nerdology.org

I just realized that today, April 12th, is the birthday of one of my former best buddies. He’ll be turning eighteen. I’m not entirely sure why he started despising Gus Gus and myself, but he did anyway, and I say more power to him.

I remember many good times with that old buddy. Our friendship first began way back when I was four, I think it was. Perhaps I was five. The first memory I have is of us taking leftover pie crust out in the back yard to Pluto (my dog at the time– a golden retriever). The fence on the west side was still made out of that old chain-link with rickety gray slats of rotting wood.

Many adventures were had in that back yard of mine. It was quite a large back yard for a child back in the day. I remember pretending the cable television box wired on the fence in the back west corner was an airplane throttle. I think he and I disrupted many a lazy American’s television broadcast with our adventures in the sky. I also remember playing backyard baseball with all of the nieghborhood boys– that was a pretty big to-do, and Josh, my elder brother’s friend, even got cut while climbing over the fence. What more could you want?

Some of our greatest adventures back there were spent on the trampoline. We first began with petty little games such as “Dead Man, Dead Man,” “Crack the Egg,” and my personal favorite, “Bounce One Another as High as You Can.” You might compare these with many of today’s first-person-shooter or racing games: fun in a pinch, but never a source of truly lasting entertainment. After a while, we developed a unique trampoline game that was more of a very, very, very long story. These are in direct relation to RPG games; I believe Zelda and the Playstation Final Fantasy games were one of our chiefest inspirations (I never played the Playstation versions of FF– only the original Nintendo and Super Nintendo classics– but my friend’s brother owned and played the newer PS episodes quite a bit). We called this game “War of the Worlds.” We generally found ourselves fighting the powers of darkness with our magic or our ridiculously huge swords, beating back made-up nemeses and foreboding encroaching powers throughout this world, the next, the Golden Land, the Dark World, and I believe various planets, incorporating not only ourselves but many made-up and previously trademarked characters ranging from Link to Indiana Jones to even many of our stuffed animals boosted to life-size intimidation via imagination. This game must have gone on for at least four to five years. We also had various other imaginary games we’d play almost every day during off-track times and over the summer, most important of which were the continual saga of the lives of our stuffed animals and the episodes that arrived with each new Lego creation (mine were generally castles, additions to the castles, and other edifices while his I believe were generally space ships, flying machines, and other more fantastic mechanical marvels).

One last game of ours was to spy on the girl across the street. I’d often dress in my army jacket that I bought from the DI and use my semi-functional laser pointer as we skirted around the property, trying to be inconspicuous. When she’d walk home from school, we’d pretend to use machine guns or grenades to complete the assassination.

I remember when he and I got into the realm of computing. We both got pretty excited when I figured out that I could get a free website with Freewebs.com. It took me months to get up the nerve to actually register, though, as my mama never had a liking for technology whether it was run on video games or personal computers, and I feared her wrath (I would go on to host a dozen or two websites through middle school, most of them Proboards, some of them mildly successful, all of them dying off). We had been into computers for years, mostly because of gaming, since we first used my dad’s Macintosh Plus. When I got my own computer in sixth grade (a Windows 95 lappy: Pentium 1 @ 133MHz, 16 MB RAM, 1.33 GB hard drive, and a dead battery), our nerdiness shot off. He eventually got a hold of one of his brother’s old desktops (a Windows 98 machine designed for 95), and we would often converge in his room and “code HTML.” I even remember “baking my first batch of cookies” and attempting to build a password-protected, hard-to-hack page. I got the text and password boxes to work, but I never did finish figuring out how to actually make it work. We thought we were hot stuff, “coding” HTML. We still were obsessed with games, of course, and often found time to play Majesty and Worms Armogeddon. I even remember having the bright idea to play a multiplayer game with him over our 56k modems and the phone lines. We connected long enough several times to exchange some messages, but we never got to play against each other. It wouldn’t be until I bought my own wireless router some three years later that I would be able to play network games; too bad he secluded himself from us by that point in time.

By eighth grade, we had begun to drift apart already. He was in band and I in choir. We didn’t have any of the same math, science, English, or gym classes. We still found time to continue our computer and gaming ventures, though. By the summer between eighth and ninth grade, however, Gus Gus and I  stopped hearing from him. We figure that because we spent more time with one another than with him (which was mostly attributed to the fact that he had summer band and was usually gone when we called him up), he felt we were pushing him away. As I said, though, we’re still unsure of the real reason.

Ah. Grand times in my childhood with that buddy. I suppose things are as they should be, though.