The Big Payoff

I am sitting on a veritable treasure-trove of wealth.

But Rob, you are saying, your vast and unprecedented knowledge of movie trivia, while interesting, has proven overly useless since the dawn of time.

Ha! Time will tell on that, you cretin.

And yours will be the first hide nailed to the wall when the revolution comes!

Mark my words.

But, I was referring not to my much-lauded general store of movie information. No, no, no. I was referring, instead, to my rather esoteric collection of fantasy novels, some of which, I have come to find out, are worth rather substantially more then when I bought them years back.

My fascination with the fantasy genre (and we're talking swords and sorcery here, not the other kind of fantasy) began at an early age as one of my first books was about three trees who could talk. It was called The Three Talking Trees.

I told you, this was at an early age.

Some people.

Anyhow, it was fantasy at its finest and the author even signed the book for me. Each tree, it seemed, wanted to be part of something great when they were cut down (trees that want to be cut down . . . someone should call the EPA). Each was greatly disturbed when they were used for much more humble means. The nice part of the story is when we find out that each of them was used, at one point, by Jesus, and helped him in his work.

Did I mention the story was written by a priest?

This is the same man who thought I was a simply wonderful child by virtue of my name. "Let the boy run around, Rosemary," he told my much-chagrined mother at church as I ran screaming all around and making a general nuisance of myself.

Ahh, what good times those were.

And only last week.

Now, though, my days of being entertained by simple talking tree stories have past. One year I was given, as a present The Hobbit. You may have heard something about a little film-adaptation that was released last month by the same author: The Lord of the Rings.

It wasn't a big success, as far as I know, and it was a limited release.

I'm very excited, as I understand that in the second movie there will be talking trees. That little "sequel" changed everything for me. Mostly because I wanted One Ring to rule them all . . . and soon I shall have my way.

Muhahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Sorry.

Many was the night that I stayed up late reading, only to fall asleep with my finger breaking the spine of my books. After I finished The Lord of the Rings, I read just about anything I could get my greasy little hands on from the fantasy section of the book store. Any money I had went to the purchase of more books and also the occasional double-double chocolate-chip cookie from Parson's Bakery.

They were the size of your head.

Hey, I was a growing boy!

I became every parent's nightmare. I mean really, if you are a reader, a book-worm if you will, it just means you are destined for more expensive past-times like college, disillusionment and probably the writing of really, really bad poetry.

Trust me, I make Jim Morrison look like William Wordsworth.

Ok, no one could do that.

But I at least make him look like Coleridge.

But just because I am a bad writer, doesn't mean that I don't stumble upon a great work, purchase that work, and proceed to dog-ear the pages and scratch up the cover. Yeah, I'm a real collector.

How do I know this, you ask?

Well, as I was looking for some copies of a series of stories that I had read once upon a time in junior high (yes, I actually went to junior high . . . we won't discuss if I made it through, however), I found that one of the volumes was out of print. Fortunately, you can purchase an older copy of this story starting at $165.

Let me repeat that, just so you get the full effect.

The soft-cover, trade paperback that's been kicking around my library (since "pile of books" isn't nearly as romantic an image), for the past fifteen years or so that I shelled out $3.95 for, is now worth forty-one times what I paid.

That's a return on investment that would ease a smile across most Wall Streeters faces much like an oil slick spreading from the ruined hulk of a ship that just beached itself on a well-known and marked coral reef.

What's better is that I have hundreds of these esoteric and unknown little ditties sitting in a basement somewhere just waiting for the Great Flood that will end their usefulness as the product of some poor writer's life.

So let me just be the first to say, "Shall we start the bidding at $10,000?"

You may feel free to contact me if you wish to make a silent bid.