The Urge to Hunt

I love the title of this post.

It's so exciting sounding. What do I have the urge to hunt? Deer? Boar? PEOPLE? 

Of course not. I'm talking about hunting for things, specifically toys of some kind. The Toy Hunt.

The word HUNT makes it sound so interesting and grandiose, like there's some kind of physical exertion or skill involved. In actuality this hunt involves a lot of driving, walking short distances, pacing around a small area and disappointment. 

While I haven't been quite in the hunting zone lately, I've limited myself to 1 trip to Toys R Us per week, there's still quite the strong desire to go and look for something. I don't even know what it is that my crazy brain wants me to find, just some THING. 

I wonder if this is some deep-rooted primordial need that's buried inside me, the desire to bring home the kill, to prove I'm serving a needed function within the tribe. In the past I'd have been putting food on the table or firewood in the stove. Instead I'm putting Minimates on the couch and Transformers in the closet. 

Sometimes I try to think back to the time before I was buying these things, to see when it started, but I'm pretty sure I've been spending my disposable income on useless things for as long as I've been able to. I mean, obviously when you're a kid and you're buying G.I. Joes with your allowance that's expected. Where does it stop being normal in society's eyes and become something worth telling the internet about?

I think the best place to starting tracking is when I got my first full time job at Pet Superstore, despite having no pets myself. I'll have to write about that place in detail at some point and how that began and ended. 

I know most of my money that didn't go to bills was spent on CD's at first. I can still clearly remember buying the first "Godsmack" album and cranking that through the crappy speakers in my Delta 88. As I'm writing this it's becoming clearer where the money was going before the piles of action figures - musical equipment. 

You see, I was in a band throughout the back end of high school and into the first few years of not-high school. Despite being, at best, "Seminary Famous" I still felt the need to upgrade equipment on a weekly basis. Sometimes this would be a distortion pedal or a more expensive speaker cable. Those were the cheap weeks. 

When I got to really worrying about the elusive uber-tone I'd buy a new Amp or, heaven forbid, Guitar. While I'm pretty proud to say that I found some crazy good (likely stolen) deals at the local Pawn Shop, I am 100% certain that my desire for new gear was driven by the same urges that bring me to Toys R Us at 32 years old.

As the band wound down and I became more excited by World of Warcraft and Xbox 360 my superfluous income (ha!) began to reroute itself. Extra instruments, pedals and amps found their way onto craig's list or ebay. It was pretty easy to watch ebay auctions whilst camping a rare-spawn in The Badlands and soon I had packages rolling in on the regular full of old toys I wanted when I was a kid (and apparently still did!) and piles of comics. 

This era wasn't so much driven by a need to hunt but a need to ACQUIRE. While clicking search on ebay can loosely be described as hunting I don't think it's quite the same. 

It became very important to me to complete runs of comic books. I don't think I ever ended up buying any books that were never read but in a lot of cases the desire to own the books was much greater than my interest in the goings on within. When I found out that one could generally buy massive lots of trade paperbacks through ebay for around 50% of the msrp I upgraded from flimsy comics to tpb's and hardcovers. 

This was probably the worst era financially for me looking back.
Practically no one is looking to buy previously loved trade paperbacks for anywhere close to their face value. All of my other phases of collecting have at least remained somewhat desirable to other folks but I still have a money pit of lovely collections of comics on my shelves. It could be worse though, very few of them are unreadable messes!

Unsurprisingly, I've drifted all over the place and am unsure how to wind this post up. Perhaps I'll re-read it at some point and spend a little more time on each era of my buying history. 

Thanks for reading.








   

Interesting Stuff and the Other 14%

I've been posting pretty regularly over at my other blog (stangg.blogspot.com) but there's only so much to say about me playing Magical Cards. 

I've got the itch to write right now and, despite what it might feel like sometimes, Magic isn't 100% of my life. Probably closer to 86% really. My wife would say more I think. 

Of course there's work right there at the top of the heap, occupying the bulk of my waking existence. Work's pretty good. It's challenging at times, entertaining and even hilarious. I know for sure that customer service wasn't even close to my job radar growing up but I enjoy it and I'm even pretty good at it if I may be allowed to brag a little. 

I'm sure I'll talk some more about work in the future, there are always good stories to tell, but for now I kind of want to put forth my manifesto for this blog. 

What I'm into, what I'll be writing about and maybe why you'd want to read about my life. 

I'm 32 for now, I'm married to a wonderful woman and I have 3 Guinea Pigs named mostly after Transformers. We all live in a house that's full of things. Some things we need, some things we absolutely don't and some things that I'm still not sure how we got. 

Some of those things (a lot of those things) are toys that I've bought. I collect toys. Collect, in this case, is accurate by 2 definitions of the word. There are some groups, brands and lines of toys that I seek out and buy in an attempt to get all of them. I've been down that road of collecting with lots of things. He-man and the Masters of the Universe. G.I. Joe, a Real American Hero. Transformers, Robots in Disguise. Mostly those experiences were frustrating ones punctuated with moments of intense excitement that was soon overshadowed by more frustration. There's a fine line between "The Thrill of the Hunt" and "Why in the Bloody Hell Can't I Buy the Sorceress" and as most collectors know you spend a lot more time on the bad side of that line than you'd like. 

Lately I've collected toys more in the way that an unmoved item collects dust. 

Not in the sense that they are unwanted, it's more that I'm not seeking them out but still I find them everywhere I look. 

I still frequent a lot of the stores that I stalked my previous prey in out of habit. It's actually more fun now that there aren't any plastic faces to pine after as I round the corners of the aisles. No feeling of hope/disappointment. Hopesappointment? The only problem is there's still that nagging need to buy something, anything, and I sometimes often usually leave with a trinket anyway. 

Luckily there's a big push lately for relatively cheap toys called "Blind Bags" and I've been able to satiate my rabid inner consumer for under $4 most of the time. I say luckily because it means I'm not spending a ton of money but to be honest there is a down side to these little guys. They are actually available to be bought just about everywhere. Where before it was relatively safe to walk down the toy aisle of Walgreens now I'm liable to crash into a display box of Lego Minifigures. 

You haven't lived until you've spent the better part of an hour feeling Legos through plastic bags in the middle of a drug store. If you've ever seen a bag of Legos that has roughly the texture of stone-washed jeans, well now you know what happened. 

So toys will probably occupy a large part of my posts on this end of the blog. What I bought, what I didn't and what I wish I could've bought. I'll add in pictures too if I can figure out the workings of the internet that'll let me do so. 

I'll also tell you about things my family does, this will include not only my fantastic wife Noelle but our 3 Guinea Pigs: Scrumbles, Ravage and Laserbeak. All 4 of the crazy women in my life make me smile, laugh and cackle on a regular basis and I want to share those experiences with literally the entire planet. And I will. 

I'm sure some Magic talk will creep into my posts, it is after all 93% of my life, but I'll try and keep the confusion to a minimum. Most likely anything Magic related will focus on what happens before and after the actual Magicing. Our little group of Magicians goes to eat, watches movies and generally hams it up in the Muggle world and it's usually a pretty good time. 

I hope to keep up with this thing better than I have before. Realistically I plan to post a couple of times a week whether anything special happens or not. Maybe more but probably less. Any feedback will be gratefully read and responded to, it really is the best reason to do something like this, so please tell me something. Anything.

If you like what I like (and I like a lot of things) then I think you'll like my blog.