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a disembodied goblin's head can be a treasured thing

perhaps my most prized possession is a copy of “Ancient Mew.” i suppose my second is another copy of “Ancient Mew.” if asked for a third, i would reveal yet another “Ancient Mew.” i have one last “Ancient Mew” which could suffice for my fourth most cherished belonging. below, i’ll tell you about my fifth most treasured thing; it’s something entirely different, i promise.

“Ancient Mew” is an unusual Pokémon card that was released in the year 2000 as part of a promotional campaign for Pokémon the Movie 2000: The Power of One. during the first week of the film’s theatrical debut, moviegoers were given a copy of the card with their ticket. if you don’t remember the year 2000, let me tell you this: Pokémon was the most popular thing on the entire planet.

as such, the number of tickets sold during that week is some clownishly absurd figure. it stands to reason that the number of “Ancient Mew” cards that exist is equally clownish and absurd. in fact, i suspect myriad extra cards were printed, as they needed to be handed out hurriedly to hordes of children by underpaid theater employees. perhaps the figures balance out once we account for the cards that were destroyed in bicycle spokes, spoiled by buttery fingers, and lost by people less spellbound by mass-produced cardboard than me.

what i’m getting at is this: my most treasured things are borderline worthless. 24 years later, anyone can hop on the internet, place an order, and get one in the mail within a few days. three of my four copies of “Ancient Mew” are still in the plastic seal; this negligibly increases their value. i don’t care. i adore them because they’re beautiful. their meaning to me lies in their ability to summon traces of the wonder and amazement they produced in me over two decades ago.

the card’s foil printing sparkles and shines when it catches light, and i think this is the most stunning thing in the world. throughout my life, i’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time gingerly holding my unwrapped copy of the card, turning it this way and that beneath a light. as a child, i did this with a natural childlike innocence. when i was older, i recaptured this mindset with drugs, high as a cat’s back, fingering this stupid little trading card like some kind of goblin fondling a precious jewel.

Ancient Mew is worthless even within the context of the trading card game itself. where a normal Pokemon card would have names and numbers, Ancient Mew has runes and glyphs. it looks like it was taken right off the wall of a pyramid. it can’t be played - it serves no function beyond existing as a curiosity.

my entire life, i have overvalued worthless things. i have invested so much time and energy into endeavors that offer no practical benefit. the government offered me a full scholarship as consolation for fooling my father into destroying himself fighting the specter of Communism in the jungles of Vietnam. i squandered it on a religious studies degree. i work a dead-end job. i spend my free time working on projects that will never earn me a penny. my boss once listened to one of my songs and asked me, “why are you working here?” i didn’t respond. the answer is simply that i can’t be bothered to do anything worthwhile. the only things that make me feel happy are worthless. the only things i don’t hate doing are worthless.

i’m worthless. i don’t say that dejectedly, or sadly, or bitterly. i don’t say it proudly, either. i was born with the world laid at my feet, a silver spoon in my mouth, and every opportunity to make something of myself. instead, i developed into the sort of thing that hunches over a glittering piece of cardboard in the dark. in the end, my bones won’t look any different than they would have if i had been successful.

as someone who typically writes at length about Buddhism, it may seem odd to see me write about “prized possessions.” i am forward about my shortcomings, including my ridiculous fondness for garbage that has been given the glamor of gravity by my own sentimentality. the basement of my childhood home is filled with my childhood toys. i used to call it “The Spiderlands,” on account of all of the spiders that live there, and i would go there to do drugs with my friends who hated that i called it “The Spiderlands.” it reeks of mold, because there is a stream of water that trickles through a gap in the concrete floor. it’s contaminated with urine scale from my drunk uncle who would go in there to piss when he and my father got drunk outside.

i’m afraid to go into that horrid, disgusting basement now. it’s filled with things that could have been valuable - such as rare vintage Pokemon cards - had they not been left to rot in the damp. it’s like some fucked up temple, a monument to lost potential, housing ruined relics from my past that i hoard away, without laying hands or eyes on them, only possessing them in some abstract sense. it’s a physical counterpart to my broken headspace: cluttered with old junk, objects of past obsessions, overrun by spiders and fungus that have proliferated out of control like disordered thoughts.

the first time i disappointed my mother was when i quit playing baseball. baseball is something of a tradition in my family: the males have always played in the local leagues. my cousin was a prodigy, and his parents thought he was going to the major leagues; he may well have made it, but eventually they decided he was going to be a superstar rapper instead. today, he is neither a major league ball player nor a superstar rapper.

my father coached the local kids, and from the moment i was born, my mother dreamed of cheering for her son as he knocked baseballs over fences and slid across base plates. instead, she ended up shouting at her son to stop playing with the grass as he squatted in the outfield, hating every second of every game.

i hated baseball. i never liked any of the sports i played, which may not come as a surprise if you’ve read this far, but baseball is the only one i hated. my teammates, in turn, hated me; i only celebrated when we lost games, since that meant i would be spared from the end-of-season tournament. i hated getting hit with the ball while i was at bat. i hated watching batters swing and wondering if i would get my face caved in from a ball launched into the helpless targets standing in the field, like bumpers in a pinball machine. baseball is a profoundly stupid sport, and i hated playing it.

my parents knew. i didn’t keep it a secret, and even if i had, it doesn’t take much brainpower to work out that a kid swatting at bugs and kicking the dirt instead of watching the ball every inning isn’t enjoying the game. season after season, one league to the next, my mother signed me up against my will, because she wasn’t ready to give up her dream of rooting for her little ball player.

my mother and i have always been close; my father and i have never been close. however, it was my father who saved me—“there ain’t no reason in makin’ the boy play if he don’t want to,” he said, likely gesturing wildly with his hands (one of his most noticeable mannerisms).

my mother was disappointed. she didn’t keep it a secret, and even if she had, i was perceptive enough to see that it was hard for her to come to terms with the fact that her son was never going to be the boy she had imagined. instead, i was a boy who cared far too much for stupid little trading cards.

my father had a large collection of baseball cards, so when i began bringing Pokémon cards home, it piqued his interest. he started taking me to the local hobby shop, which smelled of mildewed comics and incense sticks, to hunt for loose singles and booster packs. this was where we bought the extra Ancient Mew cards: my second, third, and fourth most favorite things.

we subscribed to the Beckett Pokémon Unofficial Collector magazine—when i finished ripping out the garish posters and thumbing through all of the insane, unsanctioned art renders of my favorite monsters, he would dive into the backs of the issues to pour over all of the card value listings. when the neighbor boy stole my foil Charizard and hid it in his Bible, my father is the one who went and rescued it.

i spent many evenings waiting for him to come home like he promised, only to give up and go to bed as he stayed out drinking Daddy Cokes—what he called beers when in front of me—with his brother. it was easier to get him to spend time with me if we were filling the pages of our card binders or passing issues of Beckett back and forth.

in The Spiderlands lies a large plastic tub filled with those cards we gathered, from the very first “Base Set” (released in 1999) up to the “Neo Destiny” expansion (released in 2002). that period of time was the closest i have ever been to my father. for me, collecting Pokémon cards was a fun way to take part in a magical world bursting at the seams with creativity and mystery. it was a way for me to spend time with him.

eventually, i realized it meant something else to him; he saw it as a way to get rich. his baseball cards had failed to deliver him fortunes, but the world was being consumed by Pokémania, and he saw dollar signs. those cards were priceless to me, and when it dawned on me that he only wanted to sell them, i began to accept that he and i will always be strangers to one another.

this acceptance crystallized much later, when he called me while i was at university. “hey dill!” (he calls me dill). “if you ain’t in class, i figger’d we could go to the Red Lobster!” i was taken aback. my father and i rarely spent time together, especially one-on-one. i’ll peel to the pith of this anecdote: he arranged to meet me so he could tell me to drop out of college and join the military. i refused. we silently ate Cheddar Bay Biscuits and i returned to campus.

my fifth most treasured thing is a disembodied goblin’s head. i’ve long adored goblins, even before it became “a thing” for people to say stuff like “goblincore.” after i no longer called myself “Mildew Buddha” (it was too disrespectful) or “Dhumamaya” (it was clownish to give myself a Pali name), but before i called myself “Sutta Slime” (it feels just right), i considered calling myself “Dhamma Goblin.”

there is a lot of overlap between slimes and goblins. they are both low-level mooks in roleplaying games: early enemies that the hero encounters when the stakes are low, fodder to be slaughtered en masse before moving on to more important things. they are both depicted, generally, as disgusting little wretched things. they’re worthless. i like that about them. ultimately, i went with “Sutta Slime” because the alliteration sounds fun and producing images of slimes is trivially simple.

goblins are often associated with hoarding, and i identify with that especially - what i’ve written already should be enough on that. ultimately, however, my love of goblins was cemented by their depiction in Final Fantasy XI, a 2002 MMORPG that burned a place into my heart that has never gone away.

recently, i began playing FFXI again. running through the streets of San d’Oria 22 years later feels a lot like holding my Ancient Mew card 24 years later. old feelings from simpler times, buried under two decades of life, bubble to the surface of my mind. the game felt like a massive, breathing world when i was a child. other players ran around the Elvaan kingdom where i began. some of their characters came from other digital nations that my own character would eventually visit after painstaking adventures; some of the real people controlling those characters spoke a foreign language that i’d eventually study. when i brought my character outside the castle gates, into the forest of Ronfaure, i could look up at the digital skybox and see an airship soaring across the horizon. i would think “there are other people up there!” when he became stronger, my own character would fly on an airship, far above the woods.

the forest of Ronfaure was where i first saw FFXI’s version of goblins, and i fell in love. like most fantasy goblins, they’re short, and they have long, pointed ears, but unlike most fantasy goblins, those ears are the only visible parts of their fleshly bodies. everything else is covered by special gear or armor; their true appearance is a mystery. the most common outfit includes a mask with bugged-out, spherical eye coverings and a bulbous filter to block out offensive odors. this design - brilliant, sublime - was reused for FFXI’s spiritual successor, FFXIV, with the added detail that goblins find almost every other creature and place to smell unbearable, and the mask is packed with aromatic herbs to help them feel comfortable.

i have written previously about my OCD. my sense of smell is sensitive, to say the least. the idea of being covered head-to-toe in gear that hides me away from the world and insulates me from the cigarette smoke, the body odor, the mold smells - sounds like a dream come true.

my fifth favorite thing, the disembodied goblin’s head, is a piece of FFXI merchandise. it’s a giant stuffed pillow shaped like the masks my beloved goblins wear to hide from prying eyes and stinking things. it even has the long, floppy ears! it was given to me for my birthday by the first woman i ever loved. i’ve never removed it from the plastic; i had originally planned to save that for when she and i moved in together, like we had been discussing, but eventually, we stopped discussing it, and stopped loving one another, and i never opened it. now and again, i’ll walk into the room where i keep it put away. i’ll look at it, and i’ll think, “nice,” and that will be the end of it.

i love that disembodied goblin’s head. i love those four Ancient Mew cards. they remind me of abstract things that have filled my heart at different points in time. they remind me that i am, at present, worlds away from the persons i have been in the past. they remind me that some people will always be strangers to one another, and no amount of love can break through that unfamiliarity.