Good lord, a new blog post.
Don't fret. I've still been spending my money on nonsense all these summer months.
Today I ventured up to North York to attend the monthly Greater Toronto Card Show. It was my first time going. It's held at the Montecassino Events Centre off of Downsview Station. I live downtown a few blocks off Lake Ontario (fuck you), so it was a fairly long subway ride. I rarely get north of Bloor, so it was a nice little field trip for me.
The show had a $10 cover charge, though. I had to buy it ahead of time through Eventbrite, which seems unusual to me. But what do I know? No one seemed to mind, because the place was packed.
I don't go to a lot of card shows because shopping online is more convenient, but with the increased costs of buying stuff from the US and the massive amount of card shows these days it ends up being more cost effective to buy local now.
Honestly, the internet is basically dead. I don't use social media much. Online shopping is too difficult. I don't like AI. What else is there? I try to think of what I need the internet for in my daily life. Online banking, I guess. Streaming, but I either pirate or buy physical media for the most part. Ordering fast food ahead of time on an app. Downloading games, but I don't play online multiplayer stuff. I bet I could stop using the internet and my life wouldn't change much at all. If someone had told me that a decade ago, I wouldn't have believed it. What a world.
Speaking of insanity, I couldn't get over how many small children were walking around the card show with those little locked briefcases for their cards. I'm talking like eight year olds with little lockboxes for their serious investment Pokemon cards. What the fuck? I kept waiting to see a five year old with a suitcase handcuffed to his wrist. Perhaps one day.
The show was more Pokemon that sports cards. It was also laid out in a way where the Pokemon tables were all mixed with the sports tables, which I found annoying. I feel like these things ought to have separate shows because there doesn't seem to be a lot of crossover between the two hobbies. I had to do a couple walks around the place to start in order to see where the sports card tables were.
One thing, too, is that there were a lot of pretty young girls at the Pokemon tables, as customers and vendors. Most of the tables I bought from were old men selling vintage. Maybe I have the wrong hobby. But I was already in high school when Pokemon debuted in the nineties and I never got into it. I downloaded a Pokemon digital trading card app and was messing around with that for the summer, but I don't get the appeal. I'm into all kinds of nerdy stuff, but I feel like I'm the wrong demographic. I have to hang out with all my old man friends having confused discussions about what the kids are into these days. Getting old happens way too fast.
I work with a lot of zoomers and talk with them a lot about this stuff. They have zero interest in anything from before the last 20 years or so, although I do speak to the odd zoomer who has that gut feeling like something was taken from them before they even knew what it was. Collecting cards from the seventies or eighties or, god help me, the sixties sounds unappealing to them. I guess it's like watching old black and white movies, although I like those, too. I'm over forty and have a degree in history, so I guess I like musty old stuff. I am musty old stuff.
To me, half the point of collecting is to preserve ephemera from the past as proof the past was real. History isn't a physical place we can visit. I can't hop on a plane and go on vacation in 1981. My DeLorean is in the shop, and also doesn't exist. Memories fade, and are subjective interpretations of reality anyway. The difference between a fantasy and a memory isn't much.
I collect old stuff because it reminds me the past was real, before the era where we owned nothing and liked it. Back in the time when a company like Sony couldn't get away with no longer producing physical gams, or when people were happy to buy seven different streaming services and still finding nothing to watch. Fifty-seven streaming services and nothing's on.
I collect cards, magazines, comics, toys, books, video games, movies, and whatever other bullshit because these things are real. They exist in physical reality the same as I do, and the same as you do. They are not digital, memory, or fantasy. My collection of junk is a curation of mementos accumulated by an elder millennial bachelor that tell a story of what was important to me throughout my life. Perhaps I've accumulated a life of empty materialism, of sports and pop culture. Maybe I've infused meaning where there is none, and the absurdist condition of meaningless existence has permitted me a brief glance at the void and instead I have chosen Batman and the Toronto Blue Jays. Some of us prefer illusion over despair.
If that is the case, I will make like Axl Rose and use my illusion to curate a collection of pop culture curios that tell a defined story of my life and personality. My collection symbolizes my connecton with an authentic, unmanipulated past and preserves my individuality. Let the children handcuff suitcases to their wrists. I will embrace reality and drag it kicking and screaming into the future, lest the thought police arrive and smash my paperweight into a million little shards.
Also, I bought some cards.
Before you get your panties all in a krinkle, let me remind you these are Canadian prices and our dollar isn't worth much. Also anyone that hangs around card shows knows you never pay sticker price. You have to be careful buying vintage at a Canadian show, though, because dealers tend to blend Topps and O-Pee-Chee cards in the same box without distinction. I didn't realize when I got home these were O-Pee-Chee, and I would have preferred Topps. It's my fault for not checking carefully, although I'll admit there is something strange in 2026 about owning a Canadian produced card of Hulk Hogan with an American flag border.
These are also O-Pee-Chee. I prefer OPC for hockey and Topps for everything else. But I hate, hate, hate Topps hockey cards, but can tolerate OPC baseball and wrestling. Make sense? No? Good. I've been building a cute little collection of 70s Leafs. I have a couple Plante Leafs cards, which are fantastic because he is so associated with the Habs and seeing him as a Leaf is quite strange.
Again, before you get your panties all in a bundle, these are Canadian prices and I didn't pay sticker price. I love collecting old baseball cards. They remind me of a time when America made sense. If Pete Rose got caught gambling today, no one would give a shit. He'd probably become a star of the culture wars. He'd get sponsored by DraftKings. Nobody cares, nobody cares. Kenesaw Mountain Landis would have us all hung. He'd be right.
Look how fucking yellow that top loader holding the Magic Johnson card is. I guess I have to replace it. I love nineties Fleer Ultra. Dude, Fleer Ultra was the bomb. Everything they printed looked so slick. I love it. I've also been picking up 81 Topps basketball stars here and there. Vintage basketball pre-Jordan is so cheap. Again, nobody cares, nobody cares. You can get all kinds of Kareem, Dr J, Pistol Pete, Clyde, all sorts of stars, for cheap. Sometimes much cheaper than commons from 86 Fleer. Definitely way cheaper than all those parallel Prizm bullshit cards from the last decade. It's so, so weird. I just don't get it. Am I that out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong.
A couple of Jays team sets. I'm working on a Jays team set binder and have about seven or eight Topps team sets from '77 until the late '80s. These are easy to get at these Toronto shows, and inexpensive. I would like to put together a Jays Topps team set from each season, and then move on to other brands from there. I will open up these team sets and post their blue innards another time. Promise I won't wait months to make another post. Promises, promises.
