It’s a funny thing. I used to think that I was good at killing threads. It sure seemed like it, at least to me. I wasn’t sure whether it was just that I wasn’t interesting, I had bad breath, the cool kids didn’t like me… whatever the cause, it seemed that I had a good chance of either being totally ignored or the fascinating thread which I’d just stumbled into would die a quick and ignomious death. After a while it didn’t seem as common, although I do still seem to cause the demise of more than a few GQ threads. I chock that up to having posted such a gloriously complete answer that no one could even concieve of a way to respond. Of course that’s it. Where was I? Oh, yes, so now it’s a lot less common occurence. I’m not sure why. Perhaps since I’ve been around long enough to know and be known by quite a few posters. So in the past week or so I noticed this thread. Yet I never clicked on it fearing that the curse might be revived. Day and night, whenver logged on the thread would be there, firmly ensconced in MPSIMS, growing larger and larger. But this must be a simple little thing. Why is it there taunting me so? Is it a sort of a game? Is this where the cool kids are playing whilst they’re busy ignoring my GQ about the best way of avoiding ameobic dysentery and killing the tiny entomeoba hystilitica that cause it? Ha, they would do that. Why hasn’t anyone sent me an email or PM wondering why I’m not here? Has my halitosis returned? Or maybe I’d missed something. I have been terribly busy lately. Lots of travel, work’s really heated up, orders due in the email Diplomacy (Aberration Variant) that we’ve been playing, kids are just about finished school, wash needs done, I’m way behind in paying the bills and don’t even ask me about my income taxes. Lordy, how the time flies. It’s kind of funny how time seems to contract as you get older. Did you ever notice that when you were a kid, waiting for Christmas or the end of school, that time seemed to just stand still. In fact it was even like that on those sultry Georgia summer days I spent as a boy. Of course that was way before video games, cable TV, mobile phones, etc. We spend much of the summer days watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island, Hazel, Bewitched, the Brady Bunch, the Monkees, Father Knows Best, the Andy Griffith Show and Leave it to Beaver. Half of those were in black and white, and sometimes you’d see a color episode one day and a black and white episode the next. Or vice versa. Of course we only had one TV, with 3 regular channels plus one or two UHF channels and maybe PBS, although I don’t really recall PBS. I was too old by the time ZOOM and Sesame Street came around, although sometimes we’d watch that wiht my little brother and sister and sort of tease them and make cruel remarks about Big Bird or Snuffelufegus. We were also too old to enjoy Big Wheels when they came out, which was a bit of a bummer since all the little kids had a blast, driving them down to the end of the cul-de-sac at break neck speeds before putting them into a power slide. See, we didn’t spend all of our time watching TV. We would just watch it during the heat of the day, eating our Cap’n Crunch cereal in our pajamas at 9:30, sometimes eating two or three bowls so that the cereal would shred the roof of your mouth and the milk would be sickly sweet by the end. Then we’d watch cartoons or reruns all day, but about 3-4 pm those would run out. Heck, it didn’t matter since whenever our dad would get home (on the days when he did come home) he’d chase us out while he watched the news and drank a beer or maybe had a “highball”. Then we’d go out and gather with the other kids in the neighborhood and find something to do. This usually involved sitting around on the curb for a while, asking each other what you wanted to do. Eventually enough enthusiasm would build for some basketball, kickball, street hockey, bike riding, tag, football, baseball, tree climbing, creek exploring, little brother/sister torturing, or maybe just an old fashioned game of tag, freeze tag, kick the can, capture the flag, or some other game. If you were lucky one of the kids would have a cool model or some such back at his house and you’d all run over there, maybe 5-10 of us, sneaking in the side door with a quick “It’s just me and the guys, Mom” shouted over to whoever’s mother’s house we were at. She was usually either fixing dinner (most dinner’s didn’t smell to good to me back then; I was finicky eater) or watching some afternoon show like Perry Mason that held no interest for us kids. Maybe even a soap opera although we ignored those so steadfastly that it was if they didn’t even exist. Although we did watch Dark Shadows occasionally, and I guess that was a soap opera in the end, although it had vampires and Barnabas Collins, which was cool. Now sometimes we’d go about the new homes that were being built in our neighborhood and forage around the construction sites for anything that was useful. By useful I mean anything that could be played with, sold or destroyed for fun. This was in the days of returnable soda pop bottles, and if you could find the ones that weren’t covered with cement at the construction sites you could return them up to the Safeway or Giant food store. You’d get five cents for a 16 ounce bottle or three cents for a 12 ounce or six and a half ounce bottle. That was as close as we got to recycling back then, and it was lucrative, too. Sometimes we’d group together and maybe get enough bottles for 2-3 dollars worth of refunds. It was a real bonanza. Now this was in the days of penny candies and nickel Big Buddy gum. For a dime you could get a whole candy bar. For maybe fifteen cents (it could have been a quarter, I’m a bit fuzzy on this) you could get some Wacky Packages or other stickers with some nasty gum and a bunch of stickers that would annoy your mom. We’d put them on the outside of our clothbound notebook binders, so all of the other kids could see how cool we were. I was in the 8th grade at the time and where I went to school it was eighth grade through seniors. We were called subfreshmen, or “subbies”, and of course all of the bigger kids would pick on us when we were at school. Unless some of the older classes decided that you were “cool”, then they’d mostly protect you. I’m not sure exactly what would cause you be cool. At that school most of the kids were either jocks or freaks, but this was also Georgia, so the freaks were probably not as freaky as some of the other parts of the country and the jocks were kind of freaky, since it was 1975 or so. Yeah, I lived That 70s Show, what of it. And the times weren’t exactly like TV, although I’ve not really ever watched that show, so I can’t say that for 100% certainty. But we did dress in sort of flare legged pants, although bell bottoms were a bit passe by then. And we wore jeans to school almost every day, if not every day. Maybe cordoroys would be okay, although I was always self concious about the swish-swish-swish that I’d make if I wore them. I could never tell if everyone else could hear that or it was just me. Now I’m pretty sure that we were wearing earth shoes back then, or maybe Pro Keds, with the thick suede design. And I’m almost positive we wore “silk shirts” that weren’t really silk at all, but a sort of synthetic silk like material. You could wear t-shirts to school, as long as there wasn’t anything more offensive than “Keep On Trucking” on the back. More likely it would be the name of some band, although at that age I was still just about to go to my first concert. I mean, how could you go to a concert and keep up your “cool” image if your mom or dad had to take you. As if that was going to happen anyway. So mostly we went to school, studied, and goofed off. I never hung much with the kids who smoked, so I was probably more of a jock. We didn’t have a name like “geeks” back then, or at least I never heard it, or that’s more likely the group I would have been in. There was a group of us who always had the same classes together, the “smart kids” so to speak, although I doubt that this was strictly true. I always imagined that we were the cool kids, although I did have a friend named Gary who was teaching himself to read and write Elvish. We’d both read the Hobbit and LotR several times, and would discuss various plot points between classes or in notes during classes. One thing we had going for us was that most of the cutest girls (yes, we use cute back then) were in the smart kid classes. I remember having a crush on Fiona Gould. There was a rumor that her mom was a witch, although I have no recollection of how that rumor got started, and I remember thinking that if she was a witch then witches must be pretty darn hot. Many of my friends were eighth grade cheerleaders, and back then that was still cool. And the cute girls that weren’t cheerleaders were usually on something called drill team, whose purpose was never fully clear to me. The cute girls who weren’t in either would eventually gravitate over to the freaks, and often got reputations as sluts, not that this helped us hormone laden thirteen year olds at all, since you had to be a freak (I wasn’t) and at least 15-16 to make out with any of the sluts. I hoped that someone was having sex, although no one I knew was having any. Back then there was no concept of AIDS or Herpes, and my knowledge of VD was pretty much based on whatever I could get out of my friends whose parents were a little more liberal with that sort of information. Most of what I knew about sex came from that or my dad’s Playboy collection. He even had some Penthouses after a while, although we were deathly afraid to get caught looking at them. Then a friend of mine (who later became a freak) showed me a dirty book he had. It was called “Switchhitters” and was sort of like a paperback but with some very graphic pictures in the center. There were two girls and two guys in the book, and the story was about their exploits. I won’t get into too much detail (this is MPSIMS, isn’t it?) but I learned a bit more than I wanted to learn from reading that one. This friend, Donald, came from a “broken home”, which meant he only lived with his Mom. I never met or even saw his father, but I hung around Donald since he was a veritable font of secret information. He had a younger brother about my brother’s age, and they both seemed to get in trouble a lot with their mom, who was one of the very few divorced people that I knew. She also worked, which was pretty unusual for back then, at least among families that I knew. Most of the other guys’ moms were also at home all day, cleaning the house and/or cooking. I don’t really recall any woman on TV that really had a job or career either, although what the TV father’s did in their careers was mostly a bit of a mystery as well. Some father’s like Mr. Cleaver (Ward if you were June) just seemed to go to a non-descript office somewhere. I don’t have any recollection of what he did, although I do remember that he worked with Lumpy Rutherford’s father and they both wore white shirts and ties with their suits. Lumpy’s dad would later play the schlep I forget his character’s name on the Dick Van Dyke show. I think his job was the assistant to Allan Brady. Dick Van Dyke’s job was to work with Buddy and Sally to write jokes for a late night comedy show, so I guess if you had a voice like gravel and a sarcastic wit there was some hope for future employment if you were a girl. Or there was Hazel, who was the housekeeper for Mr. B, another man who wore a suit and disappeared every morning while hijinks ensued. Sometimes Hazel would be mad at Mr. B and then she’d find a way to get her point across. And of course there was Alice on the Brady Bunch. No one I knew was a housekeeper or had a housekeeper. So these seemed to be more like made for television jobs. And then there was Barbara Gordon, who was secretly Batgirl, so another career possibility was to help Batman and Robin fight evil villains. Ginger on Gilligan’s Island had work as a movie star before she’d been stranded, although she was concerned that she was losing all the plum roles while she was away. Now of course most of our teachers were women, so that was something that young girls could aspire to, or perhaps librarian. But at that age I wasn’t thinking about a future career, and I don’t know if any of the girls I went to school with were concerned about one, either. We were more about talking about who like who, who was “going with” someone, who was going to the football game Friday night, etc. Sometimes I’d walk home from the bus with a girl named Gail. She was widely considered the prettiest girl in my eighth grade class, but she was dating some guy who had a Camaro, so she was also generally considered to be out of our league. I sometimes wonder whatever happened to her. She was very nice to me and we’d talk about things that were important to us on the way home from the busstop. Sometimes she wouldn’t even go inside, we’d just sit or stand outside her house and talk for a half hour or so. I’d joke with her about going skinny dipping in the pond down the street from our houses some night, and she’d tease me that maybe she would. I might have even pursued it but I was the smart kid with glasses not the cool older guy with perfect hair and a bitchin’ Camaro, so I didn’t hold out much hope of that ever happening. Maybe a little extra self confidence would have seen me through, but I’ll never know. I don’t often think about this kind of stuff, but sometimes, maybe if I’m passing through Atlanta, I’ll think about it and wonder whatever became of Gail, or Donald, or Gary or Fiona, or Mrs. Brown, my eighth grade English teacher. Or Ms. Jones, my eighth grade algebra teacher. There was a kid named Kevin in my Algebra class. We all had a crush on Ms. Jones (she was a tall blond woman with large, full breasts and a bra that did not hide the fullness of her nature), but Kevin had it the worst. One day Kevin, who was a bit short, jumped up on his desk and sang a song he’d just invented, “I love you Ms. Jones, you sure have nice bones…” with which she swiftly leapt up and escorted Kevin to the Principal’s office. Funny, but I have little recollection of the principal of that school. I can just about picture him, think with dark, greasy hair combed tightly across the top of his head, with dark horn-rimmed glasses and a prominent nose. I seem to recall him wearing a sports coat with a tie and maybe the coat was maroon, or at least on friday’s. Our colors were maroon and silver (or gray, I’m not sure). The school mascot was Titans, we were the Towers Titans. I have no earthly idea who or what are school was named for. And I don’t really have much of an idea of what this thread is about.
