Go Back One
Back to the Beginning
Okay, it's 7:11 am on Saturday, and given that I've had severe stomach problems this week, I'm replacing the pipe and beer/Bailey's with tea and rice. But I'm back.
My sister and I were latchkey kids. This is a term that's probably alien to a lot of younger people nowadays, as it seems that CYF is intent on taking kids away from parents who--horror of horrors--leave them at home alone nowadays. But from the time I was about eleven, I guess, both my parents worked, and Sara and I walked to school longer than that. I was "in charge" of my sister, who is two years younger, during those unsupervised times, but to be honest, Sara has always been beyond her years so she didn't need much in the way of keeping en eye on.
Our elementary school, Our Lady of Grace, was about a twenty-minute walk from our house, and did require crossing a busy street which sometimes (but not always) had a crossing guard.
When we came home from school, we were alone for about an hour or two until Mom got home from work (she worked in the accounting offices of a succession of department stores). So we weren't alone for very long, but the point is, we never got killed or burned down the house, and I don't particularly consider us "neglected." Were we a part of the 80's TV generation? Sure. But my parents did not neglect us--my mother hated the 80's buzz term "quality time"; she felt that quantity was far more important than quality, and I agree. Every moment a parent spends with their child is quality time, and the more the better.
So it was, we'd come home from school and basically plop down in front of the TV to watch cartoons until Mom and Dad got home. Or, actually, I would. I don't remember Sara ever having been as into cartoons as me. I think she played with her Barbie dolls--often having to invent elaborate storylines to explain why I had snuck into her room and placed the wrong Barbies in compromising positions with the wrong Ken dolls.
I'm not going to say there weren't accidents. The first time they ever left us alone for an extended period was when they decided we were old enough to handle being alone while they were at their Thursday bowling league. Microwave popcorn had just come out and was a great novelty. To me, as an 11- or 12-year-old kid, it was popcorn in a paper bag that you put into the microwave. To my 11-year-old mind, I could easily do that. So I dumped a bunch of popcorn into a paper shopping bag (yes, a shopping bag), and stuck it in the microwave. Sara likes to claim I put it in for 12 minutes. It was actually more like 7.
In any case, the bag caught on fire after several minutes.
To her credit, Sara at the time was far more cool-headed than me, and she had just learned in safety class that week that you don't throw water on an electrical fire...so she stopped me from doing that.
Instead, I called the bowling alley and asked for my parents. When my Dad got on the phone, I shouted "FIRE!"
They were home in record time. The bowling alley was about 10, 15 minutes away. They made it home in 4 minutes or so, flat. Still wearing their bowling shoes.
Needless to say, I was grounded for that one.
Talking of fire, like most young boys, I went through a firebug phase as a kid. This started around the age of 12 and lasted until about fourteen. Here's another place where I illustrate the difference between Then and Now. Because here's a list of some of the things we used to do:
1. We made bombs out of gunpowder, gasoline, and sawdust, which we would bury in the ground at the Dirt Pile and light up, then run. They'd go off and make glorious craters.
2. We would build cars out of Legos, which we'd sit G.I. Joe figures in. We'd then wire bottle rockets up to the cars and let them rip. The carnage, as my friend Pete would say, was glorious.
3. We made a rocket launcher that would fire bottle rockets or "D" size model rocket engines, using PVC pipe, screen door screen, a 9-volt battery, and some wires. And yes, we shot each other with it.
Nowadays? Any kid doing these things would be arrested and charged with terrorism, arson, or any number of horrible felony crimes. Now, do I endorse kids doing these things? Of course not. We were stupid and quite frankly lucky nobody lost a limb or got killed. But do I consider myself a criminal and a danger to society? Not remotely. We were kids playing stupid kids' games...doing things because we knew we weren't supposed to.
My piece de resistance, however, was the time I accidentally set my back yard on fire.
Mom and dad were away, I must've been around 13 or so. I got the bright idea (why, I couldn't begin to tell you) to light a glass of gasoline on fire. So I filled a whiskey glass with gas, and set it on the ground. I thought I was being smart by creating a wick, so I ran a shoelace soaked in alcohol from the glass. I then took a lighter to the shoelace. I learned the hard way about gas fumes, when the moment the lighter struck, the entire thing went up in a fireball.
It was on pavement; had I left it go it probably would've burned itself out pretty quickly with no harm done. But being a kid, I panicked. I ran into the house--remembering this time that you shouldn't put water on a gas fire and that you should smother it--I grabbed a large towel which I threw over the glass.
The towel burst into flames and was consumed in seconds.
I picked up the glass (again, I have no clue what possessed me to do so) and then realized I was holding a glass of flaming gasoline. I heard a voice shouting at me to get rid of it, and on instinct turned towards the voice and simultaneously launched the glass.
Fortunately, Sara rolled a critical success on her dodge roll and managed to evade the fireball coming at her. Again, the way she likes to tell it is that I maliciously hurled a glass of gasoline at her. In truth I wasn't thinking maliciously--or at all, in fact. I just wanted to get rid of the ball of death in my hand, and happened to spin towards her voice as I hurled it.
In any case, the back yard is now on fire.
We ran into the house, and got the fire extinguisher, which we used to, well, extinguish the flames.
So now it looks like it snowed in the back yard, in the middle of July.
Next step: we're now out there with brooms (and God bless Sara for helping me, even though I'd just thrown fire at her) trying to disperse the white foam. We succeeded, but of course did not succeed in removing the scorch marks from all over the grass. To their credit, my folks never said anything until years later when I was telling the story, and they said they'd known right away. Why, then, did they not punish me/us? Really, it wasn't necessary. They figured (correctly) that I'd learned my lesson, and honestly, my dad did way worse than that when he was a kid.
However, by and large we had no major incidents, and the house where I grew up still stands today. Did we get into mischief? Oh, absolutely. Some of it really stupid and dangerous mischief. Did we deserve to be arrested and charged for it? No. And this, my friends, is part of the problem with society today--we're too eager to criminalize kids for being kids. Kids are not yet fully developed people, like it or not. They are still governed on many levels by their id, their base desires. They fight, they seek pleasure, they go after what they want to go after. Criminalizing these behaviors, in my humble, is creating crime and mental/emotional problems where before none existed. Tell a kid he's a criminal or got some kind of mental disorder enough times, and guess what? You're not doing him any good, you instead are feeding into that behavior.
Sometimes I hate our current society. Often, actually, I hate it.
Go on to the next entry.
Image
Showing posts with label Reflections on Life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reflections on Life. Show all posts
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
How Did I Get Here? PART THREE: BOYS WILL BE BOYS
Go Back One
Back to the Beginning
I often wish that I had been the age I am now round about 1980. That's largely because back then it was far more possible to become established and make a living as a game designer or writer of fiction. We don't really think of it as such, because much of it was underground (save D&D, which was a cultural phenomenon and later along with heavy metal, a much-reviled scapegoat for everything that was wrong with the youth of America), but the 80's was a really productive and creative time for genre literature and all the stuff that would later become geek prerequisites.
Among other things, the 1980's was the Golden Age of Cartoons, to my mind. We had all of the best stuff--the toons of today don't even come close to matching the amount and quality of what we got in the 80's. And a lot of it still holds up. I still watch the D&D cartoon, G1 Transformers, the original G.I. Joe, He-Man, and She-Ra cartoons (and yes, targeted at girls or not, She-Ra was a pretty cool toon. So was Jem, for that matter--not the least of which because Duran Duran wrote some of the music for Jem). We had cartoons on all over the place. Weekday mornings before school. Weekday afternoons, after school. And Saturdays. Oh, glorious Saturdays, when 'toons began at roughly 6 am and lasted till noon or later. I'm talking on networks, not on cartoon-dedicated cable channels.
We had Thundercats. We had Mask. We had Voltron. We had Robotech. We had Gummi Bears. We had the Smurfs. We had Hulk Hogan's Rock n' Wrestling. We had Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (which incidentally featured the first cartoon appearance of the X-Men...Wolverine as an Aussie? WTF?) We even had a Pac-Man cartoon, which kicked ass. Later in the 80's we got a terribly kiddi-fied version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which was nevertheless fun to watch. There was even a Lazer Tag cartoon in which the kids used their Starlytes (read: guns) to travel through time and space a la Doctor Who. To accomplish this, they stood in a circle and fired their Starlytes at each others' sensors, and a portal would open (to the Time Vortex?) that would whisk them away to wherever the needed to go. The fun part is, it made a pentagram every time they did it. And the Religious Right/Parents' Watchdog groups never caught on to that one.
Early weekday mornings I used to love to watch The Great Space Coaster. It was like Sesame Street for kids that had a more psychedelic bent, or the Muppet Show, but not quite as many adult references snuck in. I will never forget "No G'news is Good G'news, with Gary Gnu."
Of course, we also had The Muppet Show (though that was late 70's), and we had Fraggle Rock.
By the early 90's we had pretty awesome versions of Spider-Man and a few other Marvel heroes. We also got a really cool X-Men cartoon that ran for quite awhile.
Unfortunately, as the 90's wore on and we all grew up, the networks decided that we didn't need cartoons anymore. That was sad. You can still catch some cartoons on Saturday mornings, but they just aren't on par with what we used to get. I've picked up Transformers G1 seasons 3/4, and the D&D cartoon on DVD just so I can have something to watch. The last decent effort to produce a cartoon in the grand 80's style was the most recent TMNT cartoon, which was very cool. Then Nickelodeon bought TMNT and that all ended.
I'm feeling a bit unfocused, today...so nothing really profound, here. Just thinking about the toons I used to watch and love. I still think about those cartoons. They, as much as anything else, contributed to my continuing geekdom. I think it's high time I started building a cartoon DVD collection.
On to the next section
Back to the Beginning
I often wish that I had been the age I am now round about 1980. That's largely because back then it was far more possible to become established and make a living as a game designer or writer of fiction. We don't really think of it as such, because much of it was underground (save D&D, which was a cultural phenomenon and later along with heavy metal, a much-reviled scapegoat for everything that was wrong with the youth of America), but the 80's was a really productive and creative time for genre literature and all the stuff that would later become geek prerequisites.
Among other things, the 1980's was the Golden Age of Cartoons, to my mind. We had all of the best stuff--the toons of today don't even come close to matching the amount and quality of what we got in the 80's. And a lot of it still holds up. I still watch the D&D cartoon, G1 Transformers, the original G.I. Joe, He-Man, and She-Ra cartoons (and yes, targeted at girls or not, She-Ra was a pretty cool toon. So was Jem, for that matter--not the least of which because Duran Duran wrote some of the music for Jem). We had cartoons on all over the place. Weekday mornings before school. Weekday afternoons, after school. And Saturdays. Oh, glorious Saturdays, when 'toons began at roughly 6 am and lasted till noon or later. I'm talking on networks, not on cartoon-dedicated cable channels.
We had Thundercats. We had Mask. We had Voltron. We had Robotech. We had Gummi Bears. We had the Smurfs. We had Hulk Hogan's Rock n' Wrestling. We had Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (which incidentally featured the first cartoon appearance of the X-Men...Wolverine as an Aussie? WTF?) We even had a Pac-Man cartoon, which kicked ass. Later in the 80's we got a terribly kiddi-fied version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which was nevertheless fun to watch. There was even a Lazer Tag cartoon in which the kids used their Starlytes (read: guns) to travel through time and space a la Doctor Who. To accomplish this, they stood in a circle and fired their Starlytes at each others' sensors, and a portal would open (to the Time Vortex?) that would whisk them away to wherever the needed to go. The fun part is, it made a pentagram every time they did it. And the Religious Right/Parents' Watchdog groups never caught on to that one.
Early weekday mornings I used to love to watch The Great Space Coaster. It was like Sesame Street for kids that had a more psychedelic bent, or the Muppet Show, but not quite as many adult references snuck in. I will never forget "No G'news is Good G'news, with Gary Gnu."
Of course, we also had The Muppet Show (though that was late 70's), and we had Fraggle Rock.
By the early 90's we had pretty awesome versions of Spider-Man and a few other Marvel heroes. We also got a really cool X-Men cartoon that ran for quite awhile.
Unfortunately, as the 90's wore on and we all grew up, the networks decided that we didn't need cartoons anymore. That was sad. You can still catch some cartoons on Saturday mornings, but they just aren't on par with what we used to get. I've picked up Transformers G1 seasons 3/4, and the D&D cartoon on DVD just so I can have something to watch. The last decent effort to produce a cartoon in the grand 80's style was the most recent TMNT cartoon, which was very cool. Then Nickelodeon bought TMNT and that all ended.
I'm feeling a bit unfocused, today...so nothing really profound, here. Just thinking about the toons I used to watch and love. I still think about those cartoons. They, as much as anything else, contributed to my continuing geekdom. I think it's high time I started building a cartoon DVD collection.
On to the next section
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
How Did I Get Here? PART TWO: HBO, ATARI, TRS-80, COMMIES, and V
Go Back One
Back to the Beginning
Oh, I can still remember
When I was just a kid
When friends were friends forever
And what you said is what you did
Well it was me and Danny and Bobby
We cut each others' hands
And held tight to a promise
Only brothers understand
We were so young
One for all and all for one
Just to know that the river's gotta run
-"Blood on Blood," Bon Jovi
For me, when I was a kid, it wasn't Danny and Bobby. It was Mike and Adam. I won't say we were like the Three Musketeers, because Mike and Adam weren't as close with each other as I was with each of them. But to me, each of those guys were like brothers.
I was not a popular kid in elementary school, and even into high school. In elementary school I was the smallest kid in my class, which led to lots of bullying. And incidentally, I got through it and grew up to be normal and well adjusted, and wasn't damaged for life. My school also didn't have "anti-bullying programs" that amounted to tattling to an adult. Of course, kids also didn't get charged with assault for a playground brawl with fisticuffs--that was chalked up to boys being boys, and people moved on.
I'll never forget the first time I got beat up. It must've been in first or second grade. I came home from school, scuffed up and crying, and told Mom what happened. She was sympathetic, as Moms are, but also sternly told me that I should've beat the other kid up instead, that size didn't matter, that I just needed to snap out and it was okay to cry, because the harder you cry, the harder you hit. I sulked in my room till Dad came home. Mom and he talked, and he came into my room.
"I heard you had a problem at school today," he said.
"Yup," I said.
"Come with me. I want to show you something."
He led me into the garage, explaining as we went that he, too, had been the smallest kid in his class, and he wanted to show me a secret about that. We got into the garage and he handed me a 2x4.
"What is that?" he asked.
"Um...a board?" I guessed.
"No, Son. That's called an 'equalizer.' Allow me to explain...you see, when you hit a kid with that, he's not bigger than you...."
That lesson, and the lesson my mom gave me about snapping out and seeing red, are two I never forgot. Nor did I forget the talk that followed, when dad sat me down. He told me that just because I knew I could pick up a board and beat a kid with it never meant that I should. He told me that it takes a Hell of a lot more guts to walk away from a fight than to start one, and that I should never, ever throw the first punch, nor attempt to goad someone into throwing the first punch (because that amounted to the same thing). However, he told me that once a punch was thrown, only one person should walk away.
I live by those words. I'm not a violent person, but I have violence in me. I'll go to great distances to avoid fighting, and have even willingly taken mild beatings quite simply I was afraid of what might happen if I lose my temper. But if someone pushes me to the limit, and it breaks, I see red. Thank God I haven't actually snapped on someone since Junior High (and unfortunately, it turned out that kid was a psychopath and I suffered one of the worst beatings of my life).
One of my favorite songs is by Kenny Rogers. It's called "Coward of the County." The song is about a guy named Tommy whose father dies in prison, and before he dies, gives Tommy advice to always turn the other cheek, and to remember that you don't have to be a fighter to be a man. Well, Tommy's refusal to ever fight earns him the mantle of "Coward of the County." This goes on until three town bullies, The Gatlin Boys, show up one night while Tommy is at work, and gang-rape Tommy's wife, Becky. Tommy proceeds to go to the bar where the Gatlin Boys hang out and beat all three of them to a pulp, then apologizes to the specter of his father, explaining that sometimes you have to fight.
The chorus goes as follows:
Promise me, son, not to do the things I've done.
Walk away from trouble when you can
It won't mean you're weak if you turn the other cheek
I hope you're old enough to understand
Son, you don't have to fight to be a man.
The last chorus, from Tommy, says:
I promised you, Dad, not to do the things you'd done
I walk away from trouble when I can
Now please don't think I'm weak, I didn't turn the other cheek
But Papa, I should hope you understand
Sometimes you have to fight when you're a man.
I think of my dad every time I hear that song. My dad is not a criminal, nor did he die in prison (he's still alive and well, thank God), but the song resonates with me because of the lessons he taught me, and it always reminds me of him.
Speaking of Dad, he's worked hard his whole life to make sure Mom, Sara and I always had the best. I only found out a few years ago that in the early 80's he was out of work, laid off for several years, and he was painting houses and doing odd jobs just to make ends meet so that we all had a good life. Dad has never given up and he works hard. We weren't rich, but we sure as Hell weren't poor. We lived in the Middle Class section of a wealthy neighborhood, and as such were often considered the "poor" kids, but we had a very good life and I can't think of a time when we wanted for anything. I was blessed that way, and I understand that very well.
Because of Dad's efforts, we always had the newest stuff when I was growing up--though my parents went to lengths to make sure we appreciated what we had and did not get spoiled because of it. Many times there were things we wanted that we didn't get, just because Mom and Dad wanted us to learn you can't always have everything you want, and that's the way it is. More than once I'd ask for something, and Mom would say "no." When I asked why, she'd say, "Because you asked for it, that's why." As a kid, I didn't get what that meant (and even at one point thought you should never ask for anything). Now I get what Mom was doing, and it was an important lesson to learn.
In any case, in keeping with the newest and best idea, my family were early adopters of cable TV. Unless I'm mistaken, we had it back in 79 or 80. I remember how exciting HBO was when it first came on the air--to actually see uncut movies, just like in the theater! Of course, at the time I wasn't nearly old enough to watch most of the movies that aired on the channel, but even still, the idea was pretty nifty, right up there with VCRs.
My grandpap Vey worked at Sears all his life. Back then, Sears was a pretty nifty department store, and Grandpap got serious discounts. That meant that he had a videodisc player (not laser disc, mind you, videodisc. They came before laser discs), a small library of video discs for it, and an Atari 2600--or rather, the Sears clone of the Atari. He had every game as soon as it came out. And before that, he had Pong.
I loved Pong.
Anyway, from there I guess my family inherited our enjoyment of gadgets and tech.
How, you're wondering, does this tie into Adam and Mike? Well, it ties directly into Adam.
See, Adam had a Tandy Color Computer Model 3. He's the one who got me into computers and technology big time. When I told my folks about it, that christmas we got a TRS-80 Color Computer Model 3. That was a clone of the Tandy (or vice-versa; I can't remember which cloned which). My the age of nine or ten, Adam and I were writing simple programs in BASIC. We had this series of books, called something like Micro-Squad Adventures, or something like that. They were sort of like Choose Your Own Adventure books, except instead of making choices, you had to write computer programs in BASIC to solve puzzles in the books. Very cool stuff. We had 5 1/4" floppy drives, and cassette tape drives for them. We didn't have Windows, yet; we didn't even have DOS. BASIC was actually the OS. We ran programs with commands like "LOAD" and "LOADM". We played games like Hunt the Wumpus. We dreamed of being big-time computer hackers one day. It was largely because of my friendship with Adam that I came to love computers.
Adam and I played soccer together, too. His dad was one of the coaches on my elementary school team the year we went to the state championships in Slippery Rock. I suffered a groin injury due to a dirty play (the kid was red carded for it--as was Adam's dad, for losing his mind on the ref for calling a dirty game in general) in the last playoff game before we went to the finals, so I didn't get to play, but I was there with my team. At the time I was playing halfback (I believe), but over the few years I played I did every position except goalie. I loved soccer. I still kinda miss playing it, but these days my body is too beat up and I'm way too out of shape.
Mike, on the other hand, well, he and I were more of the "get outside and play army" variety, though we called it, "playin' guns."
I grew up around real guns and in a family of generation after generation of hunters, and it's because of that, I am firmly convinced, that I have never had an accident with one or seriously considered pointing one at another human being. My father taught me respect for the weapon from a very early age. He beat into my skull (figuratively) that you should never, ever point a gun at anything you do not intend to destroy. And he explained in clear, concise terms that a child could understand exactly what happens to people who kill other people.
But boys will be boys, and I am convinced that playing with toy guns does not make a child violent, so long as he has good parents who are capable of explaining to him the difference between fantasy and reality. Now, that being said, my respect for guns was so great that at the time, we rarely played war with one team on one side and one team on the other. Our enemies were almost always imaginary, so even the toy guns were not being pointed at real people.
This being the early 1980's, our favorite enemies were of two varieties: Russian, and Reptilian.
Russians are self-explanatory. For any kid in the U.S. in the 1980's, the Russians were the great and terrible villains of the world. They were out to subvert, conquer, and destroy everything we held dear. Life under Russian rule would've been a nightmare. They didn't love their children the way American mommies and daddies did. They were, we were told, an Empire of Evil.
As the decade went on, of course, fences were torn down and bridges built, and we found out that except for a few core political ideologies, Russians were just like us...and by the end of the decade, even those political ideologies had lessened greatly.
But at the time, we had movies like Red Dawn to mimic, and we liked to pretend-shoot commies when they invaded our beloved homeland.
But even more than Russians, we loved to shoot reptilian invaders from Sirius. You see, in 1983 there was a miniseries that aired on TV called V. Some of you have seen it. Others have seen the recent (and recently canceled, damn ABC) remake of it. The remake, while fun, just doesn't have the impact of the original, because the subtext isn't as profound, and is a bit more along the "blunt object" variety.
But the original was quite simply an allegory for Nazi-controlled Europe in World War II, with the United States (and Los Angeles, specifically) standing in for Occupied France. It was profound, and for its time, it was impressive on every level from set design to acting to special and makeup effects. It spawned a second miniseries (V: The Final Battle), and a regular series that lasted one season (largely because it lost the message and turned into Dallas in space).
But as kids who were sci-fi fans that grew up on Star Wars (and by that time I had discovered through my Aunt Darla, God rest her, Star Trek), we ate it up. Most of the allegory was lost on us until years later, but the idea of heroic resistance fighters standing up against the alien invaders who had conquered our society through charisma and masks as much as power and technology, was just great fodder for fantasy. Most of us had dismissed Battlestar Galactica as the transparent Star Wars ripoff it was (though I did really love Buck Rogers--sue me). V, on the other hand was something entirely new and different to us. We used to argue over who played Mike Donovan, who played Ham Tyler, and who got stuck playing Kyle Bates. We made V laser guns out of cardboard tubes or (in my case) had Dad cut them out of wood with a band saw.
To this day, incidentally, I am on a quest to obtain either a Robotech Laser Blaster Target set or a Bravestarr Tex-Hex Sound Pistol n Holster, both of which are actually molds of the V laser guns. I completed my Star Wars quest a few years ago--I now own four--count 'em four Han Solo Blasters in different variations (and not the crappy toys, either; screen-accurate versions), and four lightsabers--a Force FX Luke and a Force FX Vader, and the two customs I mentioned in an earlier section. But I've never achieved my quest for a V laser with moving parts.
For reference: The Tex-Hex Pistol is on the left
Robotech blaster kit (the Holy Grail)...just not a $200 Holy Grail.
Anyway, that was our passage of time as kids. Mike had this amazing yard, that was surrounded by groves of trees with alcove-like clearings which made perfect natural "forts" and "bases," and we had this sort-of landfill at the bottom of my street which was at the entrance to a massive woods that we knew like the backs of our hands. See, back then, the woods were not a dangerous place for kids to go play. Well, they were, but not in a "your kid will vanish and never be seen again" kind of way. We played guns in Mike's yard, and all around the Dirt Pile (as we called the landfill) and the woods. We'd go out after school and not come in until my dad whistled for us (and his whistling could be heard a mile away--I kid you not) or until it started to get dark.
We had this "Tarzan Swing" in the woods, which was essentially a big, thick vine that hung down from a tree and dangled over a 7 foot drop. We had a blast on that thing. One day, I fell off, and everyone was shocked that I didn't get hurt on landing. That led to a whole new game: Jump off the Tarzan Swing. We had a blast on that thing for a long time, until someone (we never found out who) tattled to their folks and we returned one day to find it had been cut down.
There was a creek that ran from the storm drains below the Dirt Pile and ran all through the woods. We had a ton of fun in and around that thing. Years later we'd make movies down there. I'll get to that eventually, as well.
I guess I had a pretty good childhood.
Eventually, as friends do when you're a kid, Adam moved to West Virginia, and Mike Moved to the suburbs of Chicago. I lost contact with both. Years later I heard rumors, that Mike had become some kind of gangsta rapper wannabe, and Adam had been arrested for computer crimes...but those were rumors, and I've no clue whatsoever how accurate they are.
I still miss Adam and Mike. I've tried a few times to track them down over the years, to no avail. Frankly I'm surprised Adam isn't on facebook, unless either what I heard is true, or he simply stopped being interested in computers somewhere along the line.
Go to next section.
Back to the Beginning
Oh, I can still remember
When I was just a kid
When friends were friends forever
And what you said is what you did
Well it was me and Danny and Bobby
We cut each others' hands
And held tight to a promise
Only brothers understand
We were so young
One for all and all for one
Just to know that the river's gotta run
-"Blood on Blood," Bon Jovi
For me, when I was a kid, it wasn't Danny and Bobby. It was Mike and Adam. I won't say we were like the Three Musketeers, because Mike and Adam weren't as close with each other as I was with each of them. But to me, each of those guys were like brothers.
I was not a popular kid in elementary school, and even into high school. In elementary school I was the smallest kid in my class, which led to lots of bullying. And incidentally, I got through it and grew up to be normal and well adjusted, and wasn't damaged for life. My school also didn't have "anti-bullying programs" that amounted to tattling to an adult. Of course, kids also didn't get charged with assault for a playground brawl with fisticuffs--that was chalked up to boys being boys, and people moved on.
I'll never forget the first time I got beat up. It must've been in first or second grade. I came home from school, scuffed up and crying, and told Mom what happened. She was sympathetic, as Moms are, but also sternly told me that I should've beat the other kid up instead, that size didn't matter, that I just needed to snap out and it was okay to cry, because the harder you cry, the harder you hit. I sulked in my room till Dad came home. Mom and he talked, and he came into my room.
"I heard you had a problem at school today," he said.
"Yup," I said.
"Come with me. I want to show you something."
He led me into the garage, explaining as we went that he, too, had been the smallest kid in his class, and he wanted to show me a secret about that. We got into the garage and he handed me a 2x4.
"What is that?" he asked.
"Um...a board?" I guessed.
"No, Son. That's called an 'equalizer.' Allow me to explain...you see, when you hit a kid with that, he's not bigger than you...."
That lesson, and the lesson my mom gave me about snapping out and seeing red, are two I never forgot. Nor did I forget the talk that followed, when dad sat me down. He told me that just because I knew I could pick up a board and beat a kid with it never meant that I should. He told me that it takes a Hell of a lot more guts to walk away from a fight than to start one, and that I should never, ever throw the first punch, nor attempt to goad someone into throwing the first punch (because that amounted to the same thing). However, he told me that once a punch was thrown, only one person should walk away.
I live by those words. I'm not a violent person, but I have violence in me. I'll go to great distances to avoid fighting, and have even willingly taken mild beatings quite simply I was afraid of what might happen if I lose my temper. But if someone pushes me to the limit, and it breaks, I see red. Thank God I haven't actually snapped on someone since Junior High (and unfortunately, it turned out that kid was a psychopath and I suffered one of the worst beatings of my life).
One of my favorite songs is by Kenny Rogers. It's called "Coward of the County." The song is about a guy named Tommy whose father dies in prison, and before he dies, gives Tommy advice to always turn the other cheek, and to remember that you don't have to be a fighter to be a man. Well, Tommy's refusal to ever fight earns him the mantle of "Coward of the County." This goes on until three town bullies, The Gatlin Boys, show up one night while Tommy is at work, and gang-rape Tommy's wife, Becky. Tommy proceeds to go to the bar where the Gatlin Boys hang out and beat all three of them to a pulp, then apologizes to the specter of his father, explaining that sometimes you have to fight.
The chorus goes as follows:
Promise me, son, not to do the things I've done.
Walk away from trouble when you can
It won't mean you're weak if you turn the other cheek
I hope you're old enough to understand
Son, you don't have to fight to be a man.
The last chorus, from Tommy, says:
I promised you, Dad, not to do the things you'd done
I walk away from trouble when I can
Now please don't think I'm weak, I didn't turn the other cheek
But Papa, I should hope you understand
Sometimes you have to fight when you're a man.
I think of my dad every time I hear that song. My dad is not a criminal, nor did he die in prison (he's still alive and well, thank God), but the song resonates with me because of the lessons he taught me, and it always reminds me of him.
Speaking of Dad, he's worked hard his whole life to make sure Mom, Sara and I always had the best. I only found out a few years ago that in the early 80's he was out of work, laid off for several years, and he was painting houses and doing odd jobs just to make ends meet so that we all had a good life. Dad has never given up and he works hard. We weren't rich, but we sure as Hell weren't poor. We lived in the Middle Class section of a wealthy neighborhood, and as such were often considered the "poor" kids, but we had a very good life and I can't think of a time when we wanted for anything. I was blessed that way, and I understand that very well.
Because of Dad's efforts, we always had the newest stuff when I was growing up--though my parents went to lengths to make sure we appreciated what we had and did not get spoiled because of it. Many times there were things we wanted that we didn't get, just because Mom and Dad wanted us to learn you can't always have everything you want, and that's the way it is. More than once I'd ask for something, and Mom would say "no." When I asked why, she'd say, "Because you asked for it, that's why." As a kid, I didn't get what that meant (and even at one point thought you should never ask for anything). Now I get what Mom was doing, and it was an important lesson to learn.
In any case, in keeping with the newest and best idea, my family were early adopters of cable TV. Unless I'm mistaken, we had it back in 79 or 80. I remember how exciting HBO was when it first came on the air--to actually see uncut movies, just like in the theater! Of course, at the time I wasn't nearly old enough to watch most of the movies that aired on the channel, but even still, the idea was pretty nifty, right up there with VCRs.
My grandpap Vey worked at Sears all his life. Back then, Sears was a pretty nifty department store, and Grandpap got serious discounts. That meant that he had a videodisc player (not laser disc, mind you, videodisc. They came before laser discs), a small library of video discs for it, and an Atari 2600--or rather, the Sears clone of the Atari. He had every game as soon as it came out. And before that, he had Pong.
I loved Pong.
Anyway, from there I guess my family inherited our enjoyment of gadgets and tech.
How, you're wondering, does this tie into Adam and Mike? Well, it ties directly into Adam.
See, Adam had a Tandy Color Computer Model 3. He's the one who got me into computers and technology big time. When I told my folks about it, that christmas we got a TRS-80 Color Computer Model 3. That was a clone of the Tandy (or vice-versa; I can't remember which cloned which). My the age of nine or ten, Adam and I were writing simple programs in BASIC. We had this series of books, called something like Micro-Squad Adventures, or something like that. They were sort of like Choose Your Own Adventure books, except instead of making choices, you had to write computer programs in BASIC to solve puzzles in the books. Very cool stuff. We had 5 1/4" floppy drives, and cassette tape drives for them. We didn't have Windows, yet; we didn't even have DOS. BASIC was actually the OS. We ran programs with commands like "LOAD" and "LOADM". We played games like Hunt the Wumpus. We dreamed of being big-time computer hackers one day. It was largely because of my friendship with Adam that I came to love computers.
Adam and I played soccer together, too. His dad was one of the coaches on my elementary school team the year we went to the state championships in Slippery Rock. I suffered a groin injury due to a dirty play (the kid was red carded for it--as was Adam's dad, for losing his mind on the ref for calling a dirty game in general) in the last playoff game before we went to the finals, so I didn't get to play, but I was there with my team. At the time I was playing halfback (I believe), but over the few years I played I did every position except goalie. I loved soccer. I still kinda miss playing it, but these days my body is too beat up and I'm way too out of shape.
Mike, on the other hand, well, he and I were more of the "get outside and play army" variety, though we called it, "playin' guns."
I grew up around real guns and in a family of generation after generation of hunters, and it's because of that, I am firmly convinced, that I have never had an accident with one or seriously considered pointing one at another human being. My father taught me respect for the weapon from a very early age. He beat into my skull (figuratively) that you should never, ever point a gun at anything you do not intend to destroy. And he explained in clear, concise terms that a child could understand exactly what happens to people who kill other people.
But boys will be boys, and I am convinced that playing with toy guns does not make a child violent, so long as he has good parents who are capable of explaining to him the difference between fantasy and reality. Now, that being said, my respect for guns was so great that at the time, we rarely played war with one team on one side and one team on the other. Our enemies were almost always imaginary, so even the toy guns were not being pointed at real people.
This being the early 1980's, our favorite enemies were of two varieties: Russian, and Reptilian.
Russians are self-explanatory. For any kid in the U.S. in the 1980's, the Russians were the great and terrible villains of the world. They were out to subvert, conquer, and destroy everything we held dear. Life under Russian rule would've been a nightmare. They didn't love their children the way American mommies and daddies did. They were, we were told, an Empire of Evil.
As the decade went on, of course, fences were torn down and bridges built, and we found out that except for a few core political ideologies, Russians were just like us...and by the end of the decade, even those political ideologies had lessened greatly.
But at the time, we had movies like Red Dawn to mimic, and we liked to pretend-shoot commies when they invaded our beloved homeland.
But even more than Russians, we loved to shoot reptilian invaders from Sirius. You see, in 1983 there was a miniseries that aired on TV called V. Some of you have seen it. Others have seen the recent (and recently canceled, damn ABC) remake of it. The remake, while fun, just doesn't have the impact of the original, because the subtext isn't as profound, and is a bit more along the "blunt object" variety.
But the original was quite simply an allegory for Nazi-controlled Europe in World War II, with the United States (and Los Angeles, specifically) standing in for Occupied France. It was profound, and for its time, it was impressive on every level from set design to acting to special and makeup effects. It spawned a second miniseries (V: The Final Battle), and a regular series that lasted one season (largely because it lost the message and turned into Dallas in space).
But as kids who were sci-fi fans that grew up on Star Wars (and by that time I had discovered through my Aunt Darla, God rest her, Star Trek), we ate it up. Most of the allegory was lost on us until years later, but the idea of heroic resistance fighters standing up against the alien invaders who had conquered our society through charisma and masks as much as power and technology, was just great fodder for fantasy. Most of us had dismissed Battlestar Galactica as the transparent Star Wars ripoff it was (though I did really love Buck Rogers--sue me). V, on the other hand was something entirely new and different to us. We used to argue over who played Mike Donovan, who played Ham Tyler, and who got stuck playing Kyle Bates. We made V laser guns out of cardboard tubes or (in my case) had Dad cut them out of wood with a band saw.
To this day, incidentally, I am on a quest to obtain either a Robotech Laser Blaster Target set or a Bravestarr Tex-Hex Sound Pistol n Holster, both of which are actually molds of the V laser guns. I completed my Star Wars quest a few years ago--I now own four--count 'em four Han Solo Blasters in different variations (and not the crappy toys, either; screen-accurate versions), and four lightsabers--a Force FX Luke and a Force FX Vader, and the two customs I mentioned in an earlier section. But I've never achieved my quest for a V laser with moving parts.
For reference: The Tex-Hex Pistol is on the left
Robotech blaster kit (the Holy Grail)...just not a $200 Holy Grail.
Anyway, that was our passage of time as kids. Mike had this amazing yard, that was surrounded by groves of trees with alcove-like clearings which made perfect natural "forts" and "bases," and we had this sort-of landfill at the bottom of my street which was at the entrance to a massive woods that we knew like the backs of our hands. See, back then, the woods were not a dangerous place for kids to go play. Well, they were, but not in a "your kid will vanish and never be seen again" kind of way. We played guns in Mike's yard, and all around the Dirt Pile (as we called the landfill) and the woods. We'd go out after school and not come in until my dad whistled for us (and his whistling could be heard a mile away--I kid you not) or until it started to get dark.
We had this "Tarzan Swing" in the woods, which was essentially a big, thick vine that hung down from a tree and dangled over a 7 foot drop. We had a blast on that thing. One day, I fell off, and everyone was shocked that I didn't get hurt on landing. That led to a whole new game: Jump off the Tarzan Swing. We had a blast on that thing for a long time, until someone (we never found out who) tattled to their folks and we returned one day to find it had been cut down.
There was a creek that ran from the storm drains below the Dirt Pile and ran all through the woods. We had a ton of fun in and around that thing. Years later we'd make movies down there. I'll get to that eventually, as well.
I guess I had a pretty good childhood.
Eventually, as friends do when you're a kid, Adam moved to West Virginia, and Mike Moved to the suburbs of Chicago. I lost contact with both. Years later I heard rumors, that Mike had become some kind of gangsta rapper wannabe, and Adam had been arrested for computer crimes...but those were rumors, and I've no clue whatsoever how accurate they are.
I still miss Adam and Mike. I've tried a few times to track them down over the years, to no avail. Frankly I'm surprised Adam isn't on facebook, unless either what I heard is true, or he simply stopped being interested in computers somewhere along the line.
Go to next section.
Monday, June 6, 2011
How Did I Get Here? PART ONE: DAMN YOU, GEORGE LUCAS, STAN LEE, AND GARY GYGAX
You should start at the beginning
PART ONE: DAMN YOU, GEORGE LUCAS, STAN LEE, AND GARY GYGAX
Everyone who knows me knows that I am a proud, and unabashed, geek. I love all things sci-fi and fantasy (well, not all things, but a lot), I love comics. I play tabletop role playing games and write them professionally. I dabble--very, very slightly--in console and computer gaming. I love gadgets and technology, but I also maintain a deep and hearty appreciation for actual, honest-to-goodness books. I own a Nook Color and love it to death, but my office has three things in it: my desk, a couple of comfy leather chairs, and five bookcases, full. My wife's office has two more bookcases. My bedroom has a bookcase, and my basement has a bookcase. I dream of having a house one day large enough to have a big spare room that can function solely as a library. My (and Julie's) books range from history to religious studies to new age to sci-fi to fantasy to gaming to reference to psychology and probably half a dozen or more topics I'm not remembering right now.
I love movies of many varieties, and have a pretty extensive DVD and Blu-Ray collection (and it's amazing how often I can't find something I want to watch). I collect pipes. I'm pursuing a Master's degree in library and information science, to be followed up by A+ certification and (hopefully) a doctorate. My undergraduate degrees are in English and religious studies.
My wedding ring is the One Ring, from Lord of the Rings.
Yes, I'm a geek, and proud of it.
But how, exactly, did I become a geek?
That's the fault of George Lucas and Stan Lee. Well, not Stan specifically, but I'm going to blame him as the icon he is.
George first, though. You see, my earliest memory, at the age of two (going on three) was seeing the original Star Wars in the theater. It came out just a few scant months before my third birthday, you see. Mind you, this was the original release. Before it was called "A New Hope." Before we knew that Vader was Luke's father. Before we knew about brother-sister kissing. Before the awful Ewoks. When our only example of a Jedi was a 50-odd-year-old wise man and a towering black menace who breathed, "I find your lack of faith disturbing."
That movie defined me. It could be because it's the first thing I consciously remember. It probably is, in fact. But for whatever reason, it has stayed with me all of my life. I'm not as fanatical about it as some, but I'm far more fanatical than many. I own two custom lightsabers, one built by a professional "saber smith," and one that I put together with more than a little help from my best pal, Mike, who is better with electronics than I am. The latter is my take on the Imperial Knight saber from the Star Wars: Legacy comic, but that's neither here nor there, now.
The real point is, Star Wars created in me a love of sci-fi and fantasy from the time I was two years old. I love Star Wars so much that I am even capable of turning off my adult brain and watching the prequels as though I were still a little boy, and guess what? I love the prequels, too. I'm not looking to re-kindle that old, stupid argument here, either, so if your comment consists of "the prequels suck," don't expect it to see the light of day. Thanks.
Moving on, as many young boys in the late 70's did, I fell in love with superheroes. My first exposure to Stan Lee's great heroes Spider-Man, the Hulk, and Thor was through morning cartoons rather than actual comics, but super heroes have also been in my life for, well, all of it. My mother likes to tell a story that I can scarcely remember about a day when I was four or so, and she was walking us through the parking lot at Zayre's (a department store a la K-Mart or Target that no longer exists in PA), when I leapt out in front of a car with my hand extended in a "STOP" motion. She, of course, screamed in terror, and managed to whip me out from in front of the oncoming death freight. I looked up at her with a betrayed expression, blinked innocently, and said, "Aw Ma, I could've stopped it. I'm the Hulk!"
That was probably about the time Mom and I had the "fantasy vs. reality" talk. That'd be my guess, anyway.
Next up: Gary Gygax. Again, flash back to the tender age of five. It was 1979. Mom and dad were avid bowlers (a passion I would later take up--but we'll get to that when it's time). On Thursday nights, they would drop us off at Grandma's house and head for their bowling league. At the time, my uncles and aunts were mostly teens and mostly still living at home. Two in particular--Aunt Joanie and Uncle Johnny--stand out. Neither are really that much older than me, and my sister and I don't even always call them "aunt" and "uncle" anymore. But when I was five, of course, they were Aunt Joanie and Uncle Johnny.
My memories of Aunt Joanie consist of her introducing me to pop and rock music, like Duran Duran, Hall and Oates, and Cyndi Lauper, and later demonstrating to me through her friendship with a "hair band" (though it's sad that this particular band got slapped with that mantra) of the late 80's/early 90's that rock stars are really just like other people...but again, we'll talk about music in a later post.
In this particular memory, Joanie stands out because Sara (my sis) would go hang out with her while I descended into the Dungeon.
The Dungeon is how I kind of thought of Grandma's basement. It was (still is, actually) a finished basement, and it was where Johnny slept. There were the obligatory pictures of Farrah Fawcett in a bikini on the wall, along with the Wilson Sisters of Heart. At five, I didn't get the allure of that... There was also a pinball machine. That was awesome even to a five-year-old.
It was also where Johnny and his (junior?) high buddies--including a guy named Alan, who will factor in later--played Dungeons & Dragons. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, to be exact. The game had just come out. And I was introduced to it at five, as I sat in with my uncle and his buddies to play. Every session would start with Alan generating a random dungeon from the DMG. Then I would be handed this piece of paper with all these words and numbers on it that I could barely read--yes, barely. Mom said I was sight-reading by three, and able to read on my own quite well by five.
So they handed me this piece of paper--this character sheet-- and told me which of the funny-looking dice to roll when, and even let me play in character sometimes. As a five-year-old, I had a pretty active imagination, so role playing wasn't exactly a stretch.
Once, my grandmother yelled down the stairs, "Johnny, don't yinz be teaching him anything bad down there!"
To which Johnny shouted, "Here, Jase, smoke this!!!"
His friends laughed uproariously. It took me many years to understand that joke.
I had a bit of a dry spell for a few years in the mid-80's, but basically I've been playing RPG's ever since.
So there you have it. I became a geek through the fault of George Lucas, Stan Lee, and E. Gary Gygax. If any three men could be said to have shaped my life, it's them.
Go on to Interlude 1.
PART ONE: DAMN YOU, GEORGE LUCAS, STAN LEE, AND GARY GYGAX
Everyone who knows me knows that I am a proud, and unabashed, geek. I love all things sci-fi and fantasy (well, not all things, but a lot), I love comics. I play tabletop role playing games and write them professionally. I dabble--very, very slightly--in console and computer gaming. I love gadgets and technology, but I also maintain a deep and hearty appreciation for actual, honest-to-goodness books. I own a Nook Color and love it to death, but my office has three things in it: my desk, a couple of comfy leather chairs, and five bookcases, full. My wife's office has two more bookcases. My bedroom has a bookcase, and my basement has a bookcase. I dream of having a house one day large enough to have a big spare room that can function solely as a library. My (and Julie's) books range from history to religious studies to new age to sci-fi to fantasy to gaming to reference to psychology and probably half a dozen or more topics I'm not remembering right now.
I love movies of many varieties, and have a pretty extensive DVD and Blu-Ray collection (and it's amazing how often I can't find something I want to watch). I collect pipes. I'm pursuing a Master's degree in library and information science, to be followed up by A+ certification and (hopefully) a doctorate. My undergraduate degrees are in English and religious studies.
My wedding ring is the One Ring, from Lord of the Rings.
Yes, I'm a geek, and proud of it.
But how, exactly, did I become a geek?
That's the fault of George Lucas and Stan Lee. Well, not Stan specifically, but I'm going to blame him as the icon he is.
George first, though. You see, my earliest memory, at the age of two (going on three) was seeing the original Star Wars in the theater. It came out just a few scant months before my third birthday, you see. Mind you, this was the original release. Before it was called "A New Hope." Before we knew that Vader was Luke's father. Before we knew about brother-sister kissing. Before the awful Ewoks. When our only example of a Jedi was a 50-odd-year-old wise man and a towering black menace who breathed, "I find your lack of faith disturbing."
That movie defined me. It could be because it's the first thing I consciously remember. It probably is, in fact. But for whatever reason, it has stayed with me all of my life. I'm not as fanatical about it as some, but I'm far more fanatical than many. I own two custom lightsabers, one built by a professional "saber smith," and one that I put together with more than a little help from my best pal, Mike, who is better with electronics than I am. The latter is my take on the Imperial Knight saber from the Star Wars: Legacy comic, but that's neither here nor there, now.
The real point is, Star Wars created in me a love of sci-fi and fantasy from the time I was two years old. I love Star Wars so much that I am even capable of turning off my adult brain and watching the prequels as though I were still a little boy, and guess what? I love the prequels, too. I'm not looking to re-kindle that old, stupid argument here, either, so if your comment consists of "the prequels suck," don't expect it to see the light of day. Thanks.
Moving on, as many young boys in the late 70's did, I fell in love with superheroes. My first exposure to Stan Lee's great heroes Spider-Man, the Hulk, and Thor was through morning cartoons rather than actual comics, but super heroes have also been in my life for, well, all of it. My mother likes to tell a story that I can scarcely remember about a day when I was four or so, and she was walking us through the parking lot at Zayre's (a department store a la K-Mart or Target that no longer exists in PA), when I leapt out in front of a car with my hand extended in a "STOP" motion. She, of course, screamed in terror, and managed to whip me out from in front of the oncoming death freight. I looked up at her with a betrayed expression, blinked innocently, and said, "Aw Ma, I could've stopped it. I'm the Hulk!"
That was probably about the time Mom and I had the "fantasy vs. reality" talk. That'd be my guess, anyway.
Next up: Gary Gygax. Again, flash back to the tender age of five. It was 1979. Mom and dad were avid bowlers (a passion I would later take up--but we'll get to that when it's time). On Thursday nights, they would drop us off at Grandma's house and head for their bowling league. At the time, my uncles and aunts were mostly teens and mostly still living at home. Two in particular--Aunt Joanie and Uncle Johnny--stand out. Neither are really that much older than me, and my sister and I don't even always call them "aunt" and "uncle" anymore. But when I was five, of course, they were Aunt Joanie and Uncle Johnny.
My memories of Aunt Joanie consist of her introducing me to pop and rock music, like Duran Duran, Hall and Oates, and Cyndi Lauper, and later demonstrating to me through her friendship with a "hair band" (though it's sad that this particular band got slapped with that mantra) of the late 80's/early 90's that rock stars are really just like other people...but again, we'll talk about music in a later post.
In this particular memory, Joanie stands out because Sara (my sis) would go hang out with her while I descended into the Dungeon.
The Dungeon is how I kind of thought of Grandma's basement. It was (still is, actually) a finished basement, and it was where Johnny slept. There were the obligatory pictures of Farrah Fawcett in a bikini on the wall, along with the Wilson Sisters of Heart. At five, I didn't get the allure of that... There was also a pinball machine. That was awesome even to a five-year-old.
It was also where Johnny and his (junior?) high buddies--including a guy named Alan, who will factor in later--played Dungeons & Dragons. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, to be exact. The game had just come out. And I was introduced to it at five, as I sat in with my uncle and his buddies to play. Every session would start with Alan generating a random dungeon from the DMG. Then I would be handed this piece of paper with all these words and numbers on it that I could barely read--yes, barely. Mom said I was sight-reading by three, and able to read on my own quite well by five.
So they handed me this piece of paper--this character sheet-- and told me which of the funny-looking dice to roll when, and even let me play in character sometimes. As a five-year-old, I had a pretty active imagination, so role playing wasn't exactly a stretch.
Once, my grandmother yelled down the stairs, "Johnny, don't yinz be teaching him anything bad down there!"
To which Johnny shouted, "Here, Jase, smoke this!!!"
His friends laughed uproariously. It took me many years to understand that joke.
I had a bit of a dry spell for a few years in the mid-80's, but basically I've been playing RPG's ever since.
So there you have it. I became a geek through the fault of George Lucas, Stan Lee, and E. Gary Gygax. If any three men could be said to have shaped my life, it's them.
Go on to Interlude 1.
How Did I Get Here? Introduction
INTRODUCTION
Okay, Blogger. I should've done this a long time ago. Now it's just you, me, my $20 briar loaded with custom blend tobaccy from the Tinder Box, and a glass of Bailey's on the rocks.
Seriously--I have a pretty vast collection of pipes, including some meerschaums worth hundreds of dollars--and this $20 briar I bought about 11 or 12 years ago (maybe even more) is the best smoker I've got.
But that's beside the point.
I've been in a dry spell as far as writing goes over the past, well, two years--let's be honest. I could make all kinds of excuses for it, but why bother? I've been in a dry spell. I've tried to write something daily and usually succeed on some level, but it's generally crap. Somewhere around five years back, my lovely wife Julie (who then was my lovely girlfriend Julie) bought me a writer's amulet, which is a beautiful piece of Celtic artwork with an invocation to the angel Raphael on the back. I lost it sometime before we moved to our house. Well, last week I found it. And started wearing it.
And it has been nagging at me to start again.
Hot damn, I think to myself, this thing works.
In any case, here I am. Hopefully this upcoming series of blogs will be more insightful and less angst-ridden than those I've written recently. I'm starting to sound like a 16-year-old Emo kid, and that's just not cool at my age. So instead of wondering why things suck so much, I thought I'd take a look back and see how I got here. Not in a bad way, but just re-examine my life, the moments that stick out in my mind. Some of them will be painful to write. Some will be painful for others to read. But you know what? A writer has to be fearless. It's the number one thing you've got to have.
"What inspired me to write this series," you ask? Okay, I know, you could probably care less, but I'm going to tell you anyway. I'm going to tell you because I have the microphone, as it were, and in the end, I'm doing this for me more than anyone else. Maybe someday I'll collect it all together and publish a memoir that nobody will want to read. I'll get an ISBN number and everything.
Also, you should expect me to digress a lot during these little exegeses on life.
I have been feeling nostalgic recently. And by "recently," I mean over the past decade or so. But more recently than that, over the past week or two, I've begun thinking of things I have watched and read that really on some level resonated with me. The one thing that really stuck with me and kept coming back was the webcomic Queen of Wands, by a lovely woman who goes by the name Aiere. This comic, while it did have some wildly funny moments, was not a comedy-based strip. Rather, it was a pretty damned insightful story about a bunch of people, as Aiere describes it, in that place between graduating from college and realizing you have no idea what you want to do with your life.
Unfortunately for me, I kind of got stuck in that place. Actually, they only thing that's unfortunate about it is that other people about whom I care didn't get stuck there with me--because honestly it can be a fun place to be. You spend a lot of time really reflecting on things, and it's good to be reflective. You refuse to let go of the childish things you loved when you were a kid. Really, why should we have to let them go? You know, it was C.S. Lewis who said that when he became a man he realized it was time to put away childish things...but people tend to forget the rest of that quote. The rest of it is, "including the fear of being childish."
Toys rock. Comics rock. Games rock. Why should we stop appreciating these things just because we got older? We shouldn't. We should revel in them.
Which brings me back to QoW. The main character, Kestrel, really revels in her love of comics and toys. She's reflective and loves to sit in cafes reading a book--often Alice in Wonderland or some other young person's fantasy novel. She's passionate, hot-tempered, sarcastic and opinionated...she's pretty much me, only with red hair and breasts. I could relate on a very deep level with everything Kestrel goes through in that strip. The other characters are equally realistic and well-realized. Nobody in that strip is two-dimensional, and all of the problems are as real as real can be. It's comforting to read it. Seriously. If you have not read QoW, you should go there, skip to the beginning, and read that thing. It's amazing on every level...and yes, the artwork starts off somewhat amateurish, but it very quickly gets wildly better. By the end of the comic's run, she's well on par with any cartoonist out there. In my opinion.
So as I've been re-reading the archives (and Aiere, if you should by some strange chance hear about this blog and take a look, I'd pay good money for a bound collection), I've begun thinking about my own life some. So it was, I was sitting at home this afternoon after work, and my amulet started pulling me upstairs. Seriously, it was quite insistent. "You, sir," it said, "are going to write something tonight, and it's not going to be fiction. But it's going to be worth writing."
So I grabbed my pipe, packed it up, poured a glass of Bailey's, and we have come full circle.
There you have it, Faithful Readers. I hope that you remain Faithful Readers throughout these diatribes. I hope you enjoy this peek into my life. And I hope that you maybe even bring a few others along with the ride. If you relate to what I have to say, to what I've been through--and really, I think my life is rather mundane, overall--then fantastic! I thrive on comments on these things. It lets me know I'm not screaming into the void. If you do not relate, if you disagree, or if you are offended by what I say, then I politely invite you to piss off and read something else. I'm not doing this for you. I'm doing it for myself, and for those who might appreciate what I've got to say. I don't pretend to be anyone important or to have anything really profound as far as insights into the nature of life and death, but this is my forum and I'm going to use it.
That's that. Enjoy.
Go on to next part
Okay, Blogger. I should've done this a long time ago. Now it's just you, me, my $20 briar loaded with custom blend tobaccy from the Tinder Box, and a glass of Bailey's on the rocks.
Seriously--I have a pretty vast collection of pipes, including some meerschaums worth hundreds of dollars--and this $20 briar I bought about 11 or 12 years ago (maybe even more) is the best smoker I've got.
But that's beside the point.
I've been in a dry spell as far as writing goes over the past, well, two years--let's be honest. I could make all kinds of excuses for it, but why bother? I've been in a dry spell. I've tried to write something daily and usually succeed on some level, but it's generally crap. Somewhere around five years back, my lovely wife Julie (who then was my lovely girlfriend Julie) bought me a writer's amulet, which is a beautiful piece of Celtic artwork with an invocation to the angel Raphael on the back. I lost it sometime before we moved to our house. Well, last week I found it. And started wearing it.
And it has been nagging at me to start again.
Hot damn, I think to myself, this thing works.
In any case, here I am. Hopefully this upcoming series of blogs will be more insightful and less angst-ridden than those I've written recently. I'm starting to sound like a 16-year-old Emo kid, and that's just not cool at my age. So instead of wondering why things suck so much, I thought I'd take a look back and see how I got here. Not in a bad way, but just re-examine my life, the moments that stick out in my mind. Some of them will be painful to write. Some will be painful for others to read. But you know what? A writer has to be fearless. It's the number one thing you've got to have.
"What inspired me to write this series," you ask? Okay, I know, you could probably care less, but I'm going to tell you anyway. I'm going to tell you because I have the microphone, as it were, and in the end, I'm doing this for me more than anyone else. Maybe someday I'll collect it all together and publish a memoir that nobody will want to read. I'll get an ISBN number and everything.
Also, you should expect me to digress a lot during these little exegeses on life.
I have been feeling nostalgic recently. And by "recently," I mean over the past decade or so. But more recently than that, over the past week or two, I've begun thinking of things I have watched and read that really on some level resonated with me. The one thing that really stuck with me and kept coming back was the webcomic Queen of Wands, by a lovely woman who goes by the name Aiere. This comic, while it did have some wildly funny moments, was not a comedy-based strip. Rather, it was a pretty damned insightful story about a bunch of people, as Aiere describes it, in that place between graduating from college and realizing you have no idea what you want to do with your life.
Unfortunately for me, I kind of got stuck in that place. Actually, they only thing that's unfortunate about it is that other people about whom I care didn't get stuck there with me--because honestly it can be a fun place to be. You spend a lot of time really reflecting on things, and it's good to be reflective. You refuse to let go of the childish things you loved when you were a kid. Really, why should we have to let them go? You know, it was C.S. Lewis who said that when he became a man he realized it was time to put away childish things...but people tend to forget the rest of that quote. The rest of it is, "including the fear of being childish."
Toys rock. Comics rock. Games rock. Why should we stop appreciating these things just because we got older? We shouldn't. We should revel in them.
Which brings me back to QoW. The main character, Kestrel, really revels in her love of comics and toys. She's reflective and loves to sit in cafes reading a book--often Alice in Wonderland or some other young person's fantasy novel. She's passionate, hot-tempered, sarcastic and opinionated...she's pretty much me, only with red hair and breasts. I could relate on a very deep level with everything Kestrel goes through in that strip. The other characters are equally realistic and well-realized. Nobody in that strip is two-dimensional, and all of the problems are as real as real can be. It's comforting to read it. Seriously. If you have not read QoW, you should go there, skip to the beginning, and read that thing. It's amazing on every level...and yes, the artwork starts off somewhat amateurish, but it very quickly gets wildly better. By the end of the comic's run, she's well on par with any cartoonist out there. In my opinion.
So as I've been re-reading the archives (and Aiere, if you should by some strange chance hear about this blog and take a look, I'd pay good money for a bound collection), I've begun thinking about my own life some. So it was, I was sitting at home this afternoon after work, and my amulet started pulling me upstairs. Seriously, it was quite insistent. "You, sir," it said, "are going to write something tonight, and it's not going to be fiction. But it's going to be worth writing."
So I grabbed my pipe, packed it up, poured a glass of Bailey's, and we have come full circle.
There you have it, Faithful Readers. I hope that you remain Faithful Readers throughout these diatribes. I hope you enjoy this peek into my life. And I hope that you maybe even bring a few others along with the ride. If you relate to what I have to say, to what I've been through--and really, I think my life is rather mundane, overall--then fantastic! I thrive on comments on these things. It lets me know I'm not screaming into the void. If you do not relate, if you disagree, or if you are offended by what I say, then I politely invite you to piss off and read something else. I'm not doing this for you. I'm doing it for myself, and for those who might appreciate what I've got to say. I don't pretend to be anyone important or to have anything really profound as far as insights into the nature of life and death, but this is my forum and I'm going to use it.
That's that. Enjoy.
Go on to next part
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I'm not a mad bible thumper--Sophia, however, is my inspiration and always in my heart