A 40 year old man walks into a Target on Wednesday morning after running an errand. As a card collector it’s almost a habit to stop at whatever store nearby sells cards.

And so he does what he does: He sets the vehicle in park, dons a mask due to COVID-19 protocol and heads into the store hoping there will be something to buy.

He’s a baseball collector and dabbles a bit in basketball these days, but this time it’s mid December and neither of those sports are in season. The cards at the front of folks mind these days are those of football, a sport the man abandoned as a true collector almost a decade and a half prior. But here he is, two weeks before Christmas, walking into a Target, grabbing a hand basket and heading to the card aisle.

The collector sees two heads already over there, which of course piques his curiosity. It was only a year or two earlier when the only heads seen in that area were those of kids or others of his kind. Now the collector contends with young adults half his age, more wise to technology, mostly there seeing an opportunity to profit. The collector had stopped at Target out of habit because that is what he knows. As it turns out the two heads he spotted from a distance are really three, and all of them were here because they heard in a Facebook group that new cards were being stocked today at this Target and there was an opportunity to double or triple their money.

The collector walks up with a basket in hand, and from the left the card vendor shows up with a half dozen boxes of promise, or so it seems anyway.

As the vendor eyes the shelf to make room for the newest product, one of the three heads who’d been waiting wheels his shopping cart out of hiding — it is already full of new product that draws the ire of the vendor and his other two Facebook partners.

“Did you get those from here?” The perplexed vendor asks, motioning to the seemingly sealed boxes of product he had been sent there to stock.

The man with the shopping cart plays dumb, saying a female employee had placed the cards out earlier and he grabbed them all. But all standing there already knew the fix was in; the man with the shopping cart had an insider with whom he’d been working. The game was unwinnable for all others who were there to play.

There were a dozen of one box, two dozen of another, and yet another row of unknown product beneath that. The man with the shopping cart had already won the lottery and he stuck around to press his luck a bit more.

The collector was at a crossroads. Does he stick around to see if he can get some of the leftovers — assuming the other two heads even agree to share — or does he walk away in frustration, resigned to the fact that the old ways of his hobby are antiquated to a degree?

After a brief moment of internal struggle the collector decides to bow out knowing it is not in his nature to argue in public over the ability to purchase baseball cards. After all, what exactly was he there for anyway? Certainly it was not the heartache and frustration this seemingly spontaneous trip was beginning to cause.

***

The story above was my experience on Wednesday and I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that this situation really put me into a funk for a good portion of the day. Sure, part of it was the actual happening, but majority of the depressive thoughts were due in part to the fact that the sharpened hooks of FOMO and hobby addiction had again become sunken deep into my cheek and the barb wasn’t allowing for a simple catch and release.

Realizing this, I had to step away from Twitter for much of the remainder of the day. And instead of sharing here, I’d honestly still be wrestling with this internally if it weren’t for something I saw later that night.

For one reason or another I realized that Greg of NightOwlCards was going to be on the About The Cards podcast. I’d been following Greg since 2008 when I found his work in the infancy of this blog and remarkably this east coast native made time to be on the only podcast I consume regularly, one that doesn’t start until 11 pm on his side of the country. I listened to Greg talk for about 45 minutes and he reminded me of times gone by and really about how much I used to enjoy writing here about my experiences in the hobby.

I realize that my experience in this hobby is very specific to my situation; hell, much of this is true for all of us save for the the cards themselves, those are the ties that bind us.

That said, Greg’s appearance on the podcast really hit home for me in a time when I sort of needed something to bring me back to center; that is why I chose to share the entirety of my Wednesday experience and thoughts here instead of in a format built for stream of consciousness sharing. Maybe I need to revisit this writing thing and not just condense all of my thoughts into snippets every time something pops up – after all, writing IS part of my hobby experience which I realize I’ve been neglecting.

This entry was posted on December 10, 2020 at 7:28 am and is filed under Misc. with tags About The Cards, baseball, baseball cards, Night Owl Cards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.