Friends

This is an unusual topic, considering the fact that I am a supernerd, and therefore have no friends. Instead, we’ll talk about the greatest sitcom of all time. Nah, I’m kidding. I have a truck load of friends, and I love all of them. My best friend of the last 18 years is my roommate and that’s pretty badass. And, I play Dungeons and Dragons/Pathfinder (I don’t really see much difference between the two) with another great group of friends. I consider all of them my best friends too (with certain exceptions because I’m kind of a dick), and being able to sit down with them once a week is fantastic.

Then there’s Cupcake. If I had to say anything at all, I’d say she’s my very best friend. The one I love above all others, the one I would give my life for if it came down to it, she’s also the one I sleep with at night, so it’s best not to upset her.

Me and Cupcake at her mom and dad's house.

But, on another note, I’ve not always had a wide array of friends, and I’ve not always been the obnoxious asshole I am now who gets bored and likes to torment his friends.

Yeah, growing up it was hard to make friends as I was always the outcast. The one bullies picked on in grade school, and everybody else avoided me because they didn’t want the same sort of treatment.

Me and Erik in a Bitstrips comic. And, I just realized I don't have a picture of me and Erik.

I found Erik (my roommate) in the fifth grade. We got stuck in afterschool detention a number of times. Not because either of us were delinquents. I was always behind on class work, and he moved to West Virginia about halfway through the year and we were both in detention catching up on class work, and we started talking. We found we liked the same things, Power Rangers, Transformers, and other things I’ve probably forgotten about at this point in my life.

Our friendship was always solid. We practically lived at one another’s houses until the time we got out of high school. We were always making up stories, and playing them out with various action figures. I even remember the two of us using lighters and matches to disfigure one or two of the figures. We made it look like he’s suffered some serious battle damage.

I’m smiling now, as I think about this, maybe even tearing up a little. I wonder from time to time what happened to those kids. When did we stop being kids and start being adults? When did this wall of responsibility come crashing down around us?

It’s like I said in that excerpt the other day. Things change. It’s the way of things.

And, there’s a lot of irony there too. How much time did we spend as children wishing we were grown up? And, how much would an adult give up being able to go back to being a child? I would give up almost everything. Everything I own, everything I’ve done, except for being with Melanie. I would take a tight hold on her, and bring her back to my childhood, because, even as a child she would fill the empty spot in my heart.

I wasn’t whole until I met Mel. And, I’m still missing a few things (sanity is one of them, but I’m a-ok without that) but with her I am complete. I guess that’s what a wife, or a significant other in general, is meant to be. The puzzle piece that completes you makes you whole. That’s why she’s the best of my friends. One of the two I will hold close and never let go.

Now, I’m trying to think of a way to incorporate this concept into the game, but it’s already there. Without friends, without my Damn Dirty Dungeon Crawlers, there would be no game. So, yeah, I love all of them too.

That doesn’t mean I won’t summon Cthulhu on their asses if they piss me off. Just saying. Lol.

Ryan

3-20-14

Kool-aid

Grape drink, or as I always called it, dinosaur slobbers. As a kid (I hate that phrase all of a sudden) my favorite type of Kool-aid was always grape flavored. Not because it stood out as being any better than the rest, but because it had a little purple dinosaur on the packet. It was a brachiosaur or a brontosaurus or something like that, one of the ones with a long neck. He was purple and he had green polka dots on his hide. He was smiling.

It’s funny that I remember all of that, I mean I don’t know if that dinosaur is still hanging around somewhere, or whether or not he’s still on the grape flavored Kool-aid packet. I don’t even know if Kool-aid is still available.

I know that Kool-aid style drink mixes are still hanging around. You can buy them in little packets with tubes to flavor a single bottle of water, or you can get the bigger packets that can make one or two quart jugs just like you did with the Kool-aid packets. Only now they come presweetened. You don’t have to add a small mountain of sugar to make it taste the way it should. Which is good and bad, but that’s a discussion I’ll leave for another day.

Now comes another thing that seems to have become a theme on Thursdays. I’m not talking about anything to do with the blog, but rather with Facebook and Twitter and all those lovely social media sites: Throwback Thursday.

The idea for Throwback Thursday must have spawned from two points. One, Throwback Thursday is alliteration making it fun to hear and fun to say. Two, somebody started uploading their old photos on Facebook on Thursday and it caught on as a trend.

Well, Throwback Thursday caught me at an odd point, as I have been feeling very nostalgic for one reason or another and the Kool-aid thing really brought that to mind.

I miss being a kid. I miss being a ten year old. Things were safe back then, figuratively speaking. I didn’t have to worry about any adult responsibilities. I could do whatever I wanted, be it Sound Effects on the platform or if I was going to stay inside and play Nintendo or Sega (I don’t remember which one I had at the time). The other big question, should I play with my Power Ranger toys or should I play with my Beast Wars Transformers toys. Those are questions I didn’t have answers to back then. And, that’s a lot different than it is now.

Do I pay this bill and not have money for groceries?

Can we afford to pay for internet and television?

Can I afford a mobile phone right now with all the debt piled up over my head?

Those are the questions I don’t have answers to nowadays, and I would trade all of that to go back to being that ten year old boy.

Maybe that’s where my safe place is. That warm earthy smelling platform, like it had just rained, the place where many stories were born, grew old, and died. It was there that I felt safe from everything.

I want to go back to that platform. Back to that year. I want to forget all my adult problems. Alas, things don’t work like that. So, I’ll keep dreaming, and I’ll keep writing, and maybe I’ll find that ten year old again, and he can tell me what it was really like.

Ryan

2-13-14

PS: I put Sound Effects in italics because that’s what I used to call it when I went out to the platform to make up my stories. I would pace across that rough concrete surface, and I would see these wonderful things all of them behind my eyes, and I would make the noises that went alongside the stories. Fighter jet sounds, guns, occasionally the sound of someone else’s voice talking. Something like that. And, that’s a deep enough scab. Lol. Maybe I’ll tell you more about it later. For now. It’s bed time.