Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Outsider Poet Buys Star Wars Toys

These guys arrived in the mail today.

Actually they probably arrived late last week, but the USPS has been jerking them around for a few days. The damn USPS electronic system has nothing to do with what one's local carrier does. 

I overpaid for these, which is why I'm writing about them here and not on my real blog where Jenny can see it and kick me in the ass. The story about why I suddenly had an overwhelming desire to own these original 12 Star Wars figures is conveluted, and will make sense only to me.

Star Wars doesn't hold a particularly sentimental place in my childhood memories, even though I saw it when it came out and was probably as blown away as every other child who saw it. We couldn't afford to collect all these action figures, but we had a few. Not sure they called them action figures then. I think they were $2.98. 

The reason they suddenly burst back into my consciousness was twofold. First, I saw something our mother had gotten for us from a cereal box back then. I see now if we had never opened it that it would be worth over a thousand dollars, but we weren't in the habit of not playing with our toys back then.

This stand came from cereal boxes, I believe, and we had it. When I saw this I got sort of obsessive about having to have it, and two weeks later, I do.

The second reason is strange. High strangeness. We had twins that lived in our neighborhood. A couple years younger than me. One time we ended up at their house under the pretext of trading baseball cards and coins. Once there, they tried to convince me they had unopened and multiple copies of every Star Wars toy in their basement. This blew my mind. Of course I believed them. Why lie about something like that. I traded them several baseball cards for some coins that looked almost magical and ancient, but when I got home they seemed to have transformed into common coins of no value or luster.

This story always stuck with me because I am to this day convinced those coins did actually transform from when I traded for them until I got them home.

Anyway, I was in a legal meeting concerning one of the writers I publish, and the lawyer related a story about one of the state's most notorious unsolved murders. It turns out after a few microbrews that one of the prime suspects was indeed one of the twins I had traded for the coins. He had apparently turned out to be quite a dangerous sociopath.

I thought of all those unopened Star Wars toys, and how they almost certainly didn't exist. I thought about my mother taking the time to send away for this stand. And I thought about a time in the future when my own six year old will almost certainly have a Star Wars phase. 

I thought of all these things, and I had to have this. 

Now I have this.