An inveterate collector of movie ticket stubs, he

An inveterate collector of movie ticket stubs, he
had a mindset partly leftover from adolescence when
collecting things was the Thing To Do, i.e.
“cool” in some way, a way of saying this is
me; and partly leftover from some abortive
scientific instinct that told him he should
keep track of all the movies he
saw, and when, as if keeping track of
this would give him some insight, one day, into the
influences of his earlier years. There
were only two problems with
this:
when you obsess over something’s influence on you it
oddly can never
really influence you;
but more importantly he never got
around to gathering up all the movie
ticket stubs, or writing them down anywhere. The twelve
year old kept saying “ooh collect them” and the historian
thought, this stub represents an important memory which it would
be a crime to loose track of,
but the memories of watching a movie are never really
yours
they were crafted and put there by
someone else with more connections than you have, and he knew this and
decided it wasn’t worth the effort, how very like a twelve year old.