prompt: twist, title: hindsight's twenty dollars and twenty cents in misc. flash fiction

I don’t collect things because I think they are worth a lot of money or are going to be worth a lot of money someday. Far from it. When I was a child, I suppose I thought that way about some of my action figures, but those ended up not being worth the fossil-fuel plastic they were cast from. Because everyone bought them hoping for the same thing. Baseball cards, Beanie Babies, stocks, Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, commemorative plates of Princess Diana’s wedding, everything people put neatly into boxes in the hopes they would sell for oodles later ended up worth doodley-squat because everyone did the same. Their only compounded-interest arriving in the form of the dust they had collected over the cruel ensuing decades, minty-crisp fresh, in their investment closets.

Over the years, I’ve come to find, the only things worthy of my horde are ironically not worth a damn in terms of money, rather valuable in terms of nostalgia or the coin of weirdness’ realm.

Still, we live at the bizarre crossroads of a Puritanical culture and a laisse-faire economic system some dead white guys called America, and we are trapped in the paradoxes of a Protestant Work Ethic gone metastatic. We believe God chooses the sinless to be rich but, with no path to wealth beyond inheritance or theft, we lie cheat and steal our way to property in hopes of making other people think we’re going to Heaven. Without making those imaginary lines forever rise upward, how can anyone know God loves us as His Own? Never mind the big twist that Christianity was named after someone who regarded money as the tool of petty despots, gave away everything to feed the poor but occasionally allowed Himself the destruction of a bank’s lobby as a little treat. Infinite growth is another way of saying “cancer”, after all, and Christos was a healer before all else, they say, in all the books the dead white guys allowed us to read. So, what do you do when money ruins everything but you still want something to do with a handful of decades breathing?

I collect ephemera. I collect the things no one thinks to charge anything for, things I cannot just buy for way too much on eBay at the drop of a hat, things that still have the challenge of finding because there’s no profit in selling them. VHS tapes of weird religious children’s programming, how-to-video cash-in schlock, science-fiction and horror flicks made on the budget of a pair of boots and a sandwich. Souvenir mugs from roadside attractions that closed years ago, pennants from Ice Capade knock-offs forgotten even by their performers. Scorecards from minor-league baseball games whose players’ kids have already flunked out of professional-ball themselves.

Things of beauty money can’t ruin, made consumptions and disposals, unpreserved, like talking monkeys with seventy-or-so years to play around, ephemera. Ephemera collecting ephemera. In our worthlessness our truest value. Rejecting cash, embracing joy instead. For the sheer hell of it.