Tickets, Please

There are, sometimes, advantages to be gained from being broke until payday--not many, I'll grant, but some.

When I have money, I spend it--on toys, on movies (either seeing them in the theater or buying them on DVD), dinner with friends. These are fun things. Necessary things, I would argue--not specifically toys or movies or dinner, but enjoyment. Life can't be all work and no play. That's a sure way to take a premature dirt nap.

When the rent check coincides with the credit card bills and various utility fees, however, pleasure must be taken in smaller, less money-centric ways. And since I had no cash this weekend and will be running on figurative fumes until Thursday, I chose to take pleasure in time well spent around La Casa del Terror.

What, you might ask, qualifies as "time well spent" to my sometimes cluttered mind? Surpisingly, it didn't involve much TV watching (though this was done in small amounts) or napping with the Girlish Girls curled up at my side (although this also happened for brief periods both days). Rather, it involved doing something reasonably productive, like cleaning house (and there's a lot of cleaning to be done, believe me), doing my taxes (I'll be getting a decent refund from my "friends" at the IRS, while the State of Illinois will, as usual, keep everything I gave them and take a little more, too) and rummaging around in my "closet" and storage containers in search of buried treasure.

It was this last activity that involved the most work, but also yielded the greatest rewards. Understand: My "closet" is actually my pantry, but since I moved in it has been jam-packed with stuff. Action figures. Clothing. Comic books. Unbuilt model kits. Flashlights. Fabric softener sheets. Stuff. Much of it is not, by any means, necessary to my existence, such as it is. Much of it should find its way to the Dumpster in the alley alongside my apartment building. Much of it is a waste of space.

Weeding the dumping ground down wasn't the point of Saturday's excursion, though. It was more an exploratory trek into mysterious territory in search of something specific--missing photographs and negatives. I'd been through my photo archive recently (and by "archive," I mean "milk crate filled beyond capacity with Wolf Camera boxes") and found that several sets of photos were missing, like my shoots of Marquette Park and the remnants of Riverview Park. I don't think I've ever thrown a single frame of film that I've shot, so I knew that those photos were buried somewhere in La Casa--it was just a matter of digging holes until I hit paydirt, and the pantry was the most logical (and most daunting) place to start.

I tunneled for about an hour, tossing aside varied aritfacts of life past--a bag of slacks that no longer fit; a Converse All-Star box full of decade-old mix tapes; a crate of Halloween decorations unused at last year's Movie Bash; a dozen or so baseball caps--before I hit what on this occasion passed for paydirt: One bag filled with photo envelopes, the other with what appeared to be miscellaneous papers.

The bag of photos solved some of my mysteries, if not all of them--most of the missing photos were there, and what wasn't there is likely still in a storage container or drawer somewhere else in the apartment (a project for another time). The other bag, though, yielded the more interesting find. At the bottom of the mixture of paid bills and instruction manuals for appliances that've long since stopped working was a sizable stack of tickets for various events.

The oldest ticket in the bunch dated back to 1994. It was for a Sunday afternoon baseball game between the White Sox and the Seattle Mariners--the last game played before the owners locked out the players's union and the whole 1994 season came to a screeching halt, taking the playoffs and the World Series with it. Many fans still blame Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf for leading the owners in their actions, especially since the Sox had a great team that year and an excellent chance to not only make the playoffs, but to quite possibly play in the first World Series in Chicago since 1959. (Some fans have forgiven Reinsdorf, if only because his Sox went to--and won--a World Series just over a decade later.)

There were also tickets for concerts, like the New Year's Eve show Cheap Trick played at the Double Door (my Christmas gift that year from Mrs. Fluffy and definitely my best New Year's Eve ever), the Damned at the House of Blues (also with Mrs. Fluffy) and Duran Duran (back when they had trouble finding a record company to release "Pop Trash," which was released a couple of years later) in that same venue. I don't go to concerts much anymore--my trip to see Gwen Stefani last year was my first concert in ages--but this stack of tickets was a reminder that not only have I seen some cool acts, but I should get out and see more (as money and time allow).

Mostly, though, there were tickets for movies. Some were for movies I obviously must have seen, but can't remember a thing about, like Human Traffic--I looked it up on IMDB and still can't remember a thing about it. Other tickets were for movies that I remember clearly, but wish I could forget, like Glitter, Crossroads and Exorcist: the Beginning. (After years of having denied even knowing of the existence of that latter title, here was the physical evidence of my weak deception.) Still other tickets were for movies shown at theaters that no longer exist, like the Esquire, McClurg Court and Burnham Plaza. We used to have so many movie theaters in this city. Now? I can count them on my fingers and toes without running out of digits.

More than anything, the stack of tickets reminded me of all the good times I'd had, regardless of my monetary circumstance--good movies and bad, seen alone or with friends; great bands heard up close and personal; street fairs full of food and sweat and steam and noise. Maybe this paricular weekend, I didn't even have enough in wallet to go to a cheap theater. But I had been able to go before, and would be able to go again.

Someday, I'm going to give all those tickets to an artist friend of mine and have that friend make a collage out of them--a road map of life as lived, and a signpost life yet to be. I'll need to have a large wall space reserved for that collage, though--that's a lot of tickets.