Collecting Dust

In yesterday's mail, I received a catalog about gold. The metal, gold. They want me to invest in gold. They might as well send me a catalog advertising fighter jets or diamond-encrusted soup spoons. I have approximately zero dollars to my name, and the odds that I will spend even a thin dime on gold is laughable. I guess I got the catalog because I used to collect coins. Never anything "valuable," of course, outside of an ounce of silver (like thirty bucks or so, right now). But I love to read, and subscribed to two or three coin magazines at one point. In fact, I'd bet a week's paycheck that I actually spent MORE on coin magazine subscriptions than on coins.

I'm pretty much completely over the collecting urge. Not just coins, but collecting anything at all seems like a huge fucking hassle. The two most important elements - spending cash and space - are two elements completely missing from my life. Back at my parents' house in New Jersey, I have about a half-dozen long boxes filled with comics that I collected as a teenager. I might as well have just taken all the cash I spent on them and burned it. Even if I weren't 3000 miles away, I bet I couldn't get a dime apiece for them from a comic store or on eBay. That adds up to a few hundred bucks, maybe, but I spent thousands. I had a minimum-wage job, but lived with Mom and Dad, paid no rent, paid for no food, just car insurance. The worst part was that I almost never read them - I looked at them as a potential investment. What an utter asshole.

My Mom was (maybe still is, I haven't visited in a while) a chronic collector. She loves the idea of collecting, but never seems to be able to settle on one collection. We had a spare room when I was growing up. She wanted to make it "hers." Over the course of a few years, the room went from rainbow-themed to clown-themed, to country-themed. Her rainbow collection led to some laughs - she was completely unaware of the significance of the Rainbow Flag in the LGBT community, and her first visit to San Francisco was fun. "So many people here like rainbows!" The country-style room was the worst, though, because it spread. Our entire house eventually looked like granny's attic - needlepoint on the walls imploring God to "Bless This Mess," sheaves of baby's breath blossoms all over the place, shit like that. She even went through a country music phase, though that was mercifully short. I remember it was right around the time of that song "Elvira." Shudder.

Honestly, if I had space, I'd collect cats. Real cats, not cat-related objects like another one of Mom's phases. To a point, of course, as I have a limit on how many boxes of animal shit I'm willing to have in my house, but I definitely enjoy the companionship. The maintenance can be relatively cheap - bargain food and litter can be had. It helps, however, if you don't mind having furniture so torn-up that it looks like the police were searching the cushions for drugs.