IF I WAS MARTY MCFLY I WOULD BE TRYING TO HOOK MY DAD UP WITH CHICKS IN GRADE SCHOOL
No, what I really wish is that I was born just a few years earlier than I was. Mostly so that I could be a little more sentient when all those things that formed my childhood years happened. So that I could be young during the 80s and have the presence of mind enough to appreciate everything as it was happening. Of course one more go around would be fantastic, but I don't necessarily have time travel fantasies so much as I have appreciation fantasies. I wish I would have realized how great I had it back then, you know, before the world turned into its current state of total crap.
OPTIMUS PRIME MASKS IS THE NEW DIAPERS
My latest attempt at self diagnosis and treatment of my toy robots fixation had me reading up on a similar condition called infantilism, where a person becomes infatuated with reliving their babyhood so they collect and surround themselves with baby items and sometimes even go so far as to wear diapers. Infantilism is essentially the same behavior as toy robots collecting but it skews towards a slightly earlier period in life and has a different wardrobe.
TRUE INFANTILISM IS ONLY ONE INTILISM AWAY FROM TRUE FAN
I've found an essay titled "What is True Infantilism?" that explains the difference between people who get off sexually on wearing diapers and people for whom the diaper is used as a comfort object of sorts to help them regress to an earlier time when they felt more comfortable and loved. That's all this toy robots hobby is, really. A collecting of comfort items that bridge the transition between the current suck of today and the wonderful gloriousness that was 1985. I think the way RoboPlasti-Holism works is the more robots I have the more my happy childhood memories are supposed to surround me, just like the more diapers you wear the more shit you can carry around with you. Something like that.
TIME TRAVELING FOR A BETTER TODAY
This all came to a head today when I read a book called Too Cool to be Forgotten. It's one of those hardcover comics that's a little over a hundred pages with one single self contained story. Other people have done better reviews than I ever could but the basic premise is that a forty year old guy named Andy Wicks tries to quit smoking by trying some regressive hypnosis therapy that ends up sending him back in time to 1985 when he was 17 and in high school. This comic character does all I fantasize about doing every minute of my existence-he tries to kill off a retarded habit and he goes back to 1985. Plus he's just a few years older than I was in 1985. Some kids wish they were Peter Parker but hot damn I'm wishing I was some balding forty year old comic character named Andy Wicks.THERE ARE EVEN CHARACTERS IN IT WEARING IRON MAIDEN SHIRTS
If you look around on the internet you can find previews of almost the entire First Two Chapters of the book and that's what I was doing one night last June. My wife remembered I liked it and today in the mail I found she ordered it for me. What a surprise that was! I feel bad because although the preview pages were too cool, I had sort of forgotten about it. If my opinion matters to you, my fellow Macrocranians, then I want to say this book is nothing short of fantastic. It is my ultimate personal wish fulfillment realized and written in such a way that I felt changed for the better as a person after having read it. There are truths within this story that apply to anyone afflicted by any sort of shameful adult behavior, be it diaper wearing or toy robots collecting (which are pretty much equally embarrassing).
4 comments:
Wow, I feel the same way... except with Star Wars and G.I. Joe... although if I went back in time I'd get made fun of by jocks and girls again so I guess it's not all that it's cracked up to be for some of us.
You don't have to go back in time to get made fun of. Keep posting pictures of yourself sleeping with a Millennium Falcon and we'll make fun of you here and now!
Dude, even if you are just kidding around and aren't seriously comparing "adult collecting" to infantilism, adult collecting still is nowhere near embarrassing or as fucked up as infantilism is. I appreciate your self-deprecating look at adult collecting and I like Nala's take on it as well and I can see how it (buying toys as an adult) would come off as weird or embarrassing but overall I really don't seem to feel the shame/embarrassment that you guys seem to feel all the time. Maybe it's because I'm 26 and not in my thirties. I don't know. I mean, I can see how one would feel like a freak/creep/weirdo if they were some kind of completist and their whole lives were devoted to collecting and all of their money went into children's toys but it (collecting) really isn't that weird or bad of a thing if you do it the right way (you treat it like a hobby and not as a lifestyle in other words).
When I first got to college I thought that everyone would see my collections and freak out or make fun of me and that I would somehow end up being an Andy Spitzer but in reality people's responses were always stuff like "that's cool, I remember transformers" and nothing really more than that and it didn't have any kind of negative affect on me getting laid or making friends or anything like that. So, to me, in other words, collecting isn't really that weird or freakish of a thing if you do it the right way and I don't think it's really the big social taboo it once was. I think that might have something to do with more "mainstream" kinds of guys collecting. You know, the more hardass, badass kind of guys like Marines and cops buying the stuff. I used to live in a town next to a Marine base and you'd see those guys buying TF shit all the time at the local Target and TRU.
But yeah, that's the way I see "adult collecting" anyway. I honestly didn't mean to write such a rant but I guess I'm kind of defensive of adult collecting this week seeing as how two or three of my fellow collector friends have been bashing it pretty harshly this week and trying to claim it was what wrecked their chances to have a more "normal" social life.
BTW (this has nothing to do with anything) I finally posted my pics from the Toynami booth at SDCC at my site. It's mostly Robotech/Macross stuff though. I guess I didn't get a pic of the plastic Voltron after all.
I think you nailed it when you wrote about all this negativity being symptomatic of someone in their thirties. I think age does have a lot to do with it. In my twenties I could not get enough of buying robots but now I'm going through the crash landing. I'm glad though because the love just mutates into different ways of expressing it. It never really goes away.
I think Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Well after a while I realized all I was doing was expecting the hundredth or thousandth toy robot to give me the same thrill as the first one. It gets old, but yeah when I was in my twenties it was a great ride.
I never cared about anyone else's opinion of my hobby then or now, although those hot sluts at the TRU cash registers did make me feel funny inside sometimes. I'm proud to say my meltdown has been entirely self induced.
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