What Do You Collect?

I sometimes ask people the question, “If you were to have a reasonable amount of money to maintain a collection, what would you collect and why?”. It’s kind of a random question, but you can sometimes get interesting answers out of people. If you ask me, collections are weird things on so many different levels. People collect everything from bugs to coins to cars, and many other random things in between. My collections were on the more nerdy end of the scale (surprise!).

Card Games

My guiltiest collection addiction I had while growing up was collecting and playing the Star Trek and Star Wars Playing Card Games (I also played Magic every now and again with the Erickson’s, but never indulged in purchasing my own cards). I had way more Star Trek cards than I did Star Wars, but both were fun to play. I think the Star Trek version was easier to play, I’m not sure I ever got the hang of Star Wars’ Attrition in “battles”. I think at last count (which was several years ago) I had over 900 Star Trek cards. And yes, I still have them somewhere around the house. I seem to remember that Kevin and I actually played a game a few years ago for good times remembrance.

We all customized our Star Trek deck’s according to the individual Race’s in the game: Federation, Klingon, Romulan, or Non-aligned. Tyler and Kris both had their decks customized towards Klingons, Kevin towards the Federation, and I had mine towards the Romulans (D’deridex! Devoras! Hahaha, sorry, just had to throw that out their for those guys). Oh the good times. I even remember getting in a fight with Kevin because he and Tyler had hidden my Romulan deck. You don’t get between me and Sela. :)

Shot Glasses

At one point I had a collection of shot glasses, which I think was largely inspired by my brother Scott. If I remember right, he brought me home a few shot glasses from his mission to Baltimore, and that sorta started the whole thing. I’d buy shot glasses in random places where I’d been. I don’t think my collection got more than 20 pieces in it, so not much to brag about. I did have one shot glass that was a Pirate’s shot glass. It was the size of a small cup (probably 3 shot glasses worth) and had lines up the side indicating your manliness as a pirate if you filled your rum to such height, something like Swashbuckler up to Full Pirate. POGs

I also had a large collection of POGs, a modernish version of Jacks where you have small cardboard circles with random images on them. You stacked the pogs up and used a slammer (a heavier and thicker POG made of plastic or metal) to smash the stack. All the pogs that stayed face up you get to keep, and you continue playing till there are no POGs left. You were supposed to be able to steal other player’s POGs, but I don’t think we ever played that way. As I remember, the game was very fun and addicting, but seems enormously boring now. I think we still have my POGs somewhere around the house, but I doubt I’ll go looking for them.

Future Collections

While all these things held my attention as an adolescent teenager, being an adolescent adult requires much more manly things to collect methinks. Unfortunately the more manly things require more cash than I currently have excess of, so for now I’ll have to just wish upon a star.

The main answer I give to the above question is that I would LOVE to collect Vintage and Modern Guitars. My Dad had a friend (recently passed away) who was a guitar nerd and every time I’d see him we’d always talk about his guitar/amp collections. At one point he actually procured one of the PA amplifiers used by The Beatles at one of their shows in some stadium in Houston, though I never dared ask how much he paid for it. I guess back then they didn’t have PA systems installed into the stadium, so they basically had to get these insanely loud amps to do the work for them. Way cool.

I also realized today that I would also really enjoy owning a bunch of old Macs. I am a self-proclaimed Mac-ist and a bit obsessed in some ways, okay in a lot of ways. I think it’d be pretty cool to have an Apple Lisa or an Apple II kicking around my office. I could even setup a fancy display for them. Part of what would be so neat about it would be to be able to use the older software on them, to see the evolution of GUI Operating Systems since their inception. I know, I know, pretty nerdy. But everyone reading this blog (at least those who know me) understand that it comes with the territory.

Other Collections of Note: Ryan Byrd has many thousands of books, several dozen swords of all types, and a “respectable coin collection”. Let’s all go on over and coax Ryan into giving us a post about those.

UPDATE: Incidentally, I just read that the Apple Lisa was released the day after I was born. Destiny? You decide.