2021 Topps Series 2....whatever...etc.

 

I’m not sleeping.

            That’s not a good thing.

            I should probably say that I’m not staying asleep.

Which is new for me.

I’ve never been what one would call a good sleeper. It takes me a while to fall asleep when I go to bed. Even when I’m tired. I usually replay the day in my head. Run through those anxieties. Contemplate the anxieties to come the next day. I’ve had bouts of insomnia. If I’m honest, alcohol has helped over the years. It’s much easier to fall asleep (i.e., pass out) when you’re boozed up. If you don’t mind not remembering what you’ve watched or read from the previous evening.  But unless you plan on being a full-blown alcoholic, that only works for so long. So, I usually stop now after a couple of “relaxing” after work drinks. Pot helps too. But I’ve run out of pot. I have edibles here but I won’t use them.

I inhale.

I imbibe.

I don’t ingest.

I’m not staying asleep.

I find that I’m waking up around two or three in the morning and just staying awake, letting the anxieties wash over me. I have a lot of anxieties right now. I just had family visit. We walked around the city all weekend in 90-degree heat. If you don’t know, New York City is fucking miserable in the summer. Don’t come here between May and October. New York City smells like garbage, dog shit, sweat and vomit in the summer. If I could leave New York City in the summer I would.

I love my family. But being a tour guide is very hard on me. The anxiety before, during and after can be overwhelming. Am I showing people a good time? Are they seeing everything they want to see? Does it show on my face that a loathe Times Square with every fiber of my being? Being a Brooklynite with Manhattan-centric visitors…well, I only know so many restaurants over there. Sorry we keep going to the same places. Daylong conversation wears me down.

I’m also moving. My wife and I are leaving the apartment we’ve known for fourteen years. We’re moving just around the corner but it still feels strange. The move is bittersweet. When we moved in, we were the younger people. Now we’re middle-aged. There are a lot of younger people living here now. Though most of them don’t mean to be, younger people are assholes. They loiter. They make noise. They love loud music.

We currently live on the first floor of a busy street. That also wears on you when you age. I’m getting too old to argue with young, loitering, noisy music loving people on the street outside my living room and/or bedroom window (sometimes at the same time). Tired of the threats. Tired of the fights. In the past I could take those people. Physically and mentally. Now, I’m drained. Now, one of them is going to knock me out.

There’s also the job.

I’m a public servant. I’m a public servant who really hasn’t had to deal with the public since March of 2020. I’m lucky in that I got paid to stay at home during the worst of Covid. A lot of people didn’t. A lot of people were out of work. A lot of people died.  I stayed home and built baseball cards sets, listened to podcasts, and was glad I wasn’t one of the people in the ambulances streaming up and down my street all day.

I’m lucky that when I went back to work last July, it was only a few days a week. With no public. And then only the public in small doses. Now we are opening up. The public is coming back. The public doesn’t believe in social distancing. The public doesn’t believe in wearing masks to protect me. To protect themselves. The public wants. The public takes.

I’m also a supervisor.

To put it in Mike Judge terms: I used to relate to Office Space.

Now I relate to Extract.

If you don’t know the films I apologize.

I’m not sleeping.

I’m too tired to find more relatable metaphors for you.

I should have better metaphors.

I am a writer after all.

But I’m also getting tired of writing. I shouldn’t say tired but frustrated. I’m forty-seven. I’ve been in the writing game since I was seventeen. That’s thirty years and a lot of words. I get up at 4:45 in the morning five days a week to get the word down (at least I did before Covid). Been doing that for decades. That’s a lot of lost sleep. Lately, I’ve been feeling like it’s gotten me nowhere. Writers go through that from time to time. But this time it’s really lingering. I’ve avoiding writing when I can.

I should be happy with what I’ve accomplished. I have some poetry books. I have a few novels. In fact, I have a new one of each. 

But no one seems to be reading what I write. I tried to give my new novel away to Facebook “friends” and only two of them took me up on it. It’s frustrating wanting to be read, having the vehicle to be read, and to not be read. It adds to the malaise. Lately, I’ve been thinking I don’t need the writing shit anymore.

And, yeah, I know…art for arts sake.

That might be convincing at twenty-five.

But pushing fifty?

I need more than art for arts sake.

Fuck art for arts sake.

…or maybe I’m just bad at self-promotion.

My one go-to (other than boozing) when dealing with anxiety has been baseball cards. At least since the summer of 2019 it has been. I even wrote an essay about that. But baseball cards haven’t been working lately. They’ve actually become another source of anxiety for me. I don’t want them to be. I enjoy collecting baseball cards. I don’t want to become jaded by the hobby. I don’t want to become intimidated by the cost. I don’t want to find myself up at two in the morning worrying about baseball cards along with jobs, apartments, my fragile mental health, and why New York City has to be so goddamned hot in the summer.

I want baseball cards to be an anxiety elixir.

But last Friday I found myself in the Major League Baseball Flagship Store holding a hobby box of Topps Series 2.

Shaking with anxiety.

To explain I have to start from the beginning.

The beginning is this.

Late last year I told myself that I was going to spend less on cards. At least less on newer card product. Because I’d been home most of 2020, and because I was being paid by my job, I bought more cards. I had nowhere to go. I had nothing else to spend my money on. I bought Topps flagship. I dabbled in Panini products. I dabbled in Gypsy Queen. I bought a shit-ton of Heritage. I bought a shit-ton of Big League. I bought a shit-ton of Stadium Club. I bought a shit-ton of Archives. I dabbled in Bowman. I dabbled in Chrome I started and stopped so many modern sets that it was madness. I have card boxes that are filled with product from 2020. It’s just sitting there.

            2021 was going to be different.

            Just flagship. Just singles of players I wanted in other product. I was going to work on older sets. The sets that I collected as a kid. Or the sets that I wanted to collect. I was going to bypass the madness that was happening in 2020, that was dripping into the early part of the new year. It was easy to bypass that madness. I didn’t have access to Target or Wal-Mart. I couldn’t stand in line outside with packs of ravenous card collectors, waiting to attack shelves. Not that I would anyway. I couldn’t just show up and clear a shelf on my own. I had to rely on buying product online. Or over-pay in the few LCS that are located around me. One I could get to in a safe and socially distanced way.

            That logic worked for Topps Series 1.

            It’s been working for the other products.

            I’m not doing too well where Series 2 is coming along.

            The anxiety started with buying Series 2 pre-sale. When I went to buy Series 2 hobby boxes were retailing for $175 dollars. Yeah. Read that again. $175. If you’re currently in the card game, and lived through 2020, that price probably isn’t that sticker shocking to you, considering we’ve seen card boxes reach into the thousands. But it should be shocking. $175 dollars is way too much money for a flagship baseball product that I was paying maybe $60 for two seasons ago. $175 is highway robbery. It makes your palms sweat. It makes you want to find some young, loitering, noisy, music-loving person and yell at them.

            $175 dollars makes the hobby not fun.

            I wasn’t paying $175 for a box of Series 2 Topps flagship baseball cards. Two boxes, actually. So, I chose the retail box price. At the time they were selling for $125. Still overpriced but a collector has to do what a collector has to do. And I was glad to get retail. I’m not big into the autograph cards or relic cards, so I was fine not being guaranteed either. I liked the 1952 redux cards in Series 1 and actually wished that I bought retail instead of hobby for that release. Series 2 was going to have 1965 redux cards. I love 1965 Topps. It’s in my top-5 all-time favorite Topps releases. Seeing current players on 1965 Topps cards was exciting.

            I couldn’t wait for the retail boxes to come.

            Except.

            Hobby boxes were released on June 9^th.

            Retail wasn’t coming out until June 23^rd.

            Then retail boxes got delayed until July 9^th.

            I have no Target stores

            I have no Wal-Mart.

            I was developing a serious Fear of Missing Out.

            FOMO as young, loitering, noisy, music-loving people call it.

            I wasn’t waiting until July fucking 9^th.

            So, I bought a hobby box of Series 2. The prices had gone down since I’d purchased the now, oft-delayed retail boxes. I think it was $135. Talking about money is unrefined. So is writing about money. Unless you work for Forbes. But money moves a hobby. The Series 2 box was at my apartment within two days. I had it on June 10^th. Just a day after everyone else who bought Series 2. I was a part of the zeitgeist. A part of the in-crowd. I was in-the-know. There’d be no FOMO for me.

            And ripping it was…fun?

            Ripping it was okay. It should’ve been better for something I paid $135 for. I should’ve been more excited. I pulled this card.

            I’d been wanting that card since September of last year.

            And I wanted this card.

            And I wanted this card.

            I pulled all three. 

            This was a nice bonus

            (Am I becoming a fucking Marlins fan?)

           And even with keeping them for my PC, I was still able to put together a Series 2 set that is only twenty-two cards shy of completion. And that’ll probably happen when those retail boxes come rolling in on July 9^th, or whenever Topps decides to finally release them.

Minus the Tatis Silver Pack was meh.

As per usual, I pulled a relic.

For some reason my insert cards leaned heavily on the Red Sox.

The relic and the insert cards found a good home with other collectors. I pulled this for my Pirates.

            

I should’ve been happy (or the happy equivalent these days), right?

            But I wasn’t.

            I was left wanting.

            So, there I was last Friday, in the Major League Baseball Flagship store, holding a hobby box of Topps Series 2, as the anxiety washed over me. The hobby box was $120. It was cheaper than I paid for mine. It was cheaper than the retail boxes that seemed like they were never going to come. I was going to buy that hobby box, take it home, and rip those packs ASAP. That hobby box from the Major League Baseball flagship was going to take away the moving anxiety. The anxiety of the job. It was going to justify spending all day walking around in the stinking, humid NYC heat, playing tour guide for family. That hobby box was going to heal me like baptismal waters.

            But something was nagging at me.

            Maybe it was the money. Life is spending money. Spending money makes me anxious. My wife and I had just bought a new bed. Our first in twenty years (don’t ask) so we splurged. We bought plane tickets to Buffalo for her father’s memorial. I just bought a plane ticket to Pittsburgh so that I could have family play tour guide for me. We had moving expenses. We’re old. Our stuff is old. We needed newer stuff. Because my wife and I are no longer young, loitering, noisy, music-loving people, we were paying someone to come and move us instead of doing it ourselves. A blow to my male ego for sure. All of the money we were spending was making me anxious.

What in the hell was a doing buying another hobby box of Topps Series 2?

Especially since I just bought one and was underwhelmed.

Especially with two retail boxes coming on July 9^th.

Especially since I only needed twenty-two cards to complete the set.

The truth is…I didn’t know. I just knew that I had to have it. I wanted that feeling. You guys know that feeling, right? I wanted to be a part of the zeitgeist, even though the zeitgeist was moving on to the next product release. I wanted something to justify my anxiety. A creature comfort to say that everything was and would be all right. The move. The job returning. The fucking public and their fucking public wants and needs.

I wanted this $120 box of Series 2 Topps cards to be my everything, even though pulling another Ke’Bryan would never feel like it did the first time. Even though I knew I’d get another crummy relic for a player I was ho-hum about, and inserts that I didn’t care for. Even though I think the Series 2 checklist is underwhelming, and I’m growing weary of the fuss being made over any card that has a “RC” logo on it. All RC means is that there’s a young, loitering, noisy, music-loving person on that card. A player who has yet to prove anything.

Still, I wanted that feeling.

Hence the anxiety.

Hence the shaking.

But…

I put the hobby box back.

I walked out of the store spending nothing.

Common sense ruled.

I wanted baseball cards to not be a part of my other problems.

I want baseball cards to remain fun.

I didn’t want them keeping me awake along with everything else stressing me out.

Instead of blowing $120 on that second, gratuitous Series 2 hobby box, I went home and bought some cards online. Some Pirates card I wanted. I finally completed both my 1988 Donruss and 1984 Topps sets. I saved myself over $100 dollars and felt better for it.

It’s not just me.

This has become a common narrative for collectors tired of the frenzy.

I spent that leftover $100 on food and merchandise at my first Major League baseball game in seven years. I took my wife to see the Yankees on Father’s Day. 

Her first without her dad. The first without my kind, loving and gentle father-in-law. We bought Mickey Mantle t-shirts and rooted for his favorite team in his favorite place. We harnessed our sadness into something good.

I didn’t need a relic card.

I didn’t need an autograph card.

I didn’t need inserts.

I didn’t need a card with some dumb RC logo plastered on it.

With some young, loitering, noisy music-loving rookie on it.

I’d been there and done that.

Anxiety free in my hobby once again!

Of course

…there’s still the matter of those two retail boxes coming on July 9^th.

 

Thanks for reading! Happy Collecting!

 

So, having attended my first Major League game in 7 years, I noticed that live baseball watching etiquette is becoming a thing of the past. A relic, if you will.  For that reason, I’m going to subject you remaining one or two readers to my etiquette rules for attending live baseball games.

 

1.      Don’t rag on people who don’t stand for the National Anthem or this God Bless America nonsense that clogs up the seventh-inning stretch. It’s a baseball game, not an exercise in patriotism.

2.      Some people are actually there to watch a baseball game. I know that seems odd and/or antiquated…but it’s true. Sit back in your chair so you don’t block others view. In between innings is a PERFECT time to get up from your seat and go take a piss, get a beer, hot dog, Coke, or just stretch your legs. NOT DURING PLAY.

3.      On the same note, in between innings is the PERFECT time to COME BACK to your set after having pissed, got your beer, hot dog or Coke. In between Innings is the PERFECT time to make an entire row of people move so you can squeeze your fat ass on by.

4.      Believe it or not, the people NOT wearing the home team’s merchandise or colors are NOT your enemy combatants. They’re just people who happen to like the OTHER team playing that day’s game. People who paid money just like you did to come and watch nine innings of professional baseball. There’s no real reason to mess with them, other than the fact that you’re an asshole.

5.      Throw your trash away. Don’t be that jagg-off.

 

Play Ball!!

If you’d like to learn more about Topps Series 2 flagship baseball cards you can do so HERE and HERE.