do you collect something? most people do. i definitely have the packrat mentality, something i have in common with both my mum and my dad. my dad collected stamps, matchboxes, and cigarette cards. variously i have collected stamps, comics, magazines, books, cds, beer mats, badges, erasers, and key rings. i still collect some of that stuff but other hobbies fell by the wayside.
sometimes i think just for the sake of collecting – it has a certain goal usually and that is to have a complete set of something, and then once that is done you move on to something else. i have found with books and comics this is especially satisfying because it generally means you have a whole story there – a complete universe, and the reading of it is totally immersive.
a weird perverseness can sometimes plague a collector, it accompanies the manic drive to get anything an artist or writer has done – and that is for the career to be done with so it is finite and the ownership of the products is achievable. a kind of fatigue can set in if you have chosen to collect someone like prince for instance who can turn out more records than someone on an average wage can ever hope to keep up with.
i know i have a kind of mania for collecting, and it sometimes results in a situation where i have loads of shit sat there i have not read and then i have to wade through it. sure the eventual consumption is great, but it can be overwhelming the amount of culture one has inadvertently accrued, and it can leave you feeling bloated and constipated and in need of some light relief. you want some fast food culture – something that doesn’t branch off into fifteen billion intricate details of a universe built over twenty years; something that does not rely on an anally retentive attention to detail over continuity.
i have heard that it is a very male thing but i have seen some women who collect shoes, dresses and ornaments in a similar fashion. it is as if we have to surround ourselves with anchors that make us more solid in this ephemeral fad driven world, but if it actually achieved that would we really wind up with house that look like bric-a-brac shops? probably not. perhaps as the stone stop rolling quite so much this is the moss it gathers.
