When I was a kid I used to dream of all the cool stuff I could buy if I only had the money. Then, as I became an adult, money stopped being the obstacle, the problem was finding stuff that fit, or that was really good. You had to work to find the good stuff.

Then comes Amazon. I remember when a friend said to me, about ten years ago, that he tried to buy everything on Amazon. It was a game. Until that time I had never bought anything from Amazon, but I decided to play the game too. And it worked. For a while I was getting off on having all my desires fulfilled, quickly and effortlessly. I bought a big house in Berkeley and filled it with stuff from Amazon. A living room, a den, two bedrooms, an office, a kitchen, a garage, tons of closets. All that space to fill, and I came close to filling it! There was a mountain of empty Amazon boxes in the basement when I left the house and moved to NY. A one-bedroom apartment. A lifestyle that couldn't overdose on Amazon, there just wasn't the space to fill.

Today, in the middle of summer, when the humidity is 100 percent and it's hot and sticky in the city, the opposite weather of the normal post-Thanksgiving binge, we're encouraged to indulge in a frenzy of materialism. I went to the site, clicked around, but it made me feel sad for the little boy who lusted after all the good stuff. Now, if they were selling what I had when I was that kid, hanging out with friends at the playground, throwing a football in the street, swimming in a lake, baseball, flirting with girls, plotting and scheming adventures. It's all about the friends I had when I was a kid. I wish for one more week as a kid, just one more. I would pay a lot of money for that.

To come so far, when all my material dreams of childhood could be realized with a single click, to realize that what I had then is what I most desire now.