Musical Interlude #5 - Reach out for that dream ... card.

Taking a slight step back from the metal intensity I introduced the last time.  (There's plenty more of it on the way.)

This particular song was not one of his hits, but it stuck with me for a long time.  It's about dreaming of love, but always falling short of catching it.

And somehow somethin' always seems to escape me...

And I find myself holdin' on to nothin' more than a dream...

This was, of course, high school, and the prime years of my geekdom.  A self-proclaimed social pariah, my friends were all younger than me, so I hung out with them in my neighborhood playing sports - and collecting cards - even into the years when my peers from school were starting to party and date.  I would catch a proverbial glimpse of "fitting in" with the cool kids, or get a smile from a nice girl, but never really knew what to do about it.  I found an outlet for the frustration with louder and more intense metal music.

Billy Squier can be considered the main precursor to my hard rock and metal tastes.  A "gateway" artist if you will.  His was the second concert I ever saw.  September 12, 1984 at Merriweather Post Pavilion near Washington, DC.  Still have the ticket stub:

Still have most of my metal show stubs too.  Maybe in a future post I'll scan 'em and show 'em.

Well, my fellow geeks of the cardboard variety, we have dreams and frustrations within our hobby too.  That collecting goal ...that "white whale" ...that completed set ...master set ...rainbow ...or just that one elusive oddball or superstar card.  Sometimes it's scarcity, sometimes it's expense, sometimes it's just sheer volume that makes us yearn for the day that we'll hold one particular piece of pasteboard with somebody's picture on it. But until then, we go on through life waiting and watching....

So every day I'm out on the streets tryin' to make some sense of it...

You know sometimes it feels so close that I can almost reach out...

But it always slips away...

I keep tellin' myself..."I can't stop tryin'...not ever"...

Back when I first started collecting in 1978-ish, it was a major accomplishment to finish a whole entire set of cards from one product.  I finished 1979 Topps football, and then 1980 baseball in the first couple years.

I remember that last card I needed to finish my first set.  Shafer Suggs from the Jets. I allegedly made a really bad trade for it.  I can neither confirm or deny.  But I guess you could say ol' Suggs was my first "white whale".

Now, it's routine to finish several sets a year.  And start new ones constantly.  Not to mention dozens of player collections, two team collections, and other things.

Before I took the usual hiatus in the early 90's, current products were the only thing I dealt with.  Vintage was nice, but not yet accessible, and there wasn't the multiple decades in between yet with all the different eras. Now, I have cards from just about each decade in the 20th century and beyond.

I thought I may never have the real cards from the turn of the century from my New York Giants picture, so I got some reprints for my project binder.  (This is something for a future post by itself).

But now I'm actually on the way to having them all.

So now my current "white whale" is a little more ambitious.

If it's the final thing I do I'm waitin' for you...