Like a rambunctious oven chasing down the cookie dough, there is the joy and despair found in the toy aisle. There is the death of dough, so many dead presidents raffled off to the sake of a preening plastic Pharoah demanding fealty. So many years making it rain on dat ass.
The same way you can make a miniature eclipse by pumping your fist in front of the sun, you can tick down the decades by the all important “things I’m looking for.” And in those decades, fragmented into years and even months, where wants are accumulated like hermit crabs washed ashore, the space of time is crushed beneath the two-fingered assault of “specific toys I’m looking for.” I can point to a moment in time as it hangs in the fine art museum of my life and see it as “looking for V2 Storm Shadow.” Or, later still, “looking for ML 6 Juggernaut.”
There is a bite-sized chunk of childhood where the pursuit of Thundercats seemed to be as fruitless as target shooting in an abandoned mine. You can hear the echo of disappointed sighs for miles. Theirs is a bitter legacy even now. Lion-O legally changed his name to Lion-O-No-Way!
It is hard to gauge time between the seeding and the harvesting if you’ve buried your watch along with the seeds. Time ticks along underneath the soil, but the plants can’t tell time. How long was I looking for Powermaster Optimus Prime before I found him? There are moments when time can be measured in seasons. That summer when I … That winter when I …
The spring spent in search of a toy: intermittent hay fever, heat lightning on the horizon, cloudy with a chance of disappointment.
If you find the toy you’re looking for on your first try, you have the feeling of Neil Armstrong on the moon: Well, I’m here, now what?
The moon would be a nice place to visit without all those tourists. The same can be said for a toy aisle. It didn’t occur to me that loving toys put you in direct competition with everyone else until I was a bit older. I never ran across a gum machine that wasn’t ready and willing to accept my money in exchange for a brightly colored piece of gum. But a toy aisle isn’t a gum machine, although they might be just as sticky. You can’t just expect to blow a bubble just because you’re gracing the aisle with your presence. What chew looking for?
How many other collectors were looking for the 5-inch Strong Guy at the same time?
It took a while before I figured out that finding something required a sort of mutual disinterest. If the toy aisle didn’t care what I wanted, then I wasn’t going to care about it. Cows don’t eat pickles but we keep putting them on our hamburgers. I started trying to fool the toy aisle. No, don’t mind me; I’m looking over here. Not every time, but on occasion you could fool the toy aisle that way, and find what you were looking for. I’m pretty sure the only reason I ended up with both Rokkon and Stonedar at the same time was because they weren’t alerted to the fact that I was looking for them.
Same scenario: Modulok. He didn’t know it was my birthday.
Same reasoning: Cobra Commander in Battle Armor.
If the aisles knew I wanted those toys most of all, then they would have hidden them away. Why would the toy aisle want me to be happy?
There are candles in birthday cakes to create a smokescreen so parents who didn’t find the toys their children wanted can flee undercover. “Happy birthday toooooo youuuuuuuustart the car!”
As an adult — or at least a kid wearing the best adult costume I could find — I’ve found that sometimes it’s best to just fold your arms and stare down the aisle. See which of you blinks first. I have a theory that many toy aisles actually have a second, secret aisle hidden just one dimension away, and if you could vibrate in just the right way, you’d be able to see this secret aisle. You have to be quick about it, though, because the employees frown on an adult male vibrating in the toy aisle.
I like to refer to toy hunting as “pegging.” It’s not something that has caught on, although a girl once asked me if I was into pegging. I said yes, enthusiastically, but the rest of that night was very confusing and I didn’t find any toys. I didn’t find any toys at all.
It is possible to alter the course of current events by taking the most illogical action, the same way I’m currently time traveling forward at the manic rate of one second at a time. A toy will be in the last place you look, so always check the peg twice. It’s possible that you missed it. If you have to leave, walk around, buy some soap, but don’t neglect checking a third time. Don’t be afraid to take drastic action. In 1995 I’m sure I found Princess Leia’s PotF figure by screaming at the empty pegs at the top of my lungs for a full thirty seconds until she dislodged herself from a nearby quark.
Sometimes you just won’t win. Even General Patton was constipated once in a while. Logic and a large stack of calendars may tell me that I won’t run across the Super Powers Cyborg in my current trips to Walmart. If you stacked every toy aisle on Earth one on top of the other, they would cover the distance from here to the moon. At which point Neil Armstrong would get the figure you wanted first. But I guess he deserves it after being up there so long without company.
To make a long story short, if there’s one thing I’ve learned after all this time is that finding a toy and getting to Carnegie Hall both require the same technique: practice.
And, brudda, I could play you a symphony.