Dancing In Dystopia

A post of random rumination, so if you're looking for dolls, action figures and such, there probably won't be much to interest you. If you want to feel crappy and bummed out, welcome aboard!

I was saddened to learn of the passing of Chris Squire, bassist and co-founder of the band Yes. Chris was 67 and had only recently announced he was battling a rare form of leukemia. Back years before the toy collecting stuff, I was an aspiring bass player and spent many hours struggling to learn songs like Roundabout. Circle of life an all that but I hate losing yet another of my influences.

Kind of related but I just got around to reading a friends' obituary last night. He died back in March of Lymphoma at the age of 45 but it had been hard to deal with so I finally decided to suck it up and face it. I was proud of the guy because he had achieved quite a lot as a successful business owner and local celebrity as well as being active with a children's charity and several other charity groups. It just hit me hard and it still sucks.

It probably doesn't help my output of generally fluffy nice stuff that there have been a few other crises and looming problems in my family the past few months. It's all part of being an adult but it does wear you down to feel as if the Sword of Damocles is always hanging above you. I guess what I'm trying to say is that, while I don't talk a lot about my personal life here, what goes on in the background obviously effects what gets posted…or rather, what doesn't get posted.

So, all this "cheery" stuff brings me to a question for my readers. Do you ever go through some life crisis or two or ten and ask yourself "why the hell am I doing this"? I mean, when you think about it, do you ever feel like having a large collection of stuff, often expensive stuff, is kind of pointless? I go through these periods from time to time where my hobbies just don't matter much and I feel guilty for the time, effort and money I put in to them. I have one outstanding preorder but I'm really not in the mood to buy any more after that. I've even started to seriously consider how to dispose of the excess and really whittle things down to just a few core pieces. Since I have kids, I would like to save some things for them but even though they are fascinated by Daddy's dolls and "Jai Joes", they are both really young and it'll still be a few more years before most of this stuff is really age appropriate. I know of at least one on-line retailer who buys collections and there's always eBay if I want to consider that torturous but potentially more lucrative route. My wife has had luck with eBay but I've honestly never sold anything on there. Anybody have thoughts about alternate venues for selling stuff? I know a few of you have tried selling through blog posts but has that really proven viable? I'm not yet ready to throw in the towel but there's a lot of stuff I've had stored away for years and if I'm not using it, why am I keeping it?

Aside from the hoarding completist mentality, one major reasons I acquired so much stuff was because of my desire to produce THE MAGNUM OPUS!!! with a CAST OF THOUSANDS!!! OK, so really, my plan was to do a long form, multi-chapter photo story with a cast of dozens, but you get the idea. Like many such grandiose schemes, this one eventually died from its own grandiosity and a lot of major real life stuff. Still, the basic core ideas have remained with me. Many of names of the figures you see posted here, as well as their basic backgrounds and personalities, came from that project. Since I'm not likely to produce THE MAGNUM OPUS!!! any time soon, I'm thinking of posting a basic background in a future post.
Oh and that real life stuff that stalled the story? Well, I bought a house and moved out of state, injured my back in the move, my elderly cat, whom I adopted from my sister after she died, died after a couple of years of nursing him. Then my Dad, who was already in ill health, suffered a stroke and died shortly before Christmas. There was the lovely 2005 hurricane season which included a bitch named Katrina that wrecked my new hometown but utterly destroyed my old one. A bit less than a year later, I got married and a few months after that, my wife's father died. All in a space of less than two years! So yeah…. On to the next post!