Thursday, March 26, 2015

I'm An Idiot

...but that's no secret. 

I'm talking about a very specific shortcoming, however, and that is that I somehow come into possession of amazing crap that I promptly lose.  Things that are pretty cool to begin with, and then within 10 years become ridiculously valuable.  Things I've loved and lost, and will never stop kicking myself over include:



Joan Jett Barbie
This was a 30th birthday gift from my now ex-girlfriend's older sister.  I'd like to pretend that this was a token of her acceptance of our relationship (it wasn't) or a subtle nod to her own deeply closeted homosexuality (How're your shoes doing in there Champ?), but it was neither.  Turned out she had no idea what I'd like, and her sister helpfully pointed this amazeballs toy out to her.

About a month later, my girlfriend and I had a major falling out and temporarily broke up.  In a fit of vindictive assholery, she chucked Joan Jett out with the garbage.  I'm actually a little (a lot) sadder about the fact that she felt some foolish need to toss my An Amphigorey by Edward Gorey out as well, or at least I was until I saw how much Joan is going for on eBay.

Image courtesy of Girl Meets Tennessee


Friday The 13th Pumpkin
Back in the roarin' 80's, my mom owned a video store.  She got a lot of promotional crap whenever new releases hit the shelves, but didn't display all of it.  She'd had some grand idea of suspending our Friday The 13th pumpkin from the ceiling, but for whatever reason couldn't make that dream a reality.  So I inherited it.  We'd had a compressed air pump from our giant inflatable dinosaurs, so I blew that sucker up and played giant beach volleyball in my livingroom.  I kept it in my bedroom, to look at and devise weird games involving it.  I probably named it.  I have no idea what happened to it, but it was either cat related or my mom got tired of my shit (there'd be an outright ban on all horror related things during high school).

I haven't been able to find it on eBay, which leads me to believe that it's now worth a million bajillion dollars, and that no one who still has one is willing to part with theirs.  Fuckers.






A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
Where do I even begin?  So, I'm not really going to get into the gory details, because there are a few detours in this story that lead straight into territories that I don't get too much into on here.  For reasons.  But, needless to say, at one point my stepfather found himself banished from the family home.  He did what he often did when he found himself in this predicament:  he ran off to California.  It was, in fact, during one of these stints from his first ex wife that he met my mom. 

He made his way back out to the Los Angeles area and found work as a night security guard at a local junk yard. 

Hey kids, have you seen The Dream Master?  If you have, then you may recall a scene in a junk yard and there was some flamin' dog pee.  If you haven't...actually, that's fine.  I mean, I have a soft spot for all the old Freddy films, but I know that Dream Warriors was better.  I'm ok with that.

I'm not really sure if Robert Englund is just that magnanimous, or if it was the fact that my stepdad resembled Freddy Krueger (a horrible irony, again, reasons).  I have no idea how it came to be that when my mom (stupidly) let him come home he brought a signed-by-Robert Englund copy of the script with a short storyboard for that junkyard scene.  That scene was shot in a real junk yard in North Hollywood - the very one that Stepdouche worked nights at.  And I had a copy of the script with Robert Englund's fucking signature on it. 

When we fled Tennessee a few years later, it was left behind.  I don't think anyone thought to grab it, and it fell by the wayside along with other important documents and a family photo album.  In 1998, my (at that point) ex-stepfather died.  Under normal circumstances we'd have just gone down and collected what needed collecting, and I might not be including this in this post.  But normal isn't a commodity I'm accustomed to dealing with.  His brothers and sister descended on the house like a plague, and burned everything that was burnable in it.  They'd had a notion that there'd be a will naming his children (my sisters) as beneficiaries of any wealth he may have accumulated.  They'd also figured they'd be able to seize control of the house and property from my then underaged sisters.  So, if the script was still in the house, it went up in flames - much like Freddy was wont to do.

And now I'm sad, so I'll stop now.



1 comment:

  1. I don't want to think of how many cool things i have had and lost or given away over the years...it would make me sad but hey no regrets right?

    ReplyDelete