1980, and I put a lot of my allowance towards purchasing cartridges. We eventually had 17 of them between that and getting them as presents. I grew out of it by the time I was in high school. In my senior year, my sister asked for a Nintendo for Christmas, and I was really taken with it, so I also bought some games for that. I grew out of that one when I met Sarah, but working at Kay-Bee kind of stoked my video game fire, because I was exposed to everything that was out there. For Christmas one year she bought me a Sega Master System (something I'd never heard of), which Kay-Bee had on closeout. She also bought me a Super Nintendo as a wedding present. :) On our honeymoon, we were in a junk shop and I saw some Atari 2600 cartridges. I did not buy them, but I was gripped with nostalgia for them. Sarah took me to my first flea market a few months later, and there were Atari 2600 cartridges and systems EVERYWHERE. I started buying them, hoping to get the 17 games I had when I was a kid, plus other ones that friends had back then. I fell in love with these simple games, and I bought whatever I could find. I also discovered other old systems that I never heard of when I was a kid and bought those too, but I was still playing everything. I had amassed quite a collection when we moved to Delaware, which is where it came to a standstill. I stopped playing for almost a year and a half, and I had to cut back on buying. I didn't get rid of anything though, and I was able to pick up the collecting part of it after we moved into our house (I have/had complete collections of quite a few systems). Last year I reassessed the classic video game collection, and I ended up trading in a lot of stuff that I didn't have a sentimental attachment to, for a Wii. Which I still don't really play that often. :P

My biggest and most life spanning collection is music. I started buying records when I was a kid, because I didn't have an 8-track tape player in the house (cassettes were never really an option for me, I guess I was just a cassette snob). I discovered Goldmine magazine and bought a lot of old records that were out of print (I love a lot of 60s music). I bought a lot of records when I found the secondhand shops, but I bought records to listen to back then. When CDs came out, I sold a lot of records when I got them on CD, which I really regret now. I built up a giant CD collection over the years, but I don't buy as many as I used to. I got back into buying records in the past few years, and I would say that I buy more of those than CDs. I don't really download music, unless I can't get it on either format, or it's prohibitively expensive on either format. I like holding it in my hands, to Sarah's chagrin. :) I still buy music to listen to, but I have started buying records because of the label they're on or who actually cut the record, or I'll buy a deluxe version of a CD because I really like the band (R.E.M. is a good example).

I can see a future for me where the only collection I have left is music. At some point I will probably switch over to digital music (especially if I have to move all of this stuff again). I can probably live without owning any video games. I can always emulate them on the computer.

The moral of the story is: don't collect stuff. It's too expensive. :)