Don't wish for a collapse.

I'm seeing this sentiment quite a bit online. I understand the urge, but my experience is that once something collapses it takes a very long time to recover, if ever.

I remember having this discussion with my sportscard wholesaler circa 1990. I mentioned that the industry was so dysfunctional that maybe it needed to hit bottom before it could recover.

"Yeah, me and some of the other wholesalers have been talking about that. Maybe we need it all to collapse so that it can be rebuilt."

So it did collapse, and it's never really recovered fully. It's a full 35 years later and there are occasional surges and it never went away completely, but it's a pale shadow of what it once was.

Over the years I've seen a lot of product lines collapse--I'm watching one right now--and none of them have recovered. A few settled in at a sustainable level, but nowhere near as profitable as they were at their height.

Sure, in the long arc of history, a collapse seem like a blip. But humans don't live in the long arc of history, we live in the short arc of mortality.

Trying to relax. Ordering things at a once a week pace, and not getting ahead of myself. 

Saw there was a new documentary about the composer John Williams and watched it midday, which I rarely, rarely do. 

Made me realize, I am surrounded by art. Movies, books, music. Surrounded. It sustained me in my depressive twenties, especially books, but also movies. (There was a couple years where I literally went to every movie that came to Eugene. Every movie. Only walked out on one.)

There is more art available at this moment than any time in history. Art available to everyone. 

My mom had tons of art books. They were black and white, sometimes out of focus. Now we can buy art books in glorious color. When I was young, I had to stay up late, or watch movies in early afternoon, to see the classics. They used to show black and white films, no problem. I'd mark the TV Guide a week in advance.

My house had tons of books and I could go to the library; even so, I felt as if I bought every mass market SF and Fantasy book I'd find in the supermarket spin racks. I still remember being drawn across a room by the first Frazetta cover I saw.

We had to buy our music in albums. In Bend, we had AM radio, tons of commercials. They rarely, if ever, played funk, or people like David Bowie or Kate Bush. 

Now, it's all available any time I want it. In fact, there is so much art, I find myself seeking silence and solitude. I rarely watch great movies a second time because it seems like my older self picks apart movies I loved when I was younger.

Hard to say all this art has made us better, but it certainly has made my life more enjoyable. 

I'm glad I got to express myself in stories. It doesn't really matter if they were good or not; what counts is that they were a creative thing I did for myself. I immersed myself in other worlds and very much enjoyed the journey,