If you're obsessive, then why do you need the complusive?

I have a friend who used to make lists of things he wanted to buy. He would print off a full page description of the item and then put the page in a four inch three ring binder. Each binder was labeled for the different areas of his desires; Kitchen items. Shoes. Albums. Art work. He had a lot of these four inch three ring binders and they were all full. He bought bookshelves and kept all the binders together. In an essence, he collected the binders full of things he wanted to collect. I never thought it was odd because I too am afflicted by the urge to collect things.

Kitchen Magnets - I have hundreds from all four corners of the globe. I lost a few in the shake up with my former editor this past summer, but I still have quite a few. I love kitchen magnets as long as they are kitchy. Gotta have the kitch. I guess it's easy to display them and you don't really have to think twice about them until you slam your refrigerator door and they all come flying off. Then they're a huge pain in the ass, but until then, they're not only handy, they're a good memory.

Before the magnets it was postcards. I had thousands of them from everywhere I would travel to during my early days of comedy. I used to think that I could never get the exact photo I wanted and it was easier to pay twenty cents and get what I wanted without any hassle. And the damn thing was labeled! This was long before digital cameras so if you took a picture of something there was no guarantee that you got the shot. You had to wait until you sent in the film for developing and if you didn't get the shot, you were shit out of luck. It was annoying. Digital cameras are my third favorite invention of the last hundred years for this reason alone. So I collected postcards and I kept them in photo albums. I lost most of those post cards in a shake up with the girl from Prospero's Books. She took them and probably snorted them. Who knows, they're almost all gone. I think I have three left.

Prior to postcards it was patches. I had hundreds of them. I had patches from every state I had visited, every National Park, and almost every tourist trap that had a patch. It was the late seventies and early eighties so patches were all the rage back then. I was ten years old so there wasn't much I could with the patches at the time. I kept them in a box and would pull them out to look at them once or twice a week. Eventually they all disappeared during one of my many "relocations." I loved the patches a lot. They don't really make patches anymore, which I think is sad. Mostly because now I know how to sew.

The last five years, at every disc golf tournament I entered, they gave me a tee shirt. It would give the name of the tournament, it had some artwork and usually the date of the event on it. I never wore any of them. I have hundreds of them too. I stuffed them into trash bags which took up a small closet. It was decided that I should make them into a quilt, but, alas, my former editor was also responsible for the quilt work and she cut up the shirts and took them with her. I don't think I'm going to see them again. She is also the one who took my dog. Hmmmm...

In Junior High I collected movie posters. I had over a thousand! Easily 1200 differ titles and I had them all put up on my wall. I was particularly fond of "LEGEND" and "WIZARDS." (look over there -->) Those were two of my favorites. I had posters for movies that most people had never seen and I loved to stare at all of them. I love movies. Of course, 1200 movie posters on your wall will insulate that room and it tended to get a bit warm in there. It could be miserable during the hot Kansas summers. What was worse is if I had to "relocate." I took a lot of time and effort to take them off the wall and transport them. When they were rolled up they weighed over a hundred pounds. I moved six different times in high school and during the final move I just didn't put them up. I kept them in a roll and stored them. I put up a wall of surfing posters which made my room look like it was filled with water. The lady I was living with at the time had an attic and she let me store them there. I heard she moved to Central America and I doubt she took them with her.

When I was in Elementary school, I collected anything with Garfield on it. Anything. Sheets, pillows, books, a toothbrush, you name it, I wanted it. Now when I was collecting Garfield items it wasn't easy to find things. Garfield was just a simple comic strip and it didn't have much promotional kitch to collect. Today you can find that stuff anywhere, but back in the early eighties it was a major hassle. I actually wrote the author of the Garfield comic, Jim Davis and told him about my collection and the woes of trying to find items with Garfield on it. He was so impressed that he wrote me back a personal note and gave me a few collectible pieces from his desk. I was very, very proud of that autograph. I was very serious about my Garfield world until book twenty-two or something like that. Then I gave up. By that time, Garfield was everywhere and there was no way for me to get everything I wanted. I was on an eight year old's allowance and some of those Garfield collectibles ran over a hundred bucks a pop. My entire collection was lost in the great migration of 1984 when I relocated to Kansas City from Washington state. The collection didn't come with me and was probably thrown away. I lost the autograph in the relocation.

I moved on to GI JOE toys for a while and enjoyed trying to collect as many of the action figures as I could. Then I went through puberty and the fascination for toys in general went away. Exercising became important to me because if you exercise you get girls. And girls will have sex with you. It all made sense to me. To offset all my manliness - or to soften it - I also collected snow globes, though I only had a few dozen. The downside of snow globes even though they are awesome, is that the music they play is often not very awesome.

In order to further sell myself as sexy to all those ladies, I decided it would be a smart idea to start to building models in my room at night. All helicopters. I had dozens of them. It would take a few weeks to build one and then I would figure out a way to suspend them from the ceiling in my room. I'm not sure if women find model helicopters hanging from the ceiling sexy, but it was my original plan. I loved those helicopters and I had all the famous ones; Blue Thunder. Airwolf. Chinooks, Hueys, Bells, Apaches. Eventually I was forced to give them to my father who collected military toys and felt they would be safer in his collection room. I don't know what he did with them after I moved out, and years later, after he died, the entire collection was lost or sold.

Playing disc golf gave me the desire to collect disc golf discs, and I had almost a thousand discs before I sold them off to pay for my golf trips. Now I only have what I call, "replacement" discs for the ones I use regularly. In case I lose one, I have a spare. I try to avoid buying discs because I know have enough replacements that if I wanted to play with a new set of discs every day for a month, I could do it and not touch the same disc twice (this is why I ask that no one give me disc golf gift certificates on gift bearing holidays).

I do have a great collection of manual typewriters which I am either going to give away or sell in the near future. I was going to give them to people I thought might use them, but I recently gave one to a friend in the hopes that she would start writing and it was lost on her. It turns out she was more driven by image and not substance and I think the typewriter is just going to be a prop in the background of her world. I hate to think that my typewriters are going to turn into jewelry or book ends. I think I am going to send a few of the typewriters to people I know are writers.


I have a lot of friends who like to collect things and they have kept a much better focus on it from early on. For instance, I have friends who collect vinyl records and have since they were kids. They have entire rooms which are floor to ceiling records. I have more than a few friends who collect shoes, wigs, guitars, kaleidoscopes, snow globes, oven mitts, nutcrackers, cars, hats, scars, sunglasses, horses, computers, tractors, cats, Facebook friends, knives, lovers, money, guns, comic books, action figures, autographs, dvds, tea cups, pornography and baseball memorabilia. When I think of all that, I don't feel that my collections are all that foolish. My paltry ambitions are just as note worthy as the next person's. Man... I would really like those movie posters back.