The Return Of the Curse Of the Cosmic Avenger

A detour to the Colecovision in the middle of a record purge

Only our firepower and determination can save the planet of the 1970s kitchen linoleum.

I wish I’d started writing essays like this years ago.  I’m not sure the world needed me to pontificate about my retro collection that much sooner, but the older I get, the more some of my picking roadtrips start to blur together in my mind, and it would be nice to have some more reliable documentation of what I’ve been up to all this time.

I was thinking of this after unearthing a box of Colecovision stuff in the garage this week.  For the unobsessed, this was a game console released in 1982 that kicked the much older Atari 2600’s ass to the moon and back, and sold about two million units before its demise in 1985.  The lot I was picking up had an as-is console, some Super Action Controllers (really souped up joysticks) and a pile of cartridges for (I wanna say) $75, and it was out near Cleveland.

I know it wasn’t the same trip where I offloaded a whole stack of non-working Commodore 1541 disk drives, or the other one where I bought cassette tape case shells in bulk from a duplicating company, because those were family trips (one during the covid lockdown, where we met up with my mother-in-law for the first time in months and had a socially distant outdoor lunch at a park).  I also remember it was my second (or maybe even third) stop of the day, and my last one before heading home.