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.
