Every once in a while Nelson Santovenia shows up somewhere unusual. A few years ago, he appeared inside my guitar. And here he is now in my garbage. Why, you may ask, is there a baseball card in my garbage?
There are baseball cards in various places in my home. The cards from my childhood in the 1970s are in a couple of shoeboxes. My sons now each have a shoebox of their own, filled with some cards that have split off from two large plastic bags of random cards from the 1980s onward. Those bags are now buried in a closet, because I’m tired of cleaning them up. My sons aren’t card collectors yet, and I tend to doubt they ever will be. They like to dump the bags of cards out and fling them around the room. They’ll eventually “help” gather the wreckage, but I always get impatient with the pacing and unfocused nature of this effort and end up angrily lurching around and stuffing the cards back into the bags. This will probably loom large in my sons’ associations of baseball cards with their father: a frustrated ogre snarling vows about this being the last time anyone plays with baseball cards.
Inevitably, I miss a card or two. Later I’ll find it stuck under a chair or in the crack between couch cushions. In the past I’ve then most often placed them on a bookshelf, an intermediate step toward getting them back in the plastic bags that usually gets stretched out for quite a while and bugs me on some level. My life is always partially undone. I’m always rushing from one thing to the next, one kid needing food, the other needing help to climb up to a terrifying height atop the treadmill, my face needing a shave before work, work, a novel in unrealized chunks festering in notebooks in my file cabinet, an appointment to make with a doctor to jab his finger up my anus because it’s finally about time for that glorious rite of passage, etc.
So I made a new policy—any baseball cards from those bags that don’t make it back into the bags at the first cleanup are no longer part of my world. What’s the big deal? I have no deep association with any of those cards. They came to me after childhood as thrift-shop gifts or occasional nostalgic purchases of packs at Target or whatever. They didn’t fuse my goddamn psyche. And they certainly aren’t worth anything in a monetary fashion. They’re garbage! Right? No more nor less than the drier sheets, tissues, and packaging for a pair of tension pulley things that my wife is incorporating into her workout regime. But this morning while playing with my sons, I was pretending to be Megatron, who I guess is a foe of the Transformers, and my sons were blasting me off the bed to the ground via various means such as fart blasts and pillow pummelings and pro-wrestling style leg launches, and down there on the carpet, a smoldering and defeated robotic hulk of villainy, I noticed Nelson Santovenia where I’d discarded him, among the trash, and he didn’t seem to fit in with his surroundings. I couldn’t make him fit in with his surroundings. I could not make him mean nothing. So I took him out. He’s on my desk right now, yet another item in that messy, forever unfinished collection, my life.
Cardboard Gods 
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