Once upon a time, when my white high-tops were high, and my mullet flowed effortlessly down the back of my neck, I honestly believed that I was destined for greatness. Considering what I wore at the time (black sweatpants, massive amounts of Brut cologne and an assortment of metal shirts), it's fair to say that the greatness I believed to be destined for lay somewhere within the musical spectrum. Perhaps—I thought—I'll get to be the drummer of one of these new death metal bands from Florida (the time being the early 90s and all). My dream was to make multiple thousands of dollars a year, and maybe get to live in the same outdoor storage facility that Chuck Schuldiner from Death lived in near my family's apartment. That, to me, would have been a great success.
Why bring this up? Why do I share my most personal dreams and aspirations? Because I recently found proof of how severe my delussions of grandeur were back then. Though the tendency that my brother and I had for archiving every receipt of every tape and album that we bought back then (starting in 1990) could simply be chalked up to our packrat/fastidous tendencies...I would now argue something else. Deep inside my head, the one with the flowing and elegant mullet, I believed that one day these would be museum pieces. Behind bullet proof glass, in temperature controlled comfort, these receipts would be displayed in the halls of the Smithsonian, or some other similarly impressive institution. Visitors would "oooh" and "ahhh" as they saw when I bought my first Sacred Reich or Kreator cassette.
That of course, was my dream.
Reality, as is often the case, is much simpler. My celebrity status never came. I never became the drummer of a famed Florida death metal band, and these receipts have yet to be accepted into the Smithsonian. As such, today they are simply what they were then. A sad and retarded metal scrapbook, which I retain to this day.
Receipts for Entombed "Crawl", Napalm Death home video, Autopsy "Fiend For Blood" EP, Broken Hope LP, Prophecy of Doom/Axegrinder split cassette, SOD album, Morgoth CD, Napalm Death's "Utopia Banished"
