Post #7: Ticket to the Past: The Ephemera of Experience

A ticket stub is a peculiar kind of proof—half torn, half treasured. It’s what’s left when the event ends: the confetti of a life attended.

Collectors love them because they collapse distance. A train ticket from 1912 still smells faintly of soot. A county fair admission shows the price of nostalgia—fifteen cents for the Ferris wheel and a chance at a cheap stuffed prize. And the holy grails: concert stubs.

One of my favorites is a wrinkled ticket from Janis Joplin’s 1969 concert at the Fillmore West. The type is fading, the edges curled, but the energy still radiates from the paper like static. You can almost hear her voice tearing through the mic, somewhere between a blues wail and a battle cry. The stub outlived the singer, the venue, even the era that printed it.

Every stub tells a story: who you were when you walked through the gate, what you expected to see, what you didn’t realize you’d remember. They’re tiny archives of presence—proof that we showed up, that something once happened, that we were part of it.

Today, tickets live inside our phones—sleek, scannable, forgettable. But the paper kind carried emotion in the fiber. They were our passports to joy, noise, discovery. Little rectangles that say: You were here. You saw this. You mattered.