Hey friends, welcome back and thank you for joining me again this week! I’m glad to finally be back on schedule, and I really appreciate you guys sticking with me. As promised, this week is not another D&D related post!
Early in the week, I was really trying to think of a variety of topics to write about this week, and was drawing a massive blank and getting discouraged. Then, out of nowhere, a realization struck me. I have been rather invested in something other than D&D lately, it just never occurred to me to write about because it’s not creativity-related. For the last few months (and for on-again-off-again spurts over the last couple of years), I’ve been getting back in to collecting football cards. It’s a hobby that I was REALLY into when I was a kid. My neighbors and I would all collect football and basketball (and sometimes even baseball) cards and trade them with each other, and get excited when one of us pulled a really cool card or an autograph or piece of memorabilia out of a pack. It was a really fun hobby to share with friends.
My mom even got in to the hobby for a few years, and her and I would help each other’s collections by trading each other for our favorite players/teams. Her and I would even use cards as bargaining chips or betting chips when we wanted to challenge each other in random contests. I remember there was one particular card that was my mom’s favorite. It was a shiny, multicolored insert of Deion Sanders in a celebratory pose (presumably after having made a big play or something) where it looked as though he was looking toward the heavens and thanking God for something. It was a card her and I would come to refer to as “praying Deion,” and over the years, it bounced back and forth between our collections as a bargaining chip or the crucial crux point of many a trade. The card wasn’t a particularly valuable one monetarily-speaking, but it is absolutely one of the pieces I most emotionally associate with my interest in card-collecting.
Last weekend, while I was perusing eBay, I was looking to buy some new football cards for my collection, but the hobby is taking off right now (which honestly is kind of surprising to me with everything going on in the world), and it’s causing prices to start to jump. While I was browsing, I started thinking about those times from my youth I’ve discussed and I started getting nostalgic. Out of curiosity, I decided to check and see if there were still any unopened boxes of older product available, and I was absolutely shocked as to how readily available factory-sealed boxes from the 90’s and early 2000’s still are! I broke down and bought 4 total boxes of old (2 boxes from 1990 and 2 boxes from 1995) football product, and spent less than I would have on one low-end box of current product! That being said, these purchases are, for all intents and purposes, worthless, so there’s no money for me to be made in re-selling any of the cards I may pull out of the boxes, but it will be a fun, relatively inexpensive way for me to take a trip down memory lane and feel like a kid again.
You may be thinking at this point “this is all well and good, and it’s a fun little nostalgia trip, but I thought you said you wanted to try to write creatively on here,” and you would be right. There’s nothing inherently creative about collecting sports cards, which is why I almost scrapped this idea entirely. However, later in the same day that the realization had hit me of having other current interests than D&D, another realization hit me: collecting anything is kind of insane.
“Ok, so collecting things is insane. I don’t necessarily agree, but more importantly, I don’t see how that relates in any way to creativity.” Thank you, inner voice-of-my-readers, for bringing that up. I consider myself a pretty big fan of stand-up comedy. I’ve seen numerous specials from a wide variety of comedians, and I’ve even had the opportunity to see a couple of bigger-named acts (Ralphie May and Gabriel Iglesias are two that jump to mind immediately) live. I’ve always loved the craft, and how it is a bridge between the creative and analytical parts of our brains (Bo Burnham does a great performance-bit on that called “Left Brain / Right Brain” that you should check out). Well, as I had the thought about collecting things being insane, I started visualizing Jim Gaffigan doing a bit about it, and it has been stuck in my head all week since then. I apologize in advance for how likely not funny this will be to anyone but me (for as big of a fan of comedy as I am, I’m remarkably un-funny), but try to picture Jim Gaffigan doing this in his next special.
“My son started collecting football cards recently, anyone else here collect football cards?”
*audience cheer*
“Yeah it’s a fun hobby. You do realize that it’s completely insane though, right? I mean, you’re essentially collecting pictures of strangers you’ve never met, doing things you weren’t involved in, and organizing them in little booklets. You wouldn’t go in to Kinko’s and just be like ‘hey, I’ll give you 50 bucks for those pictures of that family on their vacation.’ You’d be arrested! ‘What? I like snorkeling, and it looks like they were having a lot of fun snorkeling! I was planning on putting that next to the one of the guy rock climbing I bought last week.’ It’s completely insane behavior, and we think nothing of it.”
“Did you know that some of these cards have sold for SIX FIGURES!? One baseball card has actually sold for over THREE. MILLION. DOLLARS! Do you understand that? Someone bought a piece of cardboard with a picture of a baseball player almost nobody has ever heard of – Honus Wagner. Have you ever heard of a guy named Honus Wagner? – for over THREE. MILLION. DOLLARS! Do you know what you could buy with 3 million dollars!? Can you imagine being that person’s financial advisor when they told you what they wanted to spend $3 million on? ‘I’m sorry, sir’ – and of course it’s a “sir” because no woman would be stupid enough to do this – ‘I’m sorry sir, what did you say you were spending $3 million on? Oh I did hear you correctly? You did say a baseball card? Not a home or a charitable contribution or something worthwhile…a piece of hundred-year-old cardboard with a drawing of a baseball player on it? Should I just resign now then, because once word of this gets out, I’m never going to find another financial advising job again.'”
“I know I shouldn’t trash on sports card collecting. It’s a fun hobby. But it is insane. It’s not just sports card collecting though, it’s really any collecting. Nobody collects things that are actually useful or helpful or anything. Nobody has a collection of Band-Aids at home like ‘oh you need a band-aid? What size? What color? Do you want just regular or do you want a vintage Gilligan’s Island one from 1965?’. No, people collect things like stamps or coins. And not even stamps or coins that can still be used. They’ve got Nicaraguan commemorative stamps and Prussian thalers. ‘Oh boy, if Nicaragua ever invades and completely dismantles our postal system I’ll still be able to send a letter to my sweetheart through the pony express!’ or ‘If Prussia ever reforms I’ll still be able to buy a loaf of bread!’ It’s insane! That being said, I have the most adorable collection of Beanie Babies at home and if you’ve got a Claude the Crab sitting at home, come see me after the show.”
Thank you all for indulging me this week. It was fun to try to bridge a couple of my interests and turn something inherently not creative in to a creative outlet (though again it was probably a lot funnier to me in my head than it was to anyone else). Also, please keep in mind that I don’t have anything against anyone’s collections at all, and I absolutely plan on continuing collecting sports cards. Do any of YOU have any collections? If so, I’d love to hear about them! Feel free to leave me a comment below.
Thank you for spending time with me again this week, and I’ll be back again next Thursday! š
Musings Of A Struggling Creator 