Today is my birthday – or possibly tomorrow or yesterday, depending on when this posts. Truthfully, I have a tendency to forget until it’s actually happening. I don’t really get birthdays, and I dislike mine in particular for any number of reasons. But, in the spirit of reminiscence – and rather than pontificate on aging or survivor’s guilt or all the other maudlin crap I’m usually going on about – today I’m going to share some fun stories about my life. Think of it like a photo album for your imagination.
Please note, though, that I’m at the age where my memory is starting to get a little fuzzy, especially when it comes to events more than ten years old, so be aware that some of this stuff might not be entirely accurate.
I was alive during the Jimmy Carter administration.
The first movie I saw in theaters was Return of the Jedi.
The first media I remember owning were records. One was a Mel Blanc album where he did Looney Tunes voices, and the other was, I think, basically an audio adaptation of the animated Transformers movie with Orson Welles.
I used to be the same age as Bart Simpson – I remember the whole Simpsons’ t-shirts in schools dust-up that swept both the nation and my classroom – man, they were so cool – and now I’m older than Homer.
Birthday parties at arcades were very common in my youth, and also a huge deal.
At some point not long after Jurassic Park came out, I played John Williams’ theme on an upright piano on the back of a moving pick-up truck.
I was part of one of the inaugural computer classes at my high school – like, literally the class was just computers, in the most general sense, and was about 80% typing exercises – and my friend and I completed the entire semester’s worth of work in one afternoon and spent the rest of the year playing Doom and teaching ourselves BASIC.
Why, yes, I do remember what a dial-up modem sounds like.
My first car was a 1986 Ford Escort. I once fixed the engine with duct tape.
Later in high school, me and a pair of friends drove to Giants Stadium and bought tickets from a scalper so we could see the drummer from Nirvana’s new band open for the Rolling Stones. The Foo Fighters were … not great. When they played “Monkeywrench” and got to that part where Dave Grohl has to sing/shout in quick succession, he got tongue-tied, forgot the words, and then just kind of Tarzan-yelled instead. I recall the stadium booing, but that might have just been my friend.
I went to three colleges over five years and only ended up with a Bachelor’s in English. I took literally one two-hour class in grad school before dropping out for health reasons.
I’ve never seen Armageddon sober.
I started a Xanga on the advice of a professor who thought I might be good at this newfangled blogging thing he’d been hearing about. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss it, at least a little.
To this day, Blockbuster was my longest-tenured employer. I worked there for five years, eventually making it up to Assistant Store Manager. I was, however, forced to resign in disgrace in the middle of the night after one of my bosses took issue with both my very liberal interpretation of the phrase “at the manger’s discretion” and all the fake accounts I created with names like Seymour Butts.
One time, my dad and I were standing in the driveway talking about something, and then a bunch of lights appeared in the sky, moved around real weird, and disappeared again. We were both – and still are – pretty sure it was a UFO.
My first apartment caught fire at least three different times.
I went to San Francisco with a friend of mine, rented a car, got a parking ticket, believed him when he said he would pay the ticket, and didn’t find out he didn’t until a letter got mailed to me saying the SFPD was preparing to put a warrant out for my arrest.
When I started submitting stories, you still had to mail paper copies. My first rejections were sent back on postcards.
For some reason, me and a couple friends once tried to launch a Pop-Tart out of a toaster like a rocket ship. The endeavor did not work. All we ended up doing was staining my apartment’s ceiling with smoke and ruining a Pop-Tart.
I have, technically, died. Twice.
There you go. All of the fun of going to a party and listening to me ramble, only without any of the drinking or talking or having to be in the same room as other people.
It’s everything I could have asked for.