Somebody Stop the Pocket Monsters
Collecting things as kids and putting limits on my hoarding tendencies
Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: do we really have to catch them all?
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Ingredient List
Usually this is where I put my inspirational reading or listening choices for the week, or things that just struck me as cool or interesting. The main course lies ahead!
📖 : “Why I Can’t Play Video Games Anymore” by Matt Gross of Trying! // I met Matt when he was the editor for my first-ever print piece, a story in Runner’s World about my brother’s opioid addiction. I met him in person shortly thereafter and he said to me: “You should write more.” He probably doesn’t even remember saying it, or realize how much those words meant to me, but him saying that is probably why I’m doing this whole newsletter right now. Anyway, he’s been writing incredible words every day for like the last month and a half for his newest venture, Trying!, and this is one of my favorites because I very much relate to all of it as someone who spent an entire semester of college perfecting Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. The rest of his stuff as just as good, so I hope you’ll check it out and subscribe.
“Invisible” by Patrick Fealey for Esquire // This former Boston Globe journalist dives deep into his current life living out of a car and struggling to make ends meet, and what homelessness looks like from the other side. It’s probably going to win a lot of awards at the end of the year. (Thanks to Andy for recommending.)
“On These Apps, the Dark Promise of Mothers Sexually Abusing Children” by Michael H. Keller for The New York Times // Keller deserves the highest journalistic honors for his incredible investigative journey over the past five years into the darkness of child sexual abuse and the blackness of human depravity. The title of this one says it all, as he uncovers over 80 apps on the Apple and Google store that allow men around the world to livestream on-demand and on-command child sexual abuse between mothers and their children. It’s as horrific as it sounds, but it needs to be brought into the light and I’m thankful that Keller has the doggedness to do so.
📺 : On a brighter note, the newest Coldplay song/music video features a beautiful tribute to Dick Van Dyke as he nears his 100th birthday, shot at his own house and featuring an in-depth look at his life both then and now. Directed by Spike Jonze, who really never misses when it comes to music videos (Buddy Holly, Otis, Sabotage, etc.)
And now, onto dinner service.
Course 1
A Word of Gratitude: At Least It’s Not Mountain Dew
Whenever I buy one of something, I need to watch out for hanger-ons. More will come if I’m not careful.
I’m not alone in this, but I have the tendency to get really into something, to buy one, and then another, and then another, until I’m a full-on collector of something I had no interest in a year ago. Shoes (so many shoes), bikes, hats, watches, and so on. Some people even do this with animals, like the guy in Baltimore who was sentenced last week for hoarding 83 dogs in his house.
Luckily, most of my impromptu interests have been kept in check by the lack of two things: money, time, and space.
For years, I simply didn’t have the money to buy new things, and then I didn’t have the time to barter and trade up. Now, I have the money, but I don’t have the space. Which is intentional. I just don’t trust myself with a walk-in closet, a large basement with whole rooms for storage, or even a backyard shed.
It can get a bit cabin-feverish living in a small Baltimore row home with two kids, but keeping space at a minimum means keeping things to a minimum. Being broke most of my adult life prior to getting married meant I was very into thrifting. When I first got married, I would bring back all kinds of random thrift store finds, which would drive my wife crazy to no end. Most had no purpose, they just seemed… interesting.
Eventually I dialed it back, because we really didn’t have the space for such frivolous collecting.
At one point, we had six bikes in our house. I couldn’t bear to get rid of them, because I had some good memories attached to them. But since bikes are the worst design in the world for saving space, I was forced to pare back my own collection down to my reliable single speed commuter. I don’t regret it, and I was able to donate them to a worthwhile nonprofit in Baltimore (Velocipede). I miss it in a way, but I also appreciate how a small space really cuts and chops what you don’t need.
So now I just collect words and distribute them among all of you. It saves so much space in our house, though my head is pretty cluttered most days. Luckily, I get to clear it out once a week.
And for that, I am grateful.
Course 2
The Main: Braised Bulbasaur
Note: this one has an Easter egg hunt in it for fans of a certain genre of card collecting. I tried to work in as many expansion pack names as possible, see if you can catch them all!
Over the past few years, I’ve been forced to learn a new language. It wasn’t French for my trip to Paris, of where I mostly spoke Italian on accident because why not be a walking stereotype of an ignorant American? It wasn’t Python or C++ during my foray into programming/web development in an effort to show my in-laws I wasn’t the worst pick their daughter could make. It also wasn’t Japanese, which would have been the most useful for learning the gameplay in a pachinko parlor and then for asking the attendant if he found my wallet after I left it on the machine in the same pachinko parlor and walked four blocks away in the heart of the most populous city in the world before realizing it.
Actually, it’s kind of Japanese, but it’s a bizarre form of Japanglish, in that the pictures look culturally correct, but the words within are a bastardization of the English and sometimes Japanese language. Pidove, Drowzee, Magikarp, Bulbasaur. A combination pigeon dove, a magical carp, a bulbous dinosaur. And then, of course, there’s the Japanese word for sparkle or shiny (pikapika) mixed with the Japanese sound that a mouse makes (chu). Pikachu. I could’ve spent time learning a real language, or refining my once rudimentary Spanish built on years of high school classes (pointless) and bullshitting with line cooks and dishwashers in the back of house (useful). Instead, I now speak passable Pocket Monster. For the uneducated, that’s Pokémon.
I never grew up with Pokémon. As with most kids born in the early eighties and growing up in the early nineties, it was all baseball, all the time when it came to card collecting. I was obsessed with it– the market fluctuation of prices, the keeping of cards featuring brilliant stars in pristine condition, the lottery chance of finding the stellar crown of a rookie in a fresh pack of trading cards. Eventually, card collecting seppuku-ed itself, the market flooded with junk that crashed the prices and the hobby for the next quarter century.
When the next wave of card collecting came along, I was already graduating high school and well past such childish things; I had moved onto more serious matters since my time as a card collector, like installing black lights in the interior of my Volkswagen Fox or collecting Snapple bottles and lining them up in my bedroom for no other reason then to show how much sugar I could consume in a single year. I was collecting actual glass bottle garbage and my mom let this go on. Some of my more normal friends were hooked into Magic: The Gathering, something I didn’t understand because I was in the business of trying to have a girlfriend at some point in my life. In hindsight, I should have joined them– I could’ve used a powerful wizard sword and shield combo in my journey. Just a single “consensual hand holding” spell would have sufficed *cries in tortured teenage tears*.
The first time I really remember hearing about Pokémon and its surging spark of popularity was in college. My roommate was taking an economics course and the professor used an example to demonstrate the profits made when buying in bulk and selling in smaller quantities. The story was that someone bought a box of Pokémon packs, broke down all the individual cards from all the individual packs, then turned around and sold them for a combined $35,000, a tidy profit over the $500 spent on the box. I thought it was both genius and absurd at the time, not knowing that someday Logan Paul, a YouTube creator whose brother would go head-to-head against Mike Tyson in a boxing match on Netflix, would pay over $5 million for a Charizard owned by someone in Dubai– an entire sentence of words that would’ve made no sense in 2001. As someone always scavenging and thinking of side hustles and gambles, I think about that anecdote more than I’d like to admit.
Eventually, I grew up– or appeared to grow up, anyway– and my newest hobby was collecting kids, or at least a base set of two fighting/fire/ground types. As with all human pocket monsters, my boys like what is cool, and unfortunately that involves things like skibidi toilets and starting every reaction to every situation with “bruh,” a short, quick, single-syllable word which has now– against all odds– been shortened to “br.” Make it make sense. But it also involves Pokémon, which has evolved into a worldwide phenomenon at this point.
In my mind, Pokémon was always a game to be played. Like, yes, they’re things that people collect, but surely all the forward-facing, complex data sets like hit points and damage and character types and strengths of weaknesses mean something. Right? The first rule of Pokémon is that none of that matters. It appears that appearances are all that matters, and– as with most things– the rarity of a card.
The first pack of Pokémon my kids ever bought was a few years ago at a local game store in our neighborhood. We came home and opened it up, and lo and behold, there was a Charizard V in the mix. I knew enough about Pokémon to now that a combination chameleon lizard dragon was a good card, but I figured they were pretty common. It wasn’t. And though it’s not the most valuable card in the set, it was still somewhat rare; I know this because my kids haven’t pulled another one since. That original card has been through the wringer and its existence at this point is unknown. A Japanese dragon lizard lost in America, the plot of the next Pixar blockbuster.
Dozens more packs have been bought since that first one (their grandmother is largely responsible for this surge, thanks mom), and it has now become an all-consuming, temporal force within our house. Instead of banana peels, I find myself slipping on Blastoise and Bidoofs. Everywhere I go, common cards litter my path, from the upstairs bathroom to the living room couch to the kitchen stove, as if I’m living a real life Studio Ghibli interpretation of Hansel and Gretel. You gotta catch them all before the witch burns you to death. I catch them all then promptly throw them out in the trash.
Only the good ones make into a binder, though I have no idea what determines a good one or not. The term “rare” must have been lost in translation from Japanese to English, because the designation is anything but. Case in point: I was aghast that my kids were stepping all over a rare, holographic Noctowl (not quite as clever as Harry Potter’s nocturnally Knockturn Alley). It looks valuable, so it must be, I thought. It is a rare card, after all. I looked it up on the TGC Player website, the primary marketplace for Pokémon cards– over 750 listings starting at 20 cents each. Same went for a rare Melmetal (a humanoid thing made of… melted metal, go figure), a card so impossibly hard to find that there are currently nearly 1,000 listings starting at a single cent.
Somehow, my kids have come to understand the value of the cards they own, to spot a fake, to memorize evolutions and trends and know what’s best. To take all that knowledge and apply it to the trade. Of course, this has become a thing at school. All the kids want to trade, it’s all they think about day and night, but doing so requires surreptitious movements– cards hidden in pockets of all kinds, deals made by lockers, between classes, during recess and at their lunch table. Obviously every teacher and the principal himself knows what’s going on, they just turn a blind eye to it and let the kids think they’re getting away with something. Which they are, for better or for worse.
As a parent, there are parts of it that are annoying. The aforementioned cards on every floor of our house and car, the arguments during heated trading sessions, the absolute wrenching of my neurotic collector’s heart when they put an actual illustrated rare card inside into their pocket without a hard case, knowing that the chances of it getting a bent corner are 1000%.
But I love the way they spend hours organizing their binders into neat rows and pages based on whatever arbitrary standard strikes them that day. Or when all three of us peruse cards together online and they’ll spend $2 of their own money and wait by the mailbox for days on end until the card finally arrives in a plain white envelope from some random person in California. It reminds me of the time I sent letters to dozens of baseball players and waited through a whole summer for the responses to come in (only Nolan Ryan ever sent me an autographed photo in return because he’s an absolute legend). I like how they speak a language more fluently than me, even if it involves holo and evolutions and scarlet and violet booster packs that will never end because my kids and maybe even their kids will keep buying them.
Rye, my oldest son, said to me last week: “You know what’s weird? We love Pokémon cards so much but really they’re just a piece of cardboard with just a picture and words on them.” He’s right, it is weird. But so is keeping books on a shelf when the library has the same collection, or stacking up vinyl discs of music when it’s all on Spotify, or collecting timekeeping pieces we wear on our wrists that show the sand dropping into the bottom of the hourglass in real time. Things that will eventually die when we die.
And when that time comes, someone will show up to a yard sale with his grandkids and see an old Pokemon binder on the table, selling for pennies on the dollar on the original investment, just so it can be cleared out. He’ll walk over to it and say “I remember collecting these,” and when he opens the page he’ll remember being 8 years old and standing at the large wooden coffee table in his living room in Baltimore, binders open with his brother, trading cards back and forth. He’ll remember the morning sun coming in through the front window, landing on the holographic foil of his favorite card, making it shimmer, making it pikapika, turning pieces of cardboard into actual gold. He’ll recall in great detail the joy that Japanese pocket monsters gave him, running around in his head all day, fire breathing, ice shooting, tail whipping, shadow punching, water gunning, and thunder shocking until they got tired and joined Snorlax in his snoozing. Day after day until they finally went into hibernation for good.
Thumbing the pages of cards, he’ll remember all those things and tell his grandkid in plain English: “Those were good times.” Because they were.
And with those– yeah, you really do gotta catch them all.
Course 4
Dessert: A Repast of the Past Week
In an attempt to not be the weakest person in my family, I’ve started going to a neighborhood weightlifting gym. It was my first session of working with a trainer, so it was pretty light and we only did one set. It destroyed me. So I didn’t run for three days straight. Anyway, I go back tomorrow, so hopefully my body remembers.
I took my oldest to his first indoor soccer game of the season on Saturday. After the game, we (including his younger brother) played some more on the field at the elementary school across from the soccer facility. It’s in Curtis Bay, one of the poorest and most neglected parts of Baltimore, which is saying something. As we were playing, a kid around 6 years old came onto the field, so I passed hit to him to score a goal. So he joined us. Then another girl joined us, a bit older. Then five other kids showed up, ranging in age from 5 to 14, four girls and two boys in all. I don’t even think any of them knew how to play soccer, but we picked teams and we played soccer for the next twenty minutes. The other team won 5-0, probably because our goalie was a kindergartener wearing boots that kept coming off her bare feet. It was a wild time and they were absolutely gassed by the end, but everyone seemed to have a good time reenacting the plot from Disney’s The Big Green.
Other things I’ve written or edited this past week:
Nike Vomero 18 / Shoe review for Believe in the Run
I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic (and sometimes heartfelt) manner. You can subscribe here.
I’m also the co-host of The Drop running podcast, one of the top running podcasts in the country, where we mostly talk about things other than running that thousands of people seem to find entertaining. You can listen to this past week’s episode here.
END OF MENU
Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.