Cold Turkey: Day Twenty-Four

Bloody Hell. The collecting gods have proven to be a jealous, vengeful lot. I’ve wondered when they’d play a role in my abstinence. From the looks of it, the time is now. Just as I began to feel like they would let me off the hook for my little experiment, they’ve brought in the big guns to force my hand during these final days, days filled with weakness and temptation.

Remember that Hornung card I mentioned yesterday? The one I’ve had on my to-buy list for three years? The one I’ve only seen once during that span? Well, the collecting gods have played the cruelest of jokes by making the auction for said rare card end just hours before my collecting fast comes to an end. Those bastards!

Of course, my good friend Jason, a fellow collector who doubted me from the beginning, is getting a kick out of it. “Oh, man, that's rich,” he said this morning. “An essential purchase is tempting you at the very ass end of your abstinence. If you purchase this little card, you fail, right? No ifs, ands, or buts about it, no ‘Close enough.’ If you buy that thing, you've failed. Hahaha. Oh, I can't wait to hear what you do.”

Not only are the gods against me, but so are my friends.

I of course has several excuses for any decision I were to make. “Yeah, it would be a failure if you look at the calendar, but not if you look in my heart,” I said, wondering where that saccharin, new age crap came from.

“Let the rationalizations begin!” he shouted.

Bastard!

I’m at a loss. I honestly feel that I’ve kicked the collecting thing. I’ve proven to myself that I can live without. Or at the very least, I can live without having right now. Yet here I am facing the ultimate temptation. If I buy that Hornung card, it’ll be as if I spent the entire month proving just the opposite of what I set out to do in the first place: to show that I don’t need anything. But fuck it all to hell; do I really want to hunt for that card for another three years just to prove a point? I mean, it’s only three hours. If I lived overseas, it’d already be 30 full days.

Argh! Collecting gods, why have you spited me?