Sunday, April 25, 2010

Interest in Coin Collecting Inversely Related to Interest in Playboy Magazine

I got some detritus from my youth back and aside from some useless nickles from the '50s I can see that things started to fade in 1985. I was 14 years old and coin collecting didn't have the same importance, and not nearly the excitement level of a stolen copy of Penthouse's Pillow Talk magazine.
Funny. There's one book in which a missing hole for a 1971 quarter has scrawled on it in my unmistakable chicken scratch, "I HAVE THIS ONE BUT IT DOESN'T FIT" in bright red ink. I even tried to draw an approximation of the quarter inside the slot, which leads me to believe I was delusional even at eleven years old. It was written in 1982 when I thought all these things had to be organized and if a slot were empty then the world was not completely organized. But since I had the coin but it didn't fit I had to make a note to myself and maybe God that there was a reason the slot was empty. When you can't be bothered to find a penny from 1986 and put it in then that's the end of the collecting bug. Hell, I've probably got one in my pocket right now and I still can't be bothered.
I should point out that the hand written numbers actually stopped at 1981 and just today I wrote 82, 83, 84, 85 because it wasn't exactly clear what was going on. But that means I stopped even caring enough to write two numbers under the penny I had just put in the slot. Or did it mean I had accepted that the date was on the coin and it was redundant to write it also? I'm not sure. For a picture I thought it should be clear the exact year I had stopped and not that there were 4 coins after 1981 that had no date. Of course now that I see this I'm not completely cured because I have a strong urge to write in all the missing dates. It's creepy to see time stop in 1985.

2 comments:

hardworker said...

my dad will buy your collection. He's not allowed to have playboys in the house. What year did you start putting rolls of pennies up your ass? Didn't see a note in the photo. Your handwriting has only gotten worse since you were 14. That's my last joke. Thank you.

Oggy Bleacher said...

I thought you would be on my side since the court of public opinion has found me guilty of all charges.

I'll sell him the whole package for $10.

send me your address again and I'll drop them off.
I have three 1912 V liberty nickles.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.