My Horde
Living with my Collection
So, riddle for you.
How much of anything is too much?
Did that not make sense? I suppose not. Let me give you an example:
Let’s talk about video games.
I have a video game collection. It is… sizable.
To give you a scale, lets look at my steam library:
That’s a lot of games.
My main platform is my Switch 2. I have two accounts.
That’s two platforms and we are already over 2000.
There are at least 30 more platforms and consoles.
I have at least six hundred-disc binders filled with games.
I have a lot of games.
Even I think I have too many.
But here’s the thing. That’s just one of my collections.
I have a lot of paper books, artbooks, eBooks, dvds, music albums, digital albums. I have all this media that would take lifetimes to consume.
And I don’t use any of it.
And yes, I realize that’s a problem.
And it’s not just media.
I have expensive pens, notebooks, journals, warhammer miniatures, figures, clothes, bras, makeup.
I am consumerism made manifest. But I know why.
Where did all this stuff come from?
Travel back with me to the magical time of 1991.
The Minnesota Twins won the pennant. My parents got divorced. I changed schools leaving my best friend behind. I made a new best friend
And I got a Nintendo Entertainment System for my birthday. I still have it. I still have all my consoles.
This wasn’t the first time I had video games: I was big into the point and click adventure games that flourished and tragically died out in that era.
This was the first time I had a video game system and an allowance.
Having both of those things in hand, my mom or dad took me to Funcoland in West St Paul, near the Musicland and Futon Gallery. It was next to Hirshfield’s and my parents would leave me there while they bought paint. Funcoland (which is now part of the Gamestop Debauchment) was one of the miracle unicorn Minnesota businesses of that era, along with Software, Etc (which is also part of what became Gamestop, small world).
Now Funcoland in those days was a store with two walls covered in video games (and NeoGeos behind the counter. And at first all the games were used. You’d go in and they hand you the list. I would look at the list of all the games they might have, and I would say. This. I will have all of these.
I did the best I could with $5 a week. Since my resources were limited I started at the bottom, which was of course the bottom of the barrel. My NES collection includes such “masterpieces” as X-men and Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu. And if you’ve played either of those you will understand how much of an idiot I was as a child. In my defense, I got more picky over time.
The problem was not my desire to buy only the worst video games ever made, but the desire to collect everything.
After video games it was TSR fantasy novels, Anime on VHS, my insanely large manga and light novel collection (RIP, I had to sell it off for pennies when I left Japan), magic cards, star trek cards, spellfire cards, rage cards.
I was consumed by this desire to horde, to collect, to own it all.
And it was never enough. It still isn’t.
But I’m getting better.
The Healing
When I decided at the prodigious bright young age of 38 to fix my messed up life, I still hadn’t figured out that I didn’t need to own everything. My switch library is proof of that.
No.
I had to get poor in order to heal.
You see, even when I was on Medical Assistance and surviving on student loans and a job in the IT department, I was still wasting money.
When I got a real job, salaried. I was still wasting money.
But then I started making so much money, and then no one was helping me anymore. Insurance went from basically free to $1300 a month. Living in my parents’ basements was no longer an option, and now I was paying $2000 a month for rent or a mortgage. Even the government got in on the game, taking away the earned income tax credit. And now for the first time in my charmed life, I didn’t have enough to buy anything.
That was when the healing could finally start.
First I stopped buying movies. I don’t even watch movies.
Second I stopped buying video games. I only have the attention span to play a game for about 30 minutes (unless it’s one of those ones that eats 8 hours, looking at you heroes of the storm).
Then I stopped buying Warhammer: I haven’t even played warhammer (fantasy, 40k) since the 90s.
Then I stopped buying magic cards. How many do you really need?
And for the first time in my life: I realized I didn’t need them.
What really makes me happy
And it wasn’t consuming stuff.
It was creating stuff.
When I hold a pencil, or a pen, or a digitizer pen my fingers curl around it and it feels tactilely like happiness. The clicking of the keyboard switches. A good mouse. Even a trackpad when it’s not pissing me off. These were the things that made me feel good.
I have an infinite number of warhammer models to build and paint. It’s insane, truly.
Art. Art was what I wanted to be doing. And I should have known that. I’ve been drawing since I could hold a crayon. I didn’t take notes in school: I drew girls and animals and things I had imagined. And I still passed the tests because my brain was alive and active when I was creating.
But here’s the most amazing thing of all.
It wasn’t Art either.
I love art and creating. But what I really love are Stories.
Conclusion
Right now, this is the best time in my life.
I never know if I’m going to be able to pay my bills. If my wife or daughter or I get sick I don’t know how we recover from that.
The government is moving in the direction of committing genocide against me and my sisters. People are taking away the healthcare and medicines we need to live.
And I’ve never been happier.
Because, my friends. I get to write.
I get to tell the Stories that I want to tell. I get to take apart the things I read and make them mine. If Hemingway can do it this way, I’m going to borrow that and take it somewhere he couldn’t even imagine. I get to make a world where I’m loved and people care about each other and maybe things will be ok in the end.
And that was the joy that I’d sought my entire life. The joy that all that stuff could never provide.
Because it was for me, not of me.