#snailcollection

Unfortunately, I’m not promoting a new fragrance from Chris Brown. My obsessions are some of the primary clues that I even had a problem growing up. Sure, all kids go through some phase or another, like wanting to be a firefighter or collecting rocks. I, however, have had tons of these phases. I continue to have them in my 30′s, which drives my wife crazy at times, though we both now understand that it’s expected ADHD behavior. Anyway, I’ve had so many, it’s hard to recall all of them. I had some of the standard collecting spurts kids have where I’d pocket various rocks or seashells, I built a respectable baseball card collection, picked up plenty of toy cars, and even had a jar full of snails at one point that I know Mom loathed (they smelled terrible and kept dying).

My uncle Scott, who was 8 years older than I, lived with my Grandma up the hill behind the house where I grew up. He also liked collecting Hot Wheels cars, and I remember he showed me how to “chrome” them. It started because some of my cars had gotten pretty worn and beaten up from playing with them so rough, and the paint was chipping off them. So we’d scratch them needlessly against the pavement to try and get the paint off. Then I believe we tried to use some sort of acrylic point used in those old paint by numbers kits to repaint them to near-original form. Of course, they looked god-awful afterward, but it was a thing we did for a while. Eventually all of my cars looked horrific and I’m pretty sure we threw them all away at some point. I won’t get into the conversation about Scott now, but he was like a big brother to me. He recently passed away after a year-long battle with cancer. 

A few years after my little Hot Wheel ‘chroming’ work, we moved to Sergeant Bluff in a lower-income duplex housing area. Mom and my stepdad, Dennis, were saving up to buy a house, so we lived there for a couple years in 3rd and 4th grade. I made several friends there, though I wouldn’t call them “good” friends looking back. We would go into the clay hills in town where there was a few larger groves of trees, some sewage drains we could fit into, and a small man-made pond behind Sioux City Brick. Not knowing any better, we kept trying to get further and further out into that pond, as disgusting as it was being a dumping area for the brick-makers nearby. I actually insisted we build a raft to float out to the middle of that cesspool to reach a lone branch that stuck up near the middle; all that was left of a felled tree that was rotting in that pond. 

Like many of my obsessions, I thought about that raft night and day, distracted by it in school, when I was at home, and even when I was hanging out with my friends. Eventually, we did get enough sticks piled on top of each other, bound by all the twine and fishing line we could steal from garages and even the local gas station (which is also how I obtained much of my baseball card collection...). Like I said, they weren’t “good” friends, but they were my buddies nonetheless. My memory is fuzzy here, but I think one of the kids was named something like Alfred, or Albert or something, but he took the raft out first. I rode it second but got scared when I was about halfway there because the raft started breaking up, and I turned around. And that was that, I was done with that raft. 

On a side note, the one cool thing about those guys I remember vividly was that we used to spend the night at each others’ houses and play video games and legos and whatnot. The final night I lived in Sergeant Bluff, before my parents and I moved back to Sioux City, the 4 of us told our parents we were staying at each others’ houses, and as a going-away party we camped out in this old rusted out Volkswagen Beetle chassis that we used as a sort-of fort. We put a bunch of sticks and leaves and a beat-up tarp over the windows to enclose it, and the doors were long-gone, but it was a cool hangout spot in the woods. One of the guys brought some cold hot dogs and s’mores components that we ate sans fire. It was a cool sentiment I won’t forget (though admittedly I could have embellished a little; but what’s a good story without some flare :)

So as I was saying, I’ve had several times in my life where I get infatuated with something and can’t seem to let go of it. A brief list of these that I’ve indulged in since I became a teenager would include: Car stereos in every car I’ve owned, Fosters beer (why I don’t know), collecting MP3s, genealogy research, writing poetry, Christianity, Building the several different computers I’ve had (I’ve built every PC I ever owned except my first Gateway), Having the perfect chemical balance in my above-ground pool, collecting CDs, collecting DVDs, having multiple fish tanks (that lasted like a year until I killed them all), many, many, many video game infatuations (Diablo and Starcraft got me kicked out of college on 2 occasions), buying and selling stocks, composing electronic music on my computer as ‘DJ Gravedigga’, opening a bar that never got off the ground, being a sound engineer, delivering pizzas and feeling entitled, being an on-air DJ (for both Morningside College and Iowa State radio stations), and the list goes on. You could say many of these things are just growing pains, but for me, I look at each one of these things and remember the deep, deep emotional tie I had to them. I literally obsessed over each and every one of these, some for longer than others. I poured everything I had into them in most cases. I would think about them, dream about them, my heart would flutter if I got a new idea or knew I could work on it. And then suddenly, without warning, my interest went from “all-in” to “why was I doing that?”, and I would move on to the next thing, or search for something else to give me that feeling of purpose.