Mysterious accumulations of stuff...

"Politics is my hobby. Smut is my vocation."
-Larry Flynt

When I was younger, maybe even in pre-school, my grandfather attached six pale blue strips of felt to a thin board. The board would hang on my wall, allowing the inch and a half wide, two foot long strips of felt to hang towards the ground. I attached my pins to the felt strips.

I had never planned on collecting pins. It just sort of happens. When a person has a collection it is not exactly a conscious decision. It’s more along the lines of “Gee, I sure have a lot of rubber stamps. I guess I should start collecting.” You don’t start collecting, though. The collection of rubber stamps/postage stamps/baseball cards/pins is already there. You just decide to add to it.

Who knows why I had so many pins in the first place—enough to completely fill the contraption on my wall. I had all kinds of pins. Now that I think back to it, despite that being perhaps the geekiest hobby a person could get sucked into, lots of those pins were pretty damn cool. Like my little orange Batman pins. They weren’t the more recent, Tim Burton-style dark caped crusader—No, this was the retro Adam West Batman. The one where the TV show had that really catchy theme song—DunananananaDuhnuhnuhnuh Batman! Batman!...Batman! Catchy…and annoying.

On one of those pins, an animated Batman and Robin practically burst out of the pin, and above them a cartoonish, black silhouette of a bat hovered behind orange letters spelling out the word “Batman.”

I need to find that pin. It would go great with my current college hipster years.

I had so many of those goddamn pins. My grandfather had to make me another of his contraptions. Then another. This third one had felt strips that were black, and twice as long as the former.

By the time I filled up the last of the felt, my collecting came to a halt. I suppose I just lost interest, or I went into a phase where the collecting simply heeded—perhaps I was too busy—and I never picked up my hobby again.