Back In The Day: Cussing At The Teacher

I started cussing at an early age. Not the occasional slip of the mouth either. I did know better not to cuss in front of authority figures, but when I was with my brother or friends, I would let the sordid vituperation fly. I think this was standard for most children of my day and even of the youth now. The young mind will always take to the forbidden simply because it is forbidden.

Because of my many years of practice, I would like to think I have become reasonably adept in foul speech. But I do remember my earlier days applying swears to my parlance. Shame comes rushing in to think of how I would prate on and on with those delicate instruments. My lips had become ever so loose with fucks and shits and bitches. I was capering toward an inexorable disaster.

And so, the calamity came…

Back In The Day: Strange Childhood Behaviors

When I was a child as far back as I can remember, I was weird. I remember most people thought I was not right, awkward, and strange. Maybe this was only my perception of what I thought people thought of me at the time, but I had no one else to tell me any different. I wanted to share one of my strange childhood behaviors.

I remember being nine or ten-years-old, and I would pretend my body was controlled by two miniature pilots. I was some boy-sized-advanced-robot which these two adventurers explored the world in. This was a recurring fantasy of mine, especially while I was at school; sitting bored. Not only did I act out my pilots’ adventures in my head, I would also act them out aloud. I would be sitting in class and begin to whisper, oh so quietly, “We must extend the arm, we are to write on this paper his name. Begin extension process.” I’d follow the dialect with some mechanical whirring sound effects. Or, my class would be shuffling through the halls in a single-file-line to spend some time at the library, and we would have to take the stairs. Upon encountering the stairs, my pilots would go into high-alert; for my pilots, stairs were a perilous affair, requiring the utmost skill. “Stairs. Repeat: Stairs. Man your stations.”

Reliving this behavior of mine makes the experience not sound so strange, which is therapeutic in a sense. Most everything you do when you are still considered a child can somehow be written off. How many times has it been said, “He’s just a kid.” I have a lot of things covered over by this gracious forgiveness of society. Many things I am allowed to attribute to just being a kid — my actions of that time carry little value because they were executed by a young mind, with little guidance.

Anyway, what do I know? I was just a kid then.

Back In The Day: Fireside With Grandma

Another memory from back in the day.

My brother and I went up for summer and winter vacations to my Grandma’s and Grandpa’s farm. This was a time for my Mom to be rid of us and for us to be rid of our Mom. The farm had some animals, but most of the wealth was generated from a quarry my Grandpa owned. We would ride with Grandpa in his dump truck or come with him to the quarry and do some laborious task.

One time I remember he had me clean the lines of a wielder with gasoline. The lines were green and red, they were covered with oil and grim. The wielder sat outside in the winter air and he had me take a rag to those lines. The rag was soaked in gas, I took the rag and ran it up and down the lines, the evaporation froze my hands, I remember that, my hands being so cold, but wanting approval from my grandpa, to show him I could clean those lines.

When night had come and work was done for the day we would sit in Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house. The fireplace stoked, started with diesel fuel, my Grandpa would smoke flavored tobacco from his pipe and Grandma would be drinking. We would sit beside the fireplace existing and enjoying one another.

I remember we had a talk about God. I summarized past belief in God as not being able to explain a phenomenon, so the phenomenon was explained with God. The meaning of my explanation was to say people of the past were to stupid to explain things rationally. My Grandma in adoration says “Isn’t he so smart.” My Grandpa half nods in approval. I said it for this approval, I didn’t know what I thought of God.

As my brother’s and I’s relationship changed with my Grandma and Grandpa it was determined we were not worth the effort. We stopped visiting them for vacations shortly thereafter.

Back in the day.

Back in the Day: Star Tropics

We have all had this experience: you’re going about your business when your brain is jolted  with a memory dug up from deep within your subconscious. Sometimes the remembered memory is of a past embarrassment, allowing you to be embarrassed all over again. Or other times, of a sweet memory of a loved one. But more often than not, since we live within a society based upon the consumption of products, the memory resurrected from our outer banks of memory is an experience pressed upon us from something consumed in our past.

The rememberance of these consumptions causes us to seek others out who too consumed the same products in their past and asking with excited anticipation, “Hey do you remember…” Well one of these memories for me is the NES game “StarTropics”.

Do you remember this game? I remember the yo-yo wielding protagonist, Mike. I remember moving from cave to cave fighting baddies and finally boarding the spaceship to fight aliens. Another thing I remember about this game is the music. I remember the soundtrack being pretty good for a Nintendo game.

Anyhow, that’s all I have and I just wanted to say “Hey do you remember StarTropics?”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarTropics