A game of Dungeons & Dragons will be.. cojnured up in the apartment later this afternoon. I will not be part of it (not a dork / afraid I'll like it too much), but I do plan on watching some. I hope to see Phil talk in the voice of his character.
I used to watch the guys that worked for my dad play D&D on their lunch breaks. This would worry my mom, when I spent too much time around them. She thought they were devil-worshipping. I told her they weren't, because they threatened to cast spells on me if I said they were.
One time one of the guys rolled a die and informed me that he had just cast a spell on me. He said I would find out what it was later that night. But I rubber-and-glued it back at him. But then he rolled the die again and was able to capture the spell in the trophy he was building.
Shit, I all of a sudden really want that trophy. I wonder who got it? It probably went to the Farm Show. Biggest Goat 1989. He's gotta be dead by now.
Looking back, I would have cast a spell on me too. You're trying to find a way out of the dungeon you're in before it's time to get back to work, and your boss's annoying ass kid keeps butting in and offering his meddlesome opinions...
When those guys quit working for my dad was when I started going to the baseball card shop and annoyed the guys who hung out there. Half my childhood was spent hanging around Main St., annoying people. I was totally that little kid character who's in all those old movies, chomping his gum and reading whatever lines the director tells him to read real loud like. The one you cringe at, the one Jimmy Stewart clearly doesn't want to be working with, the one you'd cast spells on, if you could.
I did run into that past version of me once. At a YMCA outside Finneytown, OH. Some friends and I were there doing belly-smackers off the diving board and me at, like, 9 years old showed up and just started following me around. Shadowing me, I guess. I would turn, he would turn. I would run and slide and almost fall. He would run and slide and fall (heh heh). Like one of the Marx Bros.' mirror gags. He looked exactly like I did! I wanted to drown the little punk. But by the end of it, I had accepted the surreality of the situation, got used to it even, and when it came time to leave, I offered me at 9 a high five. And he of course could not have returned it any harder. It echoed twice.
I considered lending him some advice from the future—running track isn't worth it, three years of art school is plenty, you'll have the most fun with the witty ones—but whatever. It's cliché to say, but he kind of deserves to suffer.
Tom February 3, 2007 2:49pm
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