Collecting My Failures

I am no longer the goofy professor with graphic t-shirts and sport jackets. I’m someone who has empty shelves in his basement.

A couple weeks ago I sold off my 8-track collection. Not, like, a box. We’re talking hundreds of tapes.

For years, collecting 8-tracks gave me joy. There was a time that I regarded finding a Barry White or Duran Duran 8-track as something that brightened my day. On many levels for me, it was important.

Was it stupid to collect music in this obsolete format? Yes, very stupid.

That was sort of the point, collecting as a commentary on collecting.

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I’ve tried to write about collecting 8-tracks, or Freddie Mercury memorabilia, or paintings by a retired lawyer from Connecticut I’d pick up when I first moved upstate.

I dubbed each a “project,” then dutifully put together research and notes, and then gave up. They’re collected in a catch-all folder on my hard drive called “Failed or Abandoned Projects.”

This, you might guess, is where my ideas find their final resting place. It’s a mixed bag of article pitches, research into niche obsessions, transcribed notebooks:

• A book proposal for a collection of profiles of all-female tribute bands

• Another book proposal for a biography of video game king Todd Rogers.

• 3,000 words on Lou Gramm’s 1987 solo hit “Midnight Blue.”

I’ve been trying to re-think failure lately. Once you fail a certain number of times, or give up on X. number of ideas, or realize your ideas aren’t really that good or interesting, there is a sense of liberation.

Well into the Dante-Interno-midway of one’s life, without a mother walking on the earth, and de-coupled from the teaching career that defined myself in many ways as a person out in the world, I see loss and failure as a sort of success. Like Samuel Beckett says, try again, fail again, fail better.

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These days, I am re-thinking failure as I scroll through this folder of ideas I abandoned or allowed to fail.

• A personal essay on my hatred of certain types of cheese, based on an earlier personal essay on my hatred of certain types of cheese.

• Mugshots of the priest from my high school who was a good friend and mentor and who, decades later, was convicted of horrific sex crimes.

• “A Short History of Sucky Alternative Rock Bands,” which I started when a cool publisher dude told me he wanted a book from me with this very title, after I tweeted about how bad the bands Modest Mouse and Spoon had become.

• My former therapist’s obituary from 2021, along with notes.

I’ve learned to lean into these failures with borderline giddiness. Like Bono once said to an interviewer, “Options are the enemy.”

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I recently watched Flipside, Chris Wilcha’s documentary from 2023 that, ostensibly, is about his efforts to help out a failing record store near his childhood home in New Jersey. I liked it a lot—I mean, it’s about a white guy from New Jersey who loves collecting records, so it’s not much of a stretch for me to relate.

Wilcha French-braids projects he’s started and stopped—footage of This American Life host Ira Glass, interviews with co-workers, Judd Apatow, documentaries on writers and photographers. That Flipside is about a successful commercial filmmaker who now regrets pursuing the pure artistic path begs a little credulity. It’s aspirational for someone like me. As I watched it I was jealous of another person’s failures.

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Why am I going through these old files now? The practical reason is I am cleaning up my hard drive of a career’s worth of old teaching files, gigabytes upon gigabytes of video lectures and PDFs and promotion packets. All gone. But not the failures. The failures stay.

• I once spent a couple hours with the RnB singing group Sisters With Voices at a temp job. I was mostly stalling while my boss made it into his office, but still: Me + SWV = Magic, right?

• An oral history of my friends who lived around Rutgers-Camden in the late 1980s.

• Rejected book proposals on Queen’s News Of The World and Hot Space albums for the 33 1/series.

• A manuscript of Erasmus’s aphorisms, which I’d badly translated from Latin.

• A 50-page poetry manuscript called My Catch-All Comedy Voice, written while watching Mini Kiss perform at The Cutting Room.

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One project that came closest to finishing was a profile of Kenny Moore, the comedian whose career came to a crashing halt after he El Kabonged his 12-string guitar on a heckler.

It’s a disturbing video to watch. It went viral years after the fact, and I grew interested—obsessed, really—about how someone can have a violent and public meltdown and figure out what to do with their life.

The emails I had with Kenny were like those you might have with a nine-year-old boy. He’d write like 6-7 words, half of them curse words and half of them words like HARDEE-HAR-HAR, and I came to the conclusion he was not a very good subject for a full-on piece of writing. Nothing was quotable. No conclusions or lessons could be drawn from talking with this man.

Was I excited that a guy from a viral video wrote back to me? Sure. But after a while, it was time for me to relegate it to the Failed and Abandoned. After a while, it felt like I was collecting my failures. And that was sort of the point.

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And so it has come to pass that I need to put away childish things. Or, in the case of my 8-track collection, to sell childish things to some goth dude with black hair who lives in Jersey City.

As I transferred boxes of tapes from my car into his Uber, I kept telling the dude to give them a good home, that the T. Rex skips and the Lou Reed needed re-padding. He nodded, shook my hand, and got in the car. As his payment hit my Venmo, and I felt a collector’s remorse, sitting there on the Upper West Side.

I am no longer the goofy professor who wears graphic t-shirts and sport jackets. I’m turning into someone who has empty shelves in his basement.

Or maybe just buy me a coffee.