I have mentioned that some of my first collectibles were Hot Wheels. I was in the hospital for a few days when I was 2 and my parents brought me a new HW car with the tin badge which I would put on my pyjama pocket. Yes, mom and dad, I am blaming you. I loved little cars and among my favourites were the Batmobile with the pulsing tailpipe flames, the pink Jeep with the green seats and the knock off Mach 5, which I didn’t realize was a knock off until my adult years. Thanks mom and dad for ruining everything.
When I moved out to go to college I carefully packed up my toys including my sisters’ Barbies as I felt it was my duty to protect these things from being cast off into the garbage or even worse, given to an ungrateful brat. I had a new collection beginning anyways. Clocks. Not just any clock, cool clocks from the 50′s,60′s and 70′s. I had an old IBM school clock, some pewter mantle clocks and awesome housewife kitchen clocks in pink, turquoise and avacado green. Originally I set every clock to the mysterious time of a random amount of minutes before 4. It freaked people out. Or they were freaked out by the 30 or 40 clocks staring at them from every room in the house with their silent, 3:48 glares. Once someone wound up as many as he could because he felt that clocks should be ticking. I didn’t sleep for 2 days.
The toys came back out in the 80′s when my friend and roommate Cruella Deville and I decorated our bathroom with them and even made a crayon sign that said Toy Bathroom for the door. There was a Micronaut toothbrush holder, Pee Wee Herman razor stand and Barbie toilet paper dispenser. It was awesome. Strangely enough though none of our guests ever had to pee. Some felt that they were being watched and some people just don’t like to be watched peeing. This was also the time period where I had my first visit to a Toys R Us store to find the Pee Wee Herman talking figure. What a ridiculous store with nothing but empty shelves as a far as you could see.
The toys went away for a time while I was moving back and forth across the country but came back out full force when I went Star Trek Next Gen crazy early in the nineties. I was going to conventions, I wore my communicator badge, had collar pips and started building the model kits of all the starships. Then Playmates toys launched their action figure and play set line and I was tied to a chair and intravenously fed plastic until I admitted I needed every Deanna Troi action figure and variant that came out. I started out small just collecting all the main STNG characters. Then the bad guys came out and I had to have them. Then the specific episode characters were made. I needed to collect them as well. Then the different outfit versions. Well that’s a given, right? After that it was a landslide of bridge play sets, transporter chambers, shuttle crafts and adult sized spandex uniforms. No, there are no pictures.
My walls were covered with mint on card figures and my closet stuffed with boxes of unopened environments for the figures to admire safely from their plastic prisons. That’s when the locker rentals started. I had run out of living space so I had to store my collectibles. Now I had added Aliens, Batman, Visionaries and Micronauts. This is the part where we skip ahead or you can read other posts for the next part of the story.
It is now. 2011. I am no longer working for the big box monster and I am at a crossroads in life that I never even imagined. My basement is full of totes and crates and boxes full of years and years and years of “collecting”. I am admitting I have a problem. It’s not the first time I have been aware of this but this time it seems more real and daunting than ever before. I have watched many episodes of Hoarding. I am scared. I could be one of those people. Both sets of grandparents were hoarders. They got it from the war mentality. SAVE EVERYTHING! They both had garages and rooms and attics full of stuff they had to save in case of some kind of emergency. What would save me in an emergency? The Power Rangers aren’t going to do it this time. Sailor Moon dolls just don’t have that kind of power. Just recently I saw some posted pictures of the rooms of Japanese toy collectors that had been shaken like a martini in the big earthquake. It was not pretty soldier. All those half-naked anime girl figurines sprawled in heaps with glass and half eaten Pocky everywhere. That could happen to me. My best friend and I were talking about our huge collections the other day and he said he didn’t want to drag all this crap to the old age home with him. Wow. That’s a picture that stays with you. Here’s me sitting in my “go where-ever-I-want-get-out-of-my-way” scooter with the pink ranger, a megazord and prototype Sailor Saturn strapped to the basket. I’ll be waving my lightsabre and be shouting obscenities at anyone who gives me that crazy old coot look.
The collection is going. About 90% of it anyways. I am letting my plastic children out in the world where they will be put on a shelf and admired by a new, younger hoard… I mean collector. It was a hard decision but also a freeing one. It will be nice to see my walls again. I won’t have to have 40 totes to store all this stuff anymore. No more worries about what floods and bugs and earthquakes will do to my junk. Everything will go to a new home. I will be spreading joy like a kind of Santa in March. Only they have to pay for their gifts. And by pay, I mean lots of cold hard Paypal credit.
