Prepare for : Elf

[prepareforelf]

I love skeeball; I really and truly do. I didn't learn to appreciate it until I was older: as a little kid, it seemed like pretty weak tea compared to the arcade games and pinball machines that surrounded it, and I really only played it when I had the inevitable strange itch to earn some tickets to redeem for some goofy, forgettable toy trinket. The whole tickets-for-prizes thing is, I think, a lot of kids' first experience with "earning" a currency that can be traded for an Object of Desire, and it's certainly a compelling one, which is why, I guess, you see kids—much like myself—plugging away at the skeeball lanes when they're really too young and unskilled to actually be any good at the damn game.

I've always been something of a shit, though, and the lure of tickets was, on one occasion, too strong to let a little something like a lack of skill keep me from them. I wish I could remember exactly how old I was at the time, but I'm thinking I was around kindergarten age; that seems about right for having a crafty, sneaky little idea but not having the guile to actually get away with it. The idea in question was pretty simple and probably one that has occurred to others: I plunked my token into the slot, got as many skeeballs as I could carry, and climbed up the lane and dropped them into the highest-scoring hole. This was back before you started to see those variant lanes with 100-point holes in the upper corners, incidentally.

I was later told that my Aunt Ruth saw me doing this and, in a panic, ran to the table at which the rest of my family was seated and told them: she was not panicking because I was cheating at skeeball, she was panicking—bless her heart—because she for some reason believed that I was going to get electrocuted. I don't remember getting busted, but I remember vividly what happened after: my grandmother—Um-Ma, I called her—made me sit and watch as she ripped every single ill-gotten ticket in half. Grim, determined precision, right down the damn middle: rip, rip, rip. In that how-dare-you, solipsistic way that children do not have to be taught, I felt as though I was the one being cheated.

I haven't played skeeball in years: not because I don't want to, but because I never see it anywhere. It's probably the last arcade experience that can't be satisfactorily emulated. The last time I played, all the lanes but one were out of order, and I still wasn't particularly good at it, but man, the sound of those balls rolling down the chute and clacking into place at the beginning of a game is one of life's premium sensory pleasures.

[prepareforelf]

The frequent television and radio tests of the Emergency Broadcast System used to scare all hell out of me as a child. It wasn't just the attention signal, although the fear certainly revolved around that weird electronic chord: 853Hz and 960Hz tones played at once, which (a) activated the EBS system receiver/decoder and (b) I seem to remember reading—although this is probably something I just made up/assumed and then believed so strongly that I made up a false memory of authoritative attribution—was specifically designed to be psychologically disturbing and unpleasant at the very basest level of human wetware, like an infant's cry.

I don't remember when I first learned about the possibility and implications of nuclear war, but it was really very early in my life: I distinctly remember asking my fourth-grade math/science teacher, point-blank (in that way that curious children will just straight-up ask a question without any regard to nuance or propriety) quote would you want to survive a nuclear war, to which she answered no, she'd quote rather be dead than live through the horrible aftermath. That is an extremely heavy sentence to lay on a young kid and it's always stuck with me, not out of any sense of resentment—how dare she ruin my misguided, almost romantic ideas of survival and rebuilding?—but because of how frankly unguarded it was. We hadn't been talking about nuclear war or anything; I just stopped at her desk one morning as we were filing out of class and asked as casually as I might have asked about her breakfast or the weather.

She was the only teacher I ever asked that particular question, though, and now that I'm thinking about it, that's probably because (a) she was the first science teacher I remember having that taught with an intensity that seemed to reflect both a depth and breadth of scientific knowledge and a more general lust for life (b) I was getting older and my pure and unblemished fear of nuclear war was getting smeared with these stubborn little streaks of defiance, of a determination to survive, which may have in itself been an unconscious manifestation of an acceptance of what I believed to be its inevitability and (c) because her answer, the first I solicited, was so jarringly dissonant and ultimately disappointing that I didn't want to ask another adult.

But yes, long before fourth grade, I knew about nuclear war—I knew, in what must have been a necessarily limited but still absolutely thorough sort of way, that at any time, day or night, someone somewhere could make a decision and everyone and everything I knew would be dead half an hour later, give or take a few meaningless minutes—and I was scared, even if only at the back of my mind, more or less all the time. And those EBS tests, which seemed constant—and always when I was staying home sick!—and that damnable, creepy Civil Defense logo—created in 1939, long (but not too long) before the bomb, and only recently retired—seemed to leer out from the screen in this awful eye-in-pyramid sense; if it had had a voice, I knew—and know—exactly what it would have sounded like, because, in my dreams, it did speak in something other than a precise electronic scream. I would hide behind the couch when these tests aired. Why didn't I just turn off the TV and count to sixty?—because, I think, I was more scared of the CD logo than that sound.

Poking around on the internet has taught me that I was not the only one terrified by these tests and even by those logos and symbols. "alot of kids were scared of these ebs test and having the ebs and CD logo on the slide didnt help," commented a YouTube user on one of the many, many uploaded videos of old EBS tests. It seems like a lot of us had our existential terror evolve into something like a fascination and are, right up to this very moment, tentatively prodding that terror/fascination by watching videos and reading scans of EBS authenticator lists and etc etc., even mourning the passing of the CD logo: it was a severe and hateful thing, but it was honest.

[prepareforelf]

The above is a sequence from episode 28 of Land of the Lost, "The Musician". It originally aired on November 15, 1975, way before I was even alive, and I saw it—well, that's the story I want to tell.

I lived what was probably a good thirty-minute school bus ride away from my elementary school; this meant I had to get up pretty early to get to school. There were two half-day kindergarten sessions per day and mine was in the morning. In the winter, we'd arrive at school before sunrise. It's only now that I even thought to connect these dark, early mornings for my eventual post-adolescent evolution into a morning person.

And sometimes, not terribly often, we'd be ahead of schedule, so we'd be shuffled off the bus and into the elementary school library, dimly lit because the sun hadn't come up to shine through the wall of windows and because all the lights hadn't been switched on yet, where we'd sit semi-circle around a little TV and watch whatever syndicated kidvid reruns were on at that weird hour until it was time for class. I wasn't, usually, terribly interested in the TV—I'm not trying to assume some sort of snobbish credibility by implying that, even from an early age, I was somehow "above" TV; no, indeed I fucking loved it—because we were in the library, pretty much unsupervised, which meant I could pick through the shelves that were, by the light of day, forbidden to us kindergarteners.

One morning, the girl who lived down the street (upon whom I had simply the most aching crush ever hatched in the heart of man), her fraternal twin sister, and I pulled a book off the "big-kids" shelves that I believe was simply called Ghosts. I've often entertained the idea of trying to track this specific title down, but I'm pretty sure there are literally dozens of juvenile-audience books called Ghosts published between 197X, when I'm pretty sure the school was opened, and 1984, when this story takes place, so anyway—

(I just checked Worldcat. 251 of them. Good grief.)

So we're flipping through this book, and the girls seem to be completely unfazed, pointing at the grainy black-and-white photographs of alleged ghost sightings, haunted locations, etc (complete with arrows pointing out the ghostly figures and faces) and giggling and calling them "ghosties" while I am quietly freaking the fuck out.

And playing in the background is what turned out to be this episode of Land of the Lost, and the last thing we saw before the TV was switched off and we headed to the alphabet-lined walls of kindergarten was the scene I've attempted to cram into the animated GIF above. What wouldn't fit was the seconds immediately previous: Chaka, the little simian kid, was screwing around with that glowing table, and evidently got bored or frustrated with it and walked off the left side of the screen. And then this, well, this ghost appeared and silently, slowly followed him—!

I never forgot those eerie few seconds, although for some reason I remembered the "ghost" as being glowing blue instead of red, which might have been because it was a crummy old TV or because I remembered it as a "ghost" which is always coded blue/white in my mind, or whatever whatever. And just a few days ago, I finally found it again, and I wouldn't describe the feeling as one of closure so much as having a persistent itch truly and thoroughly scratched.

[prepareforelf]

This is a picture of Victor and Valeria von Doom (drawn, I believe, by Jeff Butler) from Gates of What If?, an adventure published in 1986 for use with the Marvel Super Heroes Role-Playing Game. Gates of What If? was the first bit of supplemental material I got after getting the Advanced Set (see previous entry), and it had a similarly deep impact on me.

The idea behind the adventure is, basically, "what if there were no Reed Richards", which is itself, the introduction explains, a what-if scenario that diverges from the "what if Doctor Doom had become a hero" story in What If? #22. The details—despite the extremely specific preceding sentence—are actually not all that important; what is important is that Gates of What If? was my introduction to the idea of alternate or parallel worlds/timelines, and furthermore the idea that seemingly small decisions and/or events had the possibility to affect gigantic changes. And so, the next time my friend Logan's parents took us to Lone Star Comics, I dutifully dug through the back-issue boxes and found a copy of What If? #22, which I took home and devoured countless times. It's a legitimately great comic.

It was, I think, important that my first exposure to the what-if concept was one that was so drastic: Doctor Doom, of course, was understood as being pretty much synonymous with straight-up king-hell villainy—it's right in his given name, for heaven's sake—and yet here he is, as the result of a single choice, a couple extra moments' thought, early in his life, a pure and tragic hero. This was important because it drove home the idea that the what-ifs, the could-bes, could indeed be so different as to be unrecognizable, that pure evil, in this case, could become a very nearly pure good.

This was important because I was a very unhappy child, a child that specifically wondered and worried about why he was so unhappy, and if this unhappiness was what made him a bad child—or was it the other way around, was he unhappy because he was fundamentally bad?; religious education had, up to that point, been necessarily Manichean and, as a result, the belief that some people were just fundamentally bad was not so terribly difficult to reach. Ah, but: what if? Posit a world in which the child is not so unhappy, not "bad" as he worried/believed he might be: what might that point of divergence had been?

I know now, of course, that depression runs right up through my mother's side of the family like a vein of coal: a deep and damned near bulletproof DNA-level clinical depression that I've only recently begun to effectively treat as opposed to merely "managing", and so I know that there was no point of divergence, no zig-instead-of-zag that might have somehow spared my young brain its marinade of fear and sadness. But for years and years, the idea that something might have gone differently, that in some parallel universe—or indeed a nearly infinite phalanx of them, since divergence breeds divergence—that there existed a parallel me that was happy and well-adjusted and good: that idea sustained me and it informed, consciously and unconsciously, the decisions I made going forward, and it all grew out of the seemingly impossible belief in a heroic Victor von Doom.

[prepareforelf]

This illustration comes from, if I'm not mistaken, the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook. I wanted to pin down exactly when I would have first gotten my hands on the Player's Handbook, only to discover just now after a little bit of research that there were about four thousand variant printings of this volume, and all I know for sure is that the copy I owned had that old wizard on the cover, so it could have been anywhere between 1983 and 1988. I'll say 1988, then: I first got into role-playing games (I'm going to qualify this statement in a moment) around 1986-7, when I picked up the Marvel Super Heroes Advanced Set (about which I will write much more later, in another entry), and it would have taken a bit for the bug to truly bite and for me to want to read other role-playing games.

You'll note that I said read and not play, there: I never played any of the (eventually many) role-playing games I bought, but it was not for lack of trying; none of my friends were really interested enough to enter into the spirit of the thing. Even among the weirdos and oddballs and milksops I gathered around myself as a child, I think my fascination with role-playing games was considered pretty eccentric. I was more in love with the idea of them, anyway: the idea of codifying an imaginary world and everything in it into a system of rules and statistics. The idea that the world and everything in it basically makes a certain sort of consistent sense but there is, just beneath the surface, a random element that keeps everything from being strict cause-effect clockwork.

I couldn't have put it into words like that, of course, but I've had a lifetime to think about these games and the ways in which they resonated with me and why that might have been, so—

The above image, though, is important: it's a pretty bare-bones diagram of the "Outer Planes", which is, to oversimplify for the sake of clarity, Dungeons & Dragons-speak for "where you go when you die". I was raised as a Baptist, and early on, there, my family took the whole being-Baptist thing extremely seriously (up to and including my mother's hilarious and absolutely serious insistence that my AD&D hardbacks "smelled like marijuana", as though TSR was just giving the shit away between the pages of the books as a bonus for budding young Satanists). One thing about kids is that they make excellent believers, and so I took being Baptist seriously, too, especially the doctrine of eternal punishment, the bone-deep fear of the capital-D Devil and capital-H Hell, and the whole idea that you were born fucked, in a spiritual sense, and your whole life had to be one long carefully orchestrated performance of contrition and praise, in that order, or else refer back to the ghoulishly detailed and thorough promises of eternal punishment laid out in the Bible.

And it was so hard to be good, to truly think and act as an actual good person as opposed to a weird and flawed and scared little kid, but the choices—and, we were told, this was very much a matter of choice, which is to say you deserve whatever it is you end up getting, even if God would rather things hadn't worked out that way—were Heaven or Hell. And then I'm introduced, through the avenue of a game that was literally bought for me at Toys "Я" Us (I remember this specifically because I could never get the neon orange price tags they used at the time completely off the upper-right corners of these hardbacks), to the big mindblowing what-if of maybe there are lots of different possible things that could happen, places you could go, after you died. There was/is so much packed into this spartan, utilitarian image—really no better than a diagram—that I couldn't get it out of my head, and I am happy to have found it again.

AD&D didn't turn me into an atheist or even an agnostic, to be honest. That came a lot later and there wasn't any one particular influence or idea that turned the key in the lock. What it did do, though, was plant the seed of the idea that what comes after death (I was not yet at the point where I would have thought to add the caveat "if anything") was variable.

[prepareforelf]

I don't think I'm particularly unique in my habit of picking through the imagery and themes in my dreams—when I remember them—and trying to figure out what inspired them (or, less charitably, from where exactly my subconscious ripped them off). Of course, the fact that any given dream might be terribly derivative, as the one I had just before waking this morning was, doesn't make it any less intense when it's being subjectively experienced. My dreams are especially vivid: none of the rules with regards to "you can't see/feel/do [X] in a dream" have ever applied to my dream experiences; my dreaming mind always fills in the context and internal logic of whatever's happening so completely and(/or) convincingly that it never occurs to me to think "this must be a dream".

That's not entirely true: I had a nightmare when I was a child in which I said to a beloved great-aunt who was, for reasons I can't remember, present, "This must be a dream", to which she replied "no, it's real". At which point I was again completely convinced of the reality of my situation until I woke up.

So, this most recent dream: the theme of "people forced against their will to kill each other until one is left standing" is not at all new, but this is the first time it's ever come up in a dream. By the light of day, it's almost funny how obviously my subconscious swiped from existing cultural references, so I thought I'd try to map them out. At first I made the really obvious connections to Battle Royale and Gantz, but then after a few moments' thought I realized that what my brain was drawing from perhaps most freely was Quake III Arena, of all things.

A group of strangers—that included me, of course—were suddenly transported from whatever it was they were doing and deposited in a large room in what eventually turned out to be an essentially empty office building. Everyone was allowed to select a weapon (one at a time; one of each unique weapon; first come, first served) and then spend fifteen minutes at a fully stocked bar assembling the cocktail of their choice: each cocktail in the libatory pantheon had been assigned a unique physiological effect, which the drinkers would of course discover for themselves through trial and error. After the fifteen minutes had passed, we were to begin killing one another.

I wanted no part of this, and I left the office building; I didn't get too far across the parking lot towards the highway when I noticed a female figure in long, flowing black floating several feet above the ground. "As much as I love you," she said, "I can't let you leave." She pointed her finger at me and a hole bored through my head and I died.

And then I was back in the office building at the bar. While getting my bearings, I was killed again, shot in the back of the head by another participant. This repeated itself a few times before I realized what was going on; I think the other participants were beginning to understand, too, that no matter what we did to ourselves or each other, we'd keep coming back to life. There were violence-free break periods in which we talked, briefly, and got to know one another, in the barest of terms, and a sort of grim, ironic, and unspoken consensus formed that as long as we were doomed to keep killing and dying, we might as well relish the experience.

It never stopped hurting, though, the dying. Whatever injury killed me—and there were many and they were wildly diverse—I felt and it hurt and I very much wanted it to stop. I tried sneaking away a couple more times, but the woman in black was always there with the same mouthful of words and the same pointing finger.

It didn't occur to me for a couple of hours, but this was probably a clumsy attempt by my subconscious to tackle my overwhelming fear of death and the inevitable experience of dying by repeatedly subjecting me to it: a sort of narrative exposure therapy.

[prepareforelf]

I made this craft from a kit when I was staying in a hospital in 1990 or thereabouts. I had no idea how to even begin trying to find it on the Internet—the keywords "pins" and "threads" have been rendered completely useless by Pinterest and message boards, respectively—but find it I eventually did: there is, unless I'm still not looking in the right places, one picture of this string art kit in the entirety of this internet, and here it is. I am grateful that someone found it as lovely as I did—and do—and felt it was worth photographing and sharing with the world. And so here it is again: "String Art of Seagull and Sunburst", I guess we'll call it, just in case anyone else ends up trying to find it.

The photo doesn't do it justice, or perhaps more accurately it doesn't do my memory of it justice: I remember that black felt being an impossibly deep, rich black, and the orange of that sunburst practically glowing against it. I don't know if it's the context of my memory or if it's a genuine matter of deeply-seated personal taste, but I cannot look at this artifact objectively: I'm aware that it could be perceived as kitschy or banal or even bland in the way that mass-produced craft kits generally tend to be, but every time I look at this thing (or think about it, which I do frequently, given the correct set of mnemonic triggers), it rings the big bell in my brain.

There was one nurse in particular who was consistently and exceptionally kind to me from the very day that I arrived. I'd be remiss in my remembering if I didn't mention that giving a little kid Chick tracts doesn't slot into everyone's conception of "kindness", but I was a Christian at the time and I loved comics and was constantly craving new things to read, so no harm was done and the gesture was borne out of a generous spirit. Anyway, when I was discharged from the hospital, I ended up giving him this piece of string art.

I can't help but wonder if he still has it.

[prepareforelf]

I don't remember when I first played Ancient Land of Ys—MobyGames lists the DOS version as being released in 1989, which certainly feels right—but I know that I finally finished it in late August 2012. That is a long, long time to be fascinated by a game but not really do anything about it, but I think that gap says something about the game's unique qualities.

Let's get one thing out of the way immediately: no one knows how to pronounce "Ys" the first time they see it, and everyone gets it wrong in a different way. So, for the record, mine was "why-ess", like it was a pair of initials. 1989 was also the year I was introduced to the common Vietnamese surname "Ng", which is another one of those "impossible unless you know the secret" sort of words.

"Impossible unless you know the secret" also could be said about Ancient Land of Ys itself. I got my hands on the game the way I got my hands on most of my computer games at that point in my life: my mother brought it home from work. She was a high school teacher, and for years the only computers in our house were the ones that she borrowed from school. Of course, I always ended up monopolizing them, not least because their hard drives and the big boxes of 3.5" floppies that accompanied them were always full of games. That disc was literally all I had to go on, but at that point in my life (and this is still pretty much true) I would play anything, so I dove into the game blind, which...

It's not at all an easy game—it's short, and the game world is small compared to the other RPGs I was used to (e.g. Dragon Warrior [née Quest] on the NES and Wasteland on the PC), but definitely not easy. Combat is resolved with this weird (but eventually quite agreeable) "bump" mechanic too baroque to bother explaining under this particular umbrella, and it's not at all evident that grinding is absolutely essential, and the player's allowed access to insane murder-holes without any sort of warning that he might not be ready for them ("check out the abandoned mine, eh?").

I never got terribly far in it as a kid, but this didn't stop me from doggedly trying, trying, trying, getting these weird itches to make another fresh start and this time—! When I think about why I kept going back to it, despite having access to plenty of other games that did make some sort of sense and that could be successfully tackled, the first thing I think of is the music (composed, as it turns out, by Yuzo Koshiro). The theme that plays in town, specifically: there is not a week, I think, that's gone by since 1989 (or thereabouts) that I haven't gotten that piece of music—as performed by the trusty old PC speakers, no less—stuck in my head for at least an hour and sometimes more. The second is the sheer mystery of it: no one I knew had even heard of the game, and not even my mother knew whose disc it was. It was like having in my hands something that I had every reason to believe should and did not exist.

Chain of events: I got my fiancee Fishing Resort for the Wii for her birthday, and was so impressed by it that (a) I bought a copy for my brother for his birthday and (b) I decided to look into XSEED Games, the folks that localized and published it, because I so admired the idea that any company would roll the dice on such a (relatively) peculiar and decidedly niche title: they turned out to be a scrappy, passionate little company who've brought some really neat stuff to North American gamers... not least of which being the PSP port of Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished, which is the version I, at long last, powered through in a couple of days' worth of intense and enjoyable play.

[prepareforelf]

Another likely reason I ended up with a serious Thing for 80s Hair: Diamondback, who was a relatively major character when I started reading Captain America on a regular basis back in 1988. That long-side/buzzed-side thing is still absolutely the best.

[prepareforelf]

In fifth grade, we were assigned to write an essay (or something) about a day in our lives as an adult; the idea, I guess, was to get us thinking about what being an adult would actually be like, what we might want to do with our lives, and so on. My obsession with Marvel comics, and Captain America in particular, was at this point in full flaming bloom, so of course I wrote in this essay that, as an adult, I would (naturally!) write and draw the Captain America comic.

My mom always read the first drafts of my writing assignments (she probably polished them more than she or I remember and/or are willing to admit), and she asked me why I wouldn't create my own character in his own comic book and write and draw that, instead. I don't remember this well enough to access my frame of mind—what I do remember, and what does remain accessible to me, is surprising enough—but I am pretty sure that I didn't have the heart or the courage to tell her that no, I didn't want to "create my own character": I wanted to write and draw Captain America, specifically. He was my favorite and he was important.

But I went ahead and dutifully changed every reference to "Captain America" in my essay to "Red Falcon", a name which (a) I swiped from the instruction manual for the Contra NES game and then (b) managed to convince myself I'd made up out of thin air. For a while after that, whenever my mom would catch me drawing, she'd ask me whatever happened to Red Falcon and why I wasn't drawing Red Falcon.

The irony is that, despite the extent of my affection for and obsession with Captain America, I had no idea at the time that he had a partner named the Falcon who wore a primarily red costume, a partner so integral to Cap's story that his comic was actually called Captain America and the Falcon for quite some time. I just hadn't read enough: I read his comics as they came out, whatever back issues I could beg/borrow, and filled in the blanks with supplements to the Marvel Super Heroes role-playing game. Even when I was pretending to be original, I couldn't help but be derivative.

I never did understand how or why the folks that localized Contra ended up changing the antagonist's original name, "Emperor Demon Gyaba", to "Red Falcon". Red he is, but resemble a falcon in the slightest he does not.

[prepareforelf]

In addition to being a Cub/Boy Scout, I was also an Indian Guide as a wee li'l sprout. I've since learned that "Indian Guides", the program, has been renamed "Y-Guides", for reasons that I hope would be obvious; however, it looks like the practice of taking "Indian names" is still around. I don't want to come off sounding like I'm somehow against the Guides program—the bonding experiences I had with my dad as a Guide are a highlight of a somewhat troubled childhood—or the practice of taking on a cool-sounding new name, which every kid (and pretty much every adult: take a look at any internet forum/message board/etc) knows is completely awesome.

No, I only bring this up because, for some reason, I remembered that my own "Indian name"—now, bear in mind that this was chosen by a six-year-old boy for himself—was "Lightning Eagle", and my very next thought upon remembering this was "oh no, I bet the Google image search for 'lightning eagle' is just the worst", and please see the image above for confirmation of that hunch.

Having grown up in a household that would probably happily have referred to itself as "jingoistic" if only it hadn't been aware of the negative connotations of that word, I'm not terribly surprised that this sort of imagery had been percolating in my bone marrow before I was even able to flatter myself with the idea that I was capable of thinking critically. My dad ordered, from one of his many weird, paramilitary-styled catalogs, one of those old POW/MIA bracelets and wore it non-stop for a while; I remember thinking it was weird to see my dad wearing what my young brain categorized as "jewelry", which was, of course, for me at the time an explicitly feminine-coded category. We bought into—literally and figuratively—the churned-up POW/MIA right-wing marketing hoax as whole-heartedly as anyone did or could have.

I was, of course, as likely to have spelled my newly-adopted name "LIGHTENING EAGLE" as anything else, so there's that. And "Wee Li'l Sprout" would actually make an excellent nom du forêt for a scrawny, scrappy kid that didn't go around thinking he had some sort of tough-guy image to maintain.

[prepareforelf]

Our Boy Scout troop had its meetings on the basketball court of the local Baptist church. My family belonged to this church, and had ever since I was too young to wonder why a church needed a basketball court, so I didn't really think twice about it; if I did think about it, I probably thought it was just a neat, fun thing for a church to have. Why not have a place to play?

One evening in 1989—I know it was 1989 because What If? #7 ("What If Wolverine Was an Agent of SHIELD?") was published that year and I remember devouring it in a single sitting on the sidelines of that basketball court—one of the other scouts told us about this music video he'd seen, and it was the most god-damned bizarre-sounding thing I'd ever heard of, so much so that I thought he must have been making it up.

To fully appreciate this, I think, you need to know a bit about the kid telling the story. He was a huge kid—tall and stocky, but not in a soft way—with a deep voice for his age and a demeanor that I can only call "accidentally laconic": his deadpan, perpetually unimpressed (I think the highest praise I ever heard him give anything was "...not bad") delivery was absolutely not an affectation. So to hear him adopt a falsetto and sing-speak these weird lyrics was hilariously incongruous.

Hey DAD-dy, DAD-dy. When ya gonna make a million dollars? When ya gonna buy me a big fluffy pink Cadillac?

He also described this video as he chirp-chanted the lyrics; there was, apparently, a part of the video in which the aforementioned pink Cadillac "blew up like a balloon". I didn't believe him—if he'd mentioned that the video was partially animated, I would have, I think—but that image never did quite get out of my head. And of course for months afterwards, I would nag him to "do Hey Daddy" whenever I saw him.

I don't know why I remembered this yesterday—it's a memory that comes up maybe once or twice a year and it always makes me smile—but it finally did at the same time I was in front of a computer, and so I realized I could finally get to the bottom of this, and so here we are. He didn't get the lyrics right (it's "oh Daddy" and not "hey Daddy", and his "fluffy pink Cadillac" line is actually "that fat Cadillac", but given the accompanying imagery, and the fact that he probably only saw the video once, I can understand how he misremembered) but by god, he wasn't making the inflating Cadillac up at all. I've just seen the video for the first time and I still sort of don't believe it exists.

[prepareforelf]

I didn't realize that had a crush on Razor from Maniac Mansion until I was old enough to be embarrassed enough to keep it to myself, and I didn't see the "bulletin board" poster that was packed into the original releases of Maniac Mansion, from which this picture is taken, until I was old enough to realize that being embarrassed by childhood thoughts and ideas is for chumps. The full poster is pretty neat and the whole thing is reproduced and annotated here.

I hadn't seen it until a couple of days ago because it wasn't included in the LucasArts Classic Adventures five-pack published in 1993, which is how I finally got my hands on Maniac Mansion for the first time. I'd been obsessed with it for years before that, though. When I was a "tween", my mother would use the mall as a babysitter: she'd drop me off there, usually with some money for the arcade, and pick me up at a designated point hours later. There's only so much a lonely ten-year-old can do at the mall, especially once the quarters have run out, so I'd usually go to Babbage's to obsessively read and re-read computer game boxes, and Maniac Mansion was one of them. There were also a pair of TVs at the front of the store that played short videorecordings of recent computer games being played and, you guessed it, Maniac Mansion showed up there, too. At that point in my life, my exposure to adventure games was limited to text adventures and Sierra On-Line's questionable if compelling output, so the SCUMM interface exploded in my brain like a dazzling alien artifact.

I knew nothing about this game except that I had to play it. In much the same way, I knew nothing about the opposite sex, but I knew I loved to look at Razor. I don't know, to this day, if that character design reinforced an aesthetic that was already planted in me, or if it itself did the planting, but hot damn, either way.

[prepareforelf]

I know the lonely, pitiful piece of pineapple on what's being sold as a "Hawaiian Style" pizza is the main attraction at least as far as The Consumerist was concerned, but for me, it's the words LIMITED EDITION, in what we are clearly meant to perceive as solid gold, there on the box. I love to speculate about the thought process behind selling any non-collectible—especially a perishable consumable like frozen pizza—as a LIMITED EDITION. It's as though someone at Pinnacle Foods Group, LLC is absolutely convinced that there is a deep-pocketed segment of the single-serving frozen pizza purchasing bloc that is buying these things and then gingerly placing them into an elaborately constructed and absurdly expensive freezer/vault apparatus, anticipating the day that a similarly enthusiastic visitor can be coaxed into their sub-zero pizzatorium for a walk through the days of frozen pizza brands and varieties gone by:

This here's one of my favorites—ah ha ha ha, yes, I see you remember this little fella, got a bit of bad press back in twenty-twelve over some poorly distributed toppings. One of Celeste's Limited Editions, and even harder to find because this was released after Pinnacle constricted the brand and took Celeste strictly regional. Take a good look, though—there's something about a brand as aggressively Italian as Celeste being directly juxtaposed with that festive "Hawaiian" font and that little hibiscus flower... frozen pizzas were just so much more daring back then, but I don't need to tell you that.

[prepareforelf]

Frank Oz building the wire track along which the little red ball rolled in the 1970 Sesame Street segment "Number Three Ball Film". I hadn't seen these behind-the-scenes photos of the track's assembly before, but I've loved "Number Three Ball Film" for as long as I can remember, and it is especially gratifying on a vicariously tactile level to see just how big it actually was. I wonder whatever happened to it: it was such a beautiful object!

[prepareforelf]

So, you know—of course you do—the "Pure Evil" episode of NewsRadio in which Lisa stays up all night teaching herself to bake so that she can make this gigantic spread of cakes and profiteroles and petit-fours and etc.

Today, for some reason, I want to eat all the baked goods. I think I would honestly accept the opportunity to find out how many pounds of cake I could eat before I passed out.

(I say "for some reason" like I don't know exactly why: most immediately, I read a quote about one of Jane Austen's breakfasts—"[she] sat before a spread consisting of plum cake, pound cake, hot rolls, cold rolls, bread and butter, chocolate, coffee, and tea"—and it's sort of driving me crazy; more generally, I have been on a low/no-carb diet for a couple of months now and the whole concept of gorging on baked goods, especially as a breakfast, sets my soul to the sort of self-consciously futile slavering the likes of which I haven't experienced since mid-puberty.)