Sometimes, collecting can set off an immense chain of events that can significantly alter your life, sending you places you’d never travel to otherwise, talking to amazing people you’d not otherwise encounter, discovering the convergence of all things, and alternately, send you plummeting into disasters of nuclear proportions. Sometimes all at once.

It all started on my birthday. I was turning 24, and I wanted to do something that kicked the asses of every previous, stupid non-eventful birthday I’d ever had. Somehow, this desire to kick ass translated into meeting a cute redhead for an epic flea market extravaganza and sushi, and she was amazingly tolerant on both counts. I didn’t expect that I’d be setting off an array of events that would span the next year, all starting with a videotape called ‘Creating Rem Lezar’.

I wasn’t even going to buy it, but my redhead friend’s penchant for obscure VHS tapes had reawoken my own interest in faux-cinema, and was working in conjunction with my own love of superheroes. I was mainly there for the overpriced 1990-era action figures and the company of a charming girl, but I altered my initial trajectory and paid two whole dollars for that Creating Rem Lezar videocassette, held together by priority mail tape and a sheer unwillingless to die. The cover of the tape promised things that I couldn’t imagine - a man in a blue unitard wearing a blue wig and a gold headband, a pixelated floating head, and… the creepy blue guy escorting two small children into a cave? The tagline, “Every child has a Rem Lezar” pretty much solidified it for me… what was a Rem Lezar and why didn’t I have one growing up? It’s because of my glasses, isn’t it? Is that why I was denied the requisite Lezar that all children apparently have?

While I could try to bore you with a plot summary, there’s really not so much of a plot. Instead, they’ve replaced it with repeated punches to the kneecaps and cigarette burns to your eyelids. Needless to say, it’s probably the second most agonizing hour you’ll ever sit through, the Tyra Banks Show being the reigning champion of Soul-Destroying Television. I’m not even sure if Rem Lezar is an hour long, because once you hit ‘play’ on the VCR, time folds in on itself and life loses all meaning, so I don’t know how to quantify it. Prepare yourself for tuneless songs, a homoerotic barbershop quartet, and be sure to look up the word ‘quixotic’ before you start the movie, because they use it about eight thousand times, and use it properly only once.

My utter and abject fascination with this movie led to me mentioning it frequently in various internet forums and writings, and from this, a girl from Ohio and I began a correspondence about it, both of us fairly excited about finding a kindred Rem-spirit. Subsequently, I was invited to visit her in Toledo. While Rem Lezar might seem like a flimsy premise to journey on, there were certainly other factors in place also. Which quickly fell apart and left us all sprawling in the splintered, radioactive wreckage… leaving only Rem.

I had my doubts about making a nine hour drive to a destination that most people make an effort to travel away from. When your state’s travel guides are titled things like “Ohio : Why Bother?” and “Ohio : Michigan’s Armpit”, you should probably make other plans. Alas, the universe conspired to misguide me. How, you ask? By a trifecta of appearances by Rem Lezar himself on TV.

Now, your average person probably doesn’t know who Jack Mulcahy is, but once, he pranced around with two children wearing a blue wig and didn’t even get arrested. He’s pretty much remained in obscurity and bit parts for the entirety of his career, but on the eve of my journey, I would suddenly spot him in three commercials. Not only would he appear as a man with a guitar in a Snickers commercial, but he’d also leave a small child in front of an oncoming train in a PSA and lament the suppression of his pesky herpes. As someone who looks for the divine coincidence in the everyday, this was enough to set my resolve. Surely Ohio was destiny! Rem Lezar has said so!

I would like to add, at this point, that my interest in all things Rem was so invested that I actually hunted down Jack Mulcahy’s co-star in that Snickers commercial and inquired as to if it was truly him. I’m sure that I came across as a total psycho.

While the trip to Toledo was negatively colored by a number of unexpected things, I realized that I had the confidence and independence to actually make these extended road trips. I’m still friends with the redhead, our friendship cemented by the fact that we both survived watching Rem Lezar together and didn’t form a suicide pact right then and there. Were it not for my ever-growing collection of videotapes of things too horrible to ever transfer to DVD, I’d have never driven clear across Pennsylvania and seen the carved wooden bears at the rest stops, and I’d still feel relatively cemented in place, here in my tiny rural town. I’m now inclined to believe that the pursuit of tiny eccentricities will forever be more rewarding than something more obvious, and collections are a good place to begin.

The thing that I enjoy most about collecting is the network of interconnectedness between people, events, items and history that all things will form if you investigate them, and I investigate every whim I have to an alarmingly distracted degree. While people are inclined to believe that collections are merely an accumulation of inanimate objects for display and that collectors are inherently materialistic, the collector sees the life in these items, the past and the future implied by the present.

Blue hair and all.

What’s round on the ends and Republican in the middle? That’s right, Ohio. I spent the last week of my life buried neck-deep in the thick of it. The Little Caesars restaurant with the faded ‘Pizza Pizza!’ guy still proudly thrust atop the roof despite his total obsolescence, the deeply-sunk stadium in Toledo, and the endless expanse of I-80 during the 9.5 hour drive there. One of the highlights of this fabled Ohio trip was the Maumee Antique Mall. Such a mall might be commonplace in the midwest, just outside of my range of usual travel, but it was a beautiful and new experience for me. Being an avid connoisseur of junk is not an easy life to live.

Imagine your average indoor flea market, rife with obscure goodies and trinkets in every expansive corner. Ceramic owls, old clocks and dinner trays, more than a few over-loved baby dolls. Double it in size. Now, eliminate the hungry-eyed dealers trying to talk you into a sale and replace them with neat little labels on everything. This is the Maumee Antique Mall. You come, you’re greeted by life-sized replicas of subservient old people at the door, you browse the booths of items that vendors have entrusted to the watchful eye of the mall owners (and security cameras), you select your wares and you bring them up to the front counter. What it lacks in haggling it makes up for in the no-pressure sales approach, which usually makes me sweaty and irritable, like Taco Bell cuisine.

I spent my time there poking through bin after bin of my favorite quarry, LPs, attracted to those things with men in leiderhosen or semi-nude women on the covers, and anything that used the phrase ‘hi-fi’ as if it were going to change life as we know it. For one dollar each, I purchased 13 various records in differing states of completeness and disrepair, under the philosophy that you can’t really lose for a dollar. Collecting these unwanted LPs is always an experiment in mining for the rare gold that’s been forgotten for whatever reason. It’s likely that these albums have been sifted and resifted through until there’s nothing left of any monetary value, but I could care less. I’m the guy with the medschool 45s of the sounds of heartbeats on the bookshelf.

While I was seriously tempted by a set of four Search for Spock glasses, I abstained. Who can say that they’ve never wanted to drink a cool glass of Pepsi from the angry face of a Klingon? Productive members of society, that’s who. Instead, I unearthed an original ‘Portrait of Bobby’ LP, and admittedly, I’m too young and too heterosexual to know exactly what I’d found. Later research indicated that I was looking at a Bobby Sherman, bubblegum pop star. The record didn’t indicate this in any way, but I presume that this was simply a staple for any young girl’s record collection in the early 70s, and in being so, defied the need for any explanation. I just liked his tight little purple pants and obviously radiating charm, and so did my six-year old niece. We know where it’s at. She didn’t dig the leiderhosen squad quite so much. Even if they WERE yodeling my ‘favorite German melodies’. Man, there are so many! I hope they didn’t leave any out! It’s at this point where I don’t really care what’s on the album itself - the cover is enough to delight.

I was ridiculed for my decision to vacation in Ohio, which many of my friends saw as a place to vacation as far away from as possible and not venture towards, but as long as there’s the Maumee Antique Mall, satisfying our need for all things owl-themed or inscribed into musical discs, I’m set.