And then one day I walked into class and was told to empty out my editor’s desk. I had been fired from a job I was doing for free. My journalism professor confessed to me my late-night editing sessions and last-minute article submissions — despite never missing a single deadline — was causing her to have a nervous breakdown. In retrospect, I get it. Here I was, this 20-year-old kid with a mullet and a smirk rolling into class wearing wrinkled Metallica t-shirts, ratty cargo shorts and Converse shoes. If I had been in her shoes I wouldn’t have put me in charge of anything important, either.

So she asked me to remove my things from the editor’s desk and then we could talk about what I would be doing next for the newspaper and the yearbook. I quietly packed the contents of my desk into a box, took it out to my car, and then went home and never went back to that school ever again. Ever. If life were a sitcom, my professor, the new yearbook editor, and all my classmates would still be standing there waitng for me to come back from the parking lot, 32 years later.

If there was anything good that came from this it was that there was no reason for me to keep working at Long John Silver’s to pay for a school I just walked out on. I didn’t call LJS and tell them I was quitting. I just decided I wouldn’t go back there, either.

The only thing in my life I had left was my then girlfriend, Susan. The two of us were living together in a mobile home her mother had purchased. Susan’s grades weren’t much better than mine that semester. We’d had a lot of adventures that semester, few of which involved attending class.

I think everybody has at least one story about a moment where their life changed. I’ve had many, and here’s one. That night I told Susan I was going to flip a coin and if it landed on heads we should do our best to salvage what we could of the semester and then figure out what our next plans would be.

“And what if it’s tails?” she asked.

I didn’t have an answer, but one came to me. “I’ve always wanted to see the Grand Canyon.”

And so, as the story goes, we packed some clothes into the only suitcase either of us owned and the following morning we climbed into her car and began driving west. No cellphones, no GPS, and no laptops; just a Rand Mcnally atlas and my wife’s debit card which was connected to a bank account full of cash to be used in case of an emergency. Somehow we justified it to ourselves that seeing the Grand Canyon was an emergency, and off we went.

There was a lot of money in that bank account. Not only did we go to the Grand Canyon but we also went to Carlsbad Caverns. And Cadillac Ranch. And Meteor Crater. We drove to Area 51 to see if we could get on the base. (A guard in a white truck scared us away.) We stayed at a campground with a Flintstone theme. We visited Tucson, Arizona, because my great aunt who I had only met once lived there.

Having a vacation on someone else’s debit card is a blast. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

It all came to an end just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. After a lovely dinner at Little Anita’s (which is still in business), we discovered the debit card had been turned off. A call from a payphone back to Susan’s mother confirmed the jig was up. Fortunately between the two of us to get one last hotel room before hitting the rode and making the 12-hour drive back home the following day.

That evening, while driving around Albuquerque looking for a cheap hotel, we heard on the radio that Kurt Cobain had died. Details were still rolling in, but it appeared to be true.

It’s easy to forget that in 1994, grunge was essentially three years old. Don’t get me wrong, it had been an explosing three years, but it was in 1991 that we got Nevermind by Nirvana, Ten by Pearl Jam, amd Badmotorfinger by Soundgarden, among others. The biggest selling artists in 1990 were Madonna, the New Kids on the Block, Prince, Sinead O’Connor. and MC Hammer. Intentional or not, grunge was two middle fingers to the music that came before it — one for polished pop music and the other for hair metal. Leather jackets and eye liner (at least for guys) was out; flannel shirts, cargo shorts and combat boots were in.

Of course it was more than that. It wasn’t just anti-fashion; it was anti-corporate. Overnight we learned it was cooler to pay $5 for a pair of shorts from the thrift store than to spend $50 on a pair from the mall.

It took me a long time — years, in fact — to figure out that all of those bands who didn’t care about money were making a lot of money selling that idea to kids.

When we got back from our road trip we packed up and moved back home. I don’t mean we moved out of the mobile home; I mean we literally had a company put wheels back on the mobile home and move it 60 miles back to our hometown. If any of our classmates or coworkers had come looking for us the two weeks we were on our road trip, they would have found a dark, empty trailer. If they had come back after that, they would have found d ark, empty lot where our trailer had been.

In fact, I didn’t talk to any of my old classmates for nearly 20 years. One of them tracked me down on Facebook. I guess someone from my old journalism had stared a rumor that we had died and they all believed it, which doesn’t say much for their journalism skills.

While half the people I knew went back to school that fall and the other half kept selling fish and hushpuppies, my life went on. Susan and I got real jobs. The following year, we got married. Our son was borning in 2001; our daughter, 2005.

In 2025, Susan and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary on a trip not unlike that first one we took together back in 1994. Well, it was a little different. We have our own debit cards now, so instead of the Grand Canyon, Carlsbad Caverns, and Meteor Crator we spent two weeks visiting London, Paris, Barcelona, Malaga, Cadiz, the Azores Islands, and Bermuda.

While I wasn’t alive then, most people point to the Manson murders as the end of the hippy movement and the Summer of Love. For me, grunge ended when Cobain died.

The irony within is that this year — the 32nd anniversary of Cobain’s death — fell on Easter. I’m not super religious but I understand the story and associate the holiday with rebirths and restarts. On Easter weekend back in 1994, my life started over in the best way imaginable.

PS: I published my first book in 2006 and earned a Master of Professional Writing degree in 2018. It sure beat a life of frying fish.

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Now like I said I was not a huge fan of Michael Jackson’s in 2009, but in the 1980s, like every single Gen-Xer, I was a fan. My sister and I both owned Thriller on vinyl. And later, cassette. I practiced moonwalking until I wore tracks in our carpet. There were kids in my school — we’re talking rural Oklahoma here — who owned red leather “Michael Jackson” jackets and came to school wearing one glove. I recorded MTV’s special showing of “The Making of Thriller” on VHS and watched it a hundred thousand times.

So I was bummed when I heard Michael Jackson had died, which was not the reaction my kids had. I believe my daughter said, “good.” One of the earliest news stories involving Jackson in their lifetime was of him dangling his child over a balcony. In their lifetime, my kids only knew Michael Jackson from his torrid court testimony and the fact that his nose appeared to be falling off. We raised our kids on 80s and 90s music and they listened to Michael Jackson songs all the time, but their relationship with the performer and the art was very different than our generation’s.

Don’t even ask about the time I tried showing my daughter a Bill Cosby comedy special.

My wife and I recently watched the documentary I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not (2025). The documentary pulls no punches regarding Chase’s legendary rude behavior; the hurtful insults and his obnoxious pompousness that has colored his entire career. Save for Goldie Hawn, the producers seemed to have a relatively difficult time finding anyone who wasn’t related to him to say something nice about him. From his costars on Community to former SNL performers, Chase seems to have made a point of leaving collateral damage on every set he’s been on.

For what it’s worth, Chase’s family does their darndest to humanize the actor. His wife says he suffered from anxiety attacks and his kids share how terrible it was to walk into rooms and have people boo him while they were at his side. The filmmakers do their best to make you feel sympathy for a guy who attended Saturday Night Live’s 50th Anniversary and wasn’t asked to participate while actors like Bill Murry were; then again, Bill Murry (who’s no angel himself) didn’t go back to the show and make AIDS-related jokes to a gay cast member and Chevy Chase did, so there’s that.

One of my guilty pleasures is 1992’s Memoirs of an Invisible Man, a film that Chevy Chase describes as “one of four movies I did in the 80s to support my coke habit” and which his wife says “he shouldn’t have done.” Of all the super powers to have, like flying and X-Ray vision and the like, I’ve always thought the ability to turn invisible would be the greatest. If you’re planning on committing even petty crimes with your superpower, it wouldn’t be hard to identify “that guy who flew away.” Being invisible though, man — the possibilities are endless — from pilfering food from buffets to swapping people’s caffeinated coffee with decaf. It seems like I could cone up with better things to do if I were invisible but you get the idea. In the film, Chase gets caught not once but twice by going to the only places where people are looking for him, but it’s still a fun movie and an invisible Chase ends up with Darryl Hannah so being invisible can’t be all bad.

But then there’s all the classics like Foul Play and Caddyshack and The Three Amigos and Fletch and all the Vacation films and there’s not a single moment where Chase doesn’t come off as being charming and likeable in front of the camera which is ironic as apparently when the cameras turn off, so does his manners.

There’s a part of me that wishes I hadn’t watched the documentary beacause so many of those movies tie into my childhood. Who hasn’t joked about visiting Wallyworld? Who didn’t love Paul Simon’s music video for “Call Me Al” in which Chase, inexplicably, lip syncs Simon’s vocals as the performer sits nearby playing the guitar? A few years ago while on a cruise in Mexico we discovered a Three Amigos-themed restaurant. I wore a (no doubt unlicensed) Three Amigos baseball cap for the remainder of our vacation.

My kids grew up on Community. They know why Chevy Chase got written off the show. They know about the voice mails and drama and all of it. And I hate it because they will never see Chevy Chase the way I see him.

Or at least the way I used to see him.

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Here’s a funny thought — we now have two very specific bookends for possible “solve times” when it comes to a Rubik’s Cube. On one end, we have the new world record — and I promise you, we’ll be talking about that shortly — and the other bookmark is set at “never.” Like many Gen-Xers, I got my first Rubik’s Cube back in 1982 and excluding sticker-swapping or disassembling the thing, I have never solved one. If someone started a stopwatch the day I received my cube, it currently reads “44 years and counting…”

Have you heard of “cubing” before? Did you know there are cubing tournaments that follow guidelines established by the World Cube Association (WCA)? If you think I’m kidding, I’m not. Cubing is serious business.

So when they said that the world record was broken during a “competitive setting,” here is what that means. At officially sanctioned WCA events, mixing sequences are randomly generated and applied to Rubik’s Cubes away from competitors. These 25-movie sequences are applied twice to ensure the cubes are good and scrambled. Then they are covered so no one can see them and delivered to a competitor. The cover is lifted and the contestant has 15 seconds to look at (but not touch) the cube and plan their attack. Once the cube is picked up a timer starts and when the cube is slammed down on the same mat, the timer stops.

The new world record is 2.78 seconds.

Also, it was set by a nine-year-old kid from Poland.

Before you watch that video, I’d like you to watch this one. This is my son, Mason, at an official WCA competition. He was able to solve a cube in 28 seconds.

For a while my son was into Nerf guns and then one day he wasn’t and was into “cubing” instead. Slowly the Nerf guns disappeared and were replaced with all kinds of cubes. First there were normal ones, and then there were “speed cubes” — special cubes made to spin more quickly. He had cubes of different sizes and different brands and believe me, there wasn’t a single trip in the car where we didn’t hear “clicky-clackity” from the rear seat for about a year. He taught himself how to solve Rubik’s Cubes by watching tutorials on YouTube. The first time took a long time and then he got faster, and faster.

Our interests crossed when he asked me to register a domain for him and set up a WordPress site, where he posted YouTube videos of himself solving different cubes. He designed his own logo and had it printed on a couple of shirts.

All of it kind culminated in that video. Before long something else caught his attention and that was that. The cubes went into a box and the domain expired.

Anyway I wanted you to watch that video because, in theory, this nine-year-old could solve 10 cubes in the amount of time it took my son to solve one in 28 seconds.

Here’s the video. Don’t blink.

This video has a much clearer version of the clip within the first 10 seconds.

This story blew up for a bunch of reasons, one of which is because Teodor Zajderbreak is not Chinese. I guess all the fastest cubers in the world right now are Chinese, but none of them have been able to break the three-second barrier. So the fact that a nine-year-old kid from Poland was the first one to do it is pretty remarkable.

There’s also a lot of talk about the scramble, all of which I’ve read so you don’t have to. The gist of it all is that the kid used an ingenious move to circumvent something or other that added half a second to everyone else’s time. The result is what you saw above.

Enough about that. Let’s talk about the 1982 World’s Fair.

When I was eight-years-old my family drove from OKlahoma to Knoxville, Tennessee to attend the World’s Fair. I don’t think I understood what a big deal a World’s Fair was. I was way more excited that, on our way to the fair, we stayed in Pigeon Forge and I got to go to Magic World, a super weird theme part where we rode rides, saw a magician perform, and I got my picture taken with Jaws.

We attended the fair several days in a row and I barely remember any of it. Like, I remember we went to the German pavilion and who the hell cares about that when you’re eight? All I remember was that my feet hurt from walking so much. And then eventually we ended up in the Hungary exhibit. And guess who was from Hungary?

Yeah. Erno Rubik.

And it was there I got to see the world’s largest Rubik’s Cube.

While I couldn’t tell you much about the fair, I sure as hell remember this thing. Not only was the entire cube spinning around in a circle but the two sides were rotating too. It was an honest to goodness working Rubik’s Cube!

As a friendly gesture, Hungary donated the Rubik’s Cube to Knoxville, which was probably less about making friends with Tennessee and more about not having to ship a 10’ tall, 1,200lb cube back to Hungary. I’ve heard different versions of the story but apparently for many years the cube was put into storage and fell into disarray.

For what it’s worth, sometimes being a parent is like solving a Rubik’s Cube. Some people nail it in 2.78 seconds, some people never get it, and a lot of people are just swapping stickers and doing our best.

When you’re a kid you don’t always realize that some of the things your parents do or buy or share is because they love ya. My dad was the first person to sit me down in front of a computer, and all my early musical interests were just his musical interests. Looking back I doubt he was all that interested in seeing a 10’ tall Rubik’s Cube, but he knew I would think it was cool and so we went to see it.

Which is why, nearly 35 years later, I took my kid who was into cubing to see it.

When we saw it, the cube was located in the lobby of a Holiday Inn in Knoxville, although I hear it’s since been moved back to the convention center. It no longer spins or moves, but none of that mattered to my kid who loved seeing it.

I’m proud of my son. My dad is proud of me. Somewhere in Poland, some dad is proud of his nine-year-old kid. +

I was a teen in the 1980s when skateboarding experienced a big resurgence. Gone were the old plastic skinny skateboards of the 1970s. Our skateboards were wide with curved tails and radical graphics. I owned a series of hand-me-down and no name skateboards as a kid until, for my fifteenth birthday, I got a real honest-to-goodness professional skateboard. I still remember all the details: it was a Fred Smith III model by Alva, with Tracker trucks and Slimeball wheels.

I gave up skateboarding around the time I graduated high school, which means I hadn’t been on one since approximately 1991. Doing the math, that means it had been more than 25 years since I’d stood on one. That didn’t stop me from buying another one. This time I bought a Steve Caballero model. Caballero was an influential skater from my era (he invented many tricks and some are even named after him). I even had a Caballero poster on my bedroom wall. I was a fan of his long before he was a playable character in Tony Hawk Pro Skater.

Needless to say, I didn’t do much skateboarding as an adult. I’ve had that Caballero board out in my garage for over a decade and if the thing had an odometer, the distance it has rolled could be measured in feet. Two digits, tops.

Not long after I purchased that skateboard I developed back problems. When I was 25, while walking down the side of the interstate after running out of gas I was struck in the back by a passing pickup truck doing 70mph. It was a glancing blow that sent me flying through the air, but after a few hours in the local ER I was sent home with just a few stitches, a bruise the size of a medium pizza, lots of swelling and, apparently, lingering back pain. Yay!

Compounding the issue was a diagnosis a few years ago with spinal stenosis, a fun condition where calcium builds up in the spine and puts pressure on (or constricts) spinal nerves. After a couple of MRIs and a meeting with a b spine specialist, I was given two options: I could take back pills three times a day, or they could perform surgery. The specialist spent the next five minutes describing a procedure in which my chest would be cut open, all my organs would be removed, the calcium deposits would be removed from the front side of my spine, everything would be put back into my chest and I would be stitched up.

I currently take three back pills a day.

For the record, if I hadn’t told you any of this, you would never know. I don’t walk hunched over or complain about anything. My doctor said I should sit when I can and not lift anything heavier than a jug of milk (note: that’s 7lbs; I break that rule daily) and hope the back pills keep working. We all hope the back pills keep working.

So in the middle of all this nonsense, my spine doctor asked me if I’d had any back injuries. I told him I’d been hit by a truck once and he barely raised an eyebrow.

“Anything else?” he asked. For the record, spine surgeons (a) are always in a hurry and (b) have no sense of humor. I’m generalizing; I don’t know if all spine doctors are like that. But I know one is.

“I used to jump off roofs,” I said.

That got his attention.

First of all let me just say that the 80s kicked ass. All that stuff you hear about parents not knowing where their kids were or what they were up to is 100% true. Every summer day I would eat breakfast, get on my bike, come home for lunch — or have lunch at some other kid’s house, as long as I called home — ride my bike some more and go home when my mom turned on the porch light. Today, kids can’t ride anything with wheels without wearing a helmet. I used to mow my backyard when I was 10 without a helmet. Or a shirt. Or shoes.

I don’t know why kids are always jumping off of things. Our local movie theater had a long row of steps leading up to the ticket booth and my friends and I would see who could jump all the way down from the highest step. We were always jumping off of things. One day we figured out that my neighbor’s stockade fence met up with the lowest point of their roof which allowed us to climb up on their roof with very little effort.

Roofs are weird. When you’re a kid, climbing onto a roof for the first time is a world-expanding experience. I remember climbing up on top of my neighbor’s, pulling myself up by placing my palms on gritty shingles and hearing my jeans drag across what felt like sandpaper. Roofs are steeper than they look from the ground. Your ankles and knees are always bent. From a roof, you can see into other people’s yards and look into trees. It was a brand new view of my small world.

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The old expression “what goes up must come down” applies here. Transitioning from the roof back to the top of that wooden fence was a bit like a trust fall with no one there to catch you and so the best solution we found was to simply jump.

And so that’s what we did. We would sit on our butts and scoot all the way to the edge of the roof. With our legs dangling over the edge, we would give one good shove with our hands and literally take a leap of faith. We would hit the ground feet first and either roll to the ground or simply let our knees take the brunt of the impact. My knees hurt just typing that.

A couple of years ago I hurt my back while stepping off a curb. I was walking out of a grocery store, stepped off the curb, and it felt like someone had shoved a cattle prod up my butt all the way to my brain. And not in a good way. This led to a second round of MRIs and X-rays with a diagnosis of “hopefully it gets better.” It did, after a few weeks.

For the record, my spine doctor does not recommend jumping off of roofs.

Neither do I.

Steve Caballero is still skating. He recently turned 60 years old.

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The number one song the first week of January, 1991, was Madonna’s “Justify My Love”. It was, to seventeen-year-old me, like listening to porn on the radio. Okay, maybe not hardcore porn, but softcore, cable-friendly porn.

I certainly was no prude when it came to music. Before I was a teen I’d heard Motley Crue’s “Ten Seconds to Love” (a song about having a “quickie” in an elevator) and Prince’s infamous “Darling Nikki”. By the time I was in middle school everyone had copies of 2 Live Crew albums and by high school we were all listening to gangster rap. The big difference was, none of those songs were being played on the radio.

Madonna herself was no stranger to controversy. If you look up “awkward” in the dictionary you’re liable to see a picture of me sitting in the floor of our living room watching the MTV Music Awards with my parents in the room as Madonna writhed around on the ground in a wedding dress singing “Like a Virgin”. In one of her videos she played a stripper in a peep show booth and in another she had a black Jesus on a crucifix come to life. Controversy was kind of her thing.

Right around the time I turned sixteen, people began putting gigantic stereo systems in their cars. Suddenly it was more important to have a loud car than a fast one. For kids like me on a limited budget there was only so much that could be done. My next door neighbor had a stereo so loud in his Nissan pickup that you could feel it in your chest. The used speakers I purchased from the flea market were so weak they barely rattled the box they were installed in. Everyone with a custom stereo had “that” song that sounded great in their car. In an era ruled by the 808 kick drum, “My Posse’s on Broadway” was a popular choice. Toward the end of 1990, another popular choice began Madonna’s “Justify My Love.”

Back then, it was uncommon for a hit single to not have a hit video. Songs like C&C Music Factory’s “Everybody Dance Now”, Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice Baby” and Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” were getting played once an hour on MTV… and yet here was this song by Madonna that wasn’t being played on MTV because it was “too sexual.”

Madonna is not only known for being controversial, but knowing how to capitalize on it as well.

Not long after MTV announced the video was banned, VHS copies were being sold in stores. Madonna sold more than a million copies of the tape and it wouldn’t surprise me if MTV didn’t get a cut of the sales.

While the original controvery involved the video’s content, the real controversy came later regarding songwriting credits. The spoken word portion of the song is actually a poem written by Ingrid Chavez, which was given to Madonna by Lenny Kravitz. When Madonna and Kravitz received songwriting credit and Chavez didn’t, she sued and was awarded both a settlement and songwriting credit. Justify your sources.

The song came and went pretty quickly on pop radio — it’s not really a song you can sing along to and once the kink factor wore off, people moved on pretty quickly. Once it fell off the charts I didn’t hear it again for two years… and then, I heard it every night for months.

In 1993 I got a job at a local pizza restaurant that had the first CD-playing jukebox I had ever seen. If I remember right the jukebox held 40 CDs, most of which were either greatest hits or compilation discs. Along with a couple of “best of the 70s” and “best of the 80s” CDs the jukebox had The Cars’ Greatest Hits, Duran Duran’s Greatest Hits, and Madonna’s Immaculate Collection, her greatest hits album. And yeah, along with “Like a Virgin”, “Lucky Star”, “Borderline” and all her other hits, buried down there at the bottom was “Justify My Love.”

You may not have known that single was on that CD, but every teenager who came into our restaurant did. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was the most popular song played on that jukebox. It didn’t help matters that our jukebox had two subwoofers in the bottom. Every time the song came on you could hear the “whomp whomp” of the subwoofers kick in moments before Madonna began whispering, parents began uncomfortably wiggling in their seats, and teens began giggling and snickering. This wasn’t something that happened once a week. This happened multiple times a night until, after a few months, our manager complained to the guy who came ‘round to collect the quarters out of the jukebox and eventually he collected the CD out of it, too.

“Justify My Love” is probably more culturally important than I give it credit for. My graduating class consisted of 365 kids, none of which openly identified as gay. I don’t think MTV (and I know parents in the Midwest) were ready for a video containing whips and people wearing leather masks. Looking back, even if 99% of us were a bit shellshocked by the video, I’m sure there were a few people out there who saw a little bit of themselves on the screen. If the worst thing that came from taking alternative sexuality out of the closet and putting it in people’s living rooms was a few blushing parents, I can live with that.

The unique thing about memories is that they are, well, unique. No two people share the exact same memories. I remember the year our family got an Atari 2600 and I remember playing games Christmas morning with my dad. Although the two of us were there togethes, I am sure his memories of that morning differ from mine. All of our memories are affected by our personal experiences, perspective, and context.

So if all of our memories are unique, how can you buy one? In my life I’ve learned there are two types of people: those who associate memories with physical objects and those who don’t. I’ve also learned that those two groups will never understand one other. For the record I am a member of the former group. My room, my garage, and my life are filled with posessopms that exist only to remind me of events and people from my life. Sitting not far from me on my desk is a name plaque that belonged to a coworker who passed away several years ago. While I would not say he has been forgotten, he is also not actively remembered by most. For me, he is remembered every single time I see that plaque. Every time I look at it, I remember a funny thing he said or did or a good time we had together. I’m sure in your past you have had also had a coworker or acquaintance pass away. Maybe you’re the type of person who randomly thinks about them without having to be reminded, but I am not. The things in my home and in my life keep memories alive. I quite literally have items on display in my home office that I owned when I was five years old. Not everything, of course; it is definitely not a one-to-one relationship between all these things and my memories. Sometimes a simple item can remind me of an entire friendship or an entire era. Getting rid of these things feels like getting rid of the memories. Maybe you’re not this way. Like I said, there are two types of people and I don’t expect everyone can relate.

In seventh grade, I met one of my best friends. His name was Jeff. The first time I visited Jeff’s house I discovered he owned a Commodore 64 computer. I was enamored with the Commodore 64 for multiple reasons, one of which was that it had the best graphics and played more games than any other 8-bit computer. My friend Andy’s family owned a Commodore as did our neighbors across the street. We owned multiple computers at that time in 1985 including an Apple II, an IBM XT, and a PCjr, but we did not have a Commodore 64. And not only did Jeff own one, but it lived on a desk in his bedroom. Without bothering his parents, without asking for permission, he could roll out of bed, walk just a few feet, and play games like Ghostbusters, Archon, Impossible Mission, and any number of classic games. I used this knowledge as leverage with my parents, and for my birthday that year I got my own Commodore 64 in my own bedroom, just like Jeff’s.

That same year, my parents opened a computer software store. The store existed in a very brief window in time when stores dedicated to selling computer software existed. When the store opened, people did not see the need for a dedicated store that sold boxes of blank floppy disks, computer games, tractor-fed printer paper,and joysticks. The store was open for approximately one year and closed when mammoths like Walmart and Target began selling the same inventory. There was no way my parents could compete with their prices. My dad once told me it was cheaper for him to buy computer software from Walmart than through resale distributors.

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While the store was open we had a few loyal customers, one of whom was Jeff -- or, more specifically, Jeff’s mother. Jeff and his mother would visit the store and he was allowed to buy games there from time to time. In the spring, one of those games he purchased was the original Bard’s Tale, released by Electronic Arts. I don’t remember the exact time, but it seems like he bought it shortly before summer vacation began, at the end of seventh grade.

I’d had best best friends prior to meeting Jeff. Another one of my best friends, Andy, lived on my street. In the mornings, I would ride my bike over to Andy’s house and, often while accompanied with other kids from the neighborhood, would ride our bikes around the block or play in the creek or climb trees or build fake rocket ships out of cardboard boxes. We built bicycle ramps using wood stole from construction sites and nails pulled out of fence panels. But at the end of the day, all of us went home for supper. With Jeff, it was different. Jeff lived a few miles away from me and so I began spending the night at his house frequently. Sometimes on Fridays I would ride home with him after school, spend the night, and have my parents pick me up on Saturday. Sometimes I would stay all day Saturday too and have my parents pick me up on Sunday. I remember one time my mom specifically complaining that I was spending more time at Jeff’s house than at our house. One of the things Jeff and I spent all of our time doing was playing computer games.

In the summer of 1986, Jeff and I spent essentially three months playing Bard’s Tale. To us, Bard’s Tale seemed like a direct conversion of Dungeons & Dragons, off the paper and into the computer. Once the game loaded we were dropped into a three-dimensional world full of color and music and animated enemies. The picture of each enemy moved! Fighters waved their swords in the air amnd wizards confured fireballs right before our eyes. Each character only had a few frames of animation, but to us it was like Dungeons & Dragons had come to life. We spent hours (if not days) creating our characters, assembling our party, and heading out into the town of Skara Brae where we fought enemies, explored dungeons, drew maps, discovered treasure, and earned experience points. I’m not exaggerating when I say we must have played Bard’s Tale every single day of the entire summer.

Jeff was more of a night owl than I was. He would often stay up until six or seven in the morning. I was not wired that way back then. By ten or eleven p.m., I would fall asleep, but I would wake up at the crack of dawn. Between the two of us, we developed a system. We would play Bard’s Tale all day, and when it was time for bed I would go to sleep and Jeff would continue playing. When I woke up the following morning, he would still be playing the game. He would tell me where we were, what was happening, and where I should explore, and then he would go to bed and I would take over. Commodore computers were known for overheating and we had to buy additional fans just to keep the computer cool so that we could play for days on end. This was at a time when there were no save states, and saving your progress in the middle of an adventure was often difficult. All it took was a single power outage or power supply overheating to ruin an entire day’s worth of treasure hunting.

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For someone who has played so many video games in their life, there are so few that I’ve actually completed. With the magic of YouTube, I have watched people beat some old games in 10 or 15 minutes that I literally spent 30 years playing and never beat. I didn’t know that so many games had endings to be honest! But a role-playing game like Bard’s Tale obviously had an ending. You were given a task, and eventually you would beat the big baddie at the end of the game and you would win. And eventually, we did just that. The two of us played Bard’s Tale for the entire summer and right around the time it was time to go back to school, we finally finished the game.

Jeff and I remained friends throughout not just school but our lives. In high school we dated girls who were friends. Jeff was a groomsman at my wedding. Last month, I attended his son’s wedding.

Last week on eBay I purchased a copy of Bard’s Tale. It’s not even the Commodore 64 version. I think it’s the IBM PC version, but the box and packaging are identical. I don’t even know if the disk works, and to be honest I don’t care. In a way, it’s like Schrödinger’s floppy disk. As long as I don’t test it, it probably works, or maybe it doesn’t. Either way, I’ll never play it. I put the box up on display on a shelf next to my little retro gaming nook. I will never play this copy of Bard’s Tale. In fact, I may never play Bard’s Tale again. It was a great game in the 1980s, but modern interfaces have made those old games difficult, if not impossible, to revisit. Things like auto-mapping and auto-saving have really spoiled modern gamers.

But the point was never whether or not the game worked. I bought it for the package. I bought it so that it can sit next to my Commodore 64 setup in my home office, and every time I go over there, I will look at that box and think about all the time I spent playing games with Jeff. I will think about all the times we spent together playing Bard’s Tale, and I will think about all the great fun I had on a Commodore 64 back in the ‘80s. I will think about all those things whether or not I even turn my own computer on. That’s why I bought this box. I didn’t buy it for the game itself. I bought it for the memories.

Fast forward a bunch of years and I married a wonderful woman who, among many other gifts, is a great cook. So is her sister. So is everybody in my family, except for me. Every year, someone cooks the turkey and someone makes the stuffing and people bake pies while I sit in the living room watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

In my defense, I am not a good cook. I can’t follow directions. I find baking boring. I recently tried to make pancakes using instant pancake mix and messed them up. It is better for all parties involved for me to stay out of the kitchen, especially on holidays.

As a parent, there’s something inside me that makes me want to contribute… something. I can’t bake the turkey. I can’t bake a pie. I can’t make the stuffing.

And so, I made a… fruit turkey.

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I did not invent the concept of the fruit turkey, nor is mine made of fruit, which makes the name a bit nonsensical. I don’t remember where, but I found a picture of a similar looking creation online and thought… that’s something I can make.

The fruit turkey had a cantaloupe for a body, a pear for a head, and lots of sliced up bell peppers (not fruit) for winds and feet.

The highlight were the tail feathers which I intentionally made to act as fruit-ka-bobs. Again, other than the grapes, there’s no fruit on them. I believe those were cubes of ham and cubes of cheese.

Despite looking like an old man, mentally I am about twelve years old. I still like video games, and silly movies, and doing goofy things like bringing a fruit turkey to Thanksgiving.

I must confess that my ugle fruit turkey didn’t turn out exactly how I imagined it would (and didn’t much resemble the fancy example I found online), but all the kids loved it.

And it was fun to gobble up.

(Is it really a holiday without bad dad jokes?)

Happy Thanksgiving!

As a member of Generation X, it’s hard to imagine another generation that experienced more advances in technology more quickly than we did. For example, the summer before I started kindergarten in 1978, our family got a Pong machine. Prior to that, television had been a passive, one-way medium; all of a sudden we had this box that allowed us to twist knobs and play a game on our television. Controlling something on our own television screen was something I had never seen before. It was, to five-year-old me, magic.

Things like VCRs and home computers weren’t just neat things to own. They did things that nobody imagined were possible. Before we owned a VCR, if you wanted to watch a specific movie you had to find out when and what channel it was going to air on and then be at home in front of the television at that time. Sometimes you would wait years for that to happen. The first time Star Wars aired on public television was on CBS in 1984, seven years after it was released in theaters. VCRs ultimiately offered us the convenience to record shows or rent movies and watch them on our own schedule. But when they first came out, it was like we had been given the power to become our own television station, controlling when things played on our television.

My whole life has been filled with moments like these. I remember when we got our first microwave (which took two people to lift) and when we first got caller ID. You cannot imagine the anxiety that came from answering a phone and not knowing who was on the other end.

Although these technologies have evolved over time they rarely elicit the same wonder from me as they did when they were first introduced. Playing an Atari 2600 for the first time was magical. Going from a PlayStation 4 to a PlayStation 5 was not. Every year, computers get a little faster and cellphones get a little thinner and I’ve grown numb to those things. Every time I visit Sam’s Club, all the televisions are both cheaper and thinner than the last time. I am no longer surprised by this; in fact, I expect it.

BUT. Every now and then something comes along that rekindles that magic. Every now and then I experience something that makes me feel like a kid all over again. Every now and then I feel the same magical feeling I felt as a kid the first time a computer did something I told it to do.

Last weekend I rented a Tesla and had it drive me around the city.

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It’s hard to talk about Tesla cars without talking about Elon Musk, or arguing over EVs vs. traditional internal combustion engines, politics, and a lot of other hot topics. I don’t want to talk about any of that.

I want to tell you about this little slice of time in which I saw the future.

Tesla cars are an example of design over function, almost to a fault. The only thing you’ll find on the dash is a large 15” monitor. All of the car’s functions are controlled through this oversized touchscreen; fortunately, almost everything can also be done using voice commands. If you want to adjust the temperature, turn off the dome lights, or open the glove box, just press the microphone button on the steering wheel and tell the car to do so.

Also built into the car is Grok, an AI assistant. We all know that AI isn’t magic, but sometimes it feels like it. While driving the rental I asked Grok to recommend a local restaurant. Ten minutes later we were sharing recipes and holiday traditions. It’s weird. What kid didn’t watch Knight Rider and wished they could talk to their car like KITT?

All of that pales in comparison to the fact that you can press the microphone button and say “take me to the nearest Pizza Hut” and, after confirming your request by touching a button on the steering wheel, the goddamn car will drive you to the nearest Pizza Hut.

From my driveway I asked the car to take me to the nearest 7-Eleven, which is approximately two miles away. Once I pressed the little “go” button, the car backed down my driveway, navigated its way through my neighborhood, and took off. It is, in a word, terrifying.

And then it isn’t. The screen changes from an overheard 2D map to a 3D one that tracks every car, every traffic light, every pedestrian. The car reads speed limit signs and adjusts itself appropriately. It navigates through construction zones, four-way stops, and roundabouts better than most humans. It only takes a few trips to start wondering why every car isn’t like this.

I did not touch the accelerator. I did not touch the brakes. I did not touch the steering wheel. Mostly I watched in wonder and horror as the car sped up, slowed down, turned corners, and ultimately pulled into a parking spot at 7-Eleven like an obedient dog fetching the morning paper.

Anyway, I want to tell you about “that” moment.

That magical moment.

While in town running errands, I told the car to “take me home” and while it was doing so, the song “Drive” by the Cars randomly came on the stereo. As the car calmly changed into the turning lane, waited for the red light to turn green, and eventually turned left, lead singer Ric Ocasek asked, “who’s going to drive you home tonight?”

The answer is, “this car.” This car is going to drive me home tonight.

When I was a kid, I thought the future was going to look like Blade Runner. I imagined the future would be dark and rainy. Every building would be lit with neon, every corner would be covered in large screens displaying ads, and cars would drive themselves. And sure, we got some of that. My home office is flooded with neon lights and billboards along the highway change as I drive by, but a lot of things didn’t. I still wear the same brand of shoes that I wore in high school. I still use a physical key to unlock the front door of my house. Not everything made it to the future.

That being said, many of the things we have today I could never have imagined. I often daydream about talking to the ten-year-old version of me back in 1983, telling that kid that someday he would have a phone in his pocket that took digital pictures, allowed me to communicate with anyone at anytime, played videos, could be controlled by my voice, and so on. And that’s just one device. Imagine explaining modern video games to a kid playing monochrome games on an old Apple II computer, or just how obsolete that set of encyclopedias we had in our living room would become.

How could I explain to that kid that a 64 GB USB stick, the equivalent of 27,306,667 floppy disks, costs less than a combo meal at Taco Bell?

Maybe ten-year-old me would be a little disappointed that we don’t have flying cars in the future, but — my god — we have self-driving ones. Not in development or being tested on private tracks, but weaving around us in traffic. They’re here and they’re only going to get better. For example, currently self-driving cars can only monitor the traffic they can physically see using built-in cameras. Just wait until every car has this same technology and they begin communicating via Bluetooth. Wait until every car knows what every other car on the road is doing and we put an end to traffic jams and accidents.

It’s coming. It’s all coming.

I have seen the future. The future future.

And last night, it drove me home.

Let that sink in for a minute. The theme song from a television show — a song with no lyrics — was the most popular song in the country.

Miami Vice debuted on NBC in 1984 and ran through 1989. The show had a huge impact on the look and sound of the 1980s. It wasn’t that Miami Vice created everything that contributed to the aesthetic, but how they bundled it together. The show took neon glow, pastel colors, hot fashion trends, and palm trees, and wrapped it around a weekly crime drama. Putting The faces of Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas didn’t exactly hurt ratings, either.

And the thing was, the impact Miami Vice had on pop culture permeated every pore of 80s fashion… whether you watched the show or not. I did not watch Miami Vice regularly. Here is a picture of me from 1986 in front of my computer. I’ve shared this picture before, but I’m sharing it this time to point out that I’m wearing a Miami Vice jacket. That day I was wearing a blue undershirt but I had plenty of neon yellow and pink ones I wore with it, too. Oh, and this was not the only Miami Vice jacket I owned. I had both a white one and a gray one which I apparently wore even when I was sitting at home alone.

Miami Vice wasn’t this show that people tuned into for fashion tips. It just oozed style that went everywhere and stuck to everything. It glowed. Songs that appeared on the show were picked specifically to matchthe show’s vibe. “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins appeared in the show’s pilot. Glen Frey’s “Smuggler’s Blues” and “You Belong to the City” helped paint the show’s sonicscape.

Sonny Crocket (Don Johnson) even had his own theme, and while it wasn’t as popular as Jan Hammer’s theme to the show, the sounds instantly transport listeners to Miami, 1985. It sounds exciting, romantic, dark, and a little dangerous.

But it was another one of Hammer’s themes, the show’s theme song, that incredulously became a hit of its own. Synthesizers and electronic wizards like Jan Hammer continued to evolve the artform. The theme to Miami Vice not only sets the mood of the show but gets your heart pounding. The songs was performed on a Fairlight CMI synth. The Fairlight CMI was one of the first digital samplers, which allowed musicians and composers to capture their own sounds and transform them. The bass sound from the Miami Vice theme sounds similar to the one that appears in “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, another song recorded using the Fairlight. The Art of Noice and Devo were also big fans of the Fairlight CMI.

Not only did the Miami Vice theme hit number one on the Billboard charts back in 1985, but it was the last instrumental song to do so until 2013 when “Harlem Shake” topped the charts. I would argue that “Harlem Shake” is not purely an instrumental and only topped the charts due to its popularity due to memes, but I digress. Unlike “Harlem Shake,” the Miami Vice theme won four Grammys and was nominated for 20.

The influence that Miami Vice had on pop culture lives on today. When most people try to recreate “that 80s vibe,” you’ll see a lot of paster pinks and purples and people leaning against cool cars with palm trees in the background. You have Miami Vice to thank for that.

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Aside from all the monsters and horror movies and creepy crawlies, I think the reason I loved Halloween so much as a kid was because I felt so empowered. I got to pick my costume. I got to pick which houses I trick-or-treated. I got to sort my candy any way I chose, and ate what I wanted when I wanted, even if it led to a tummy ache. I didn’t bake the turkey on Thanksgiving or decide what time we visited Grandma on Christmas, but Halloween always felt like it was about me.

Take that feeling and wrap it in the creepiest wrapping paper you can think of. I’m know there are people who look forward to the annual batch of Hallmark Christmas movies — you know, the ones where that girl meets that guy and it doesn’t look look it’s going to work out but then they get thrown into a situation together and by the end, they’re a couple? Yeah, that one — but not me. Even the holiday specials I loved as a kid, like the Rankin-Bass stop motion classics and A Charlie Brown Christmas, don’t seem that exciting to me anymore. No, what I want are monster movies. My idea of a good holiday film is a house full of saucy sorority sisters getting chased by a chainsaw-wielding maniac. I watch a lot of Pluto TV (a free streaming platform) and last weekend they were showing Halloween II, Leprechaun 4: In Space, and Surf Nazis Must Die all at the exact same time. How’s a man to choose? I love the old black and white classics, I love 80s slasher films, I love documentaries about haunted houses, I love Halloween baking competitions. Halloween is this four-week period where the whole world is decorated with stuff I like. I’ll take fake cobwebs over tinsel and glitter any day of the week.

I don’t think I bought my 12-foot skeleton the second year they were being sold. I had just moved into a new neighborhood — one with am HOA and a gate — and I wasn’t quite ready to test the waters yet. The following year, I decided to take my chances and spend $300 on a 12-foot tall piece of (a little) metal and (mostly) plastic to stand in front of my house on Halloween.

Normally I prefer homemade costumes and decorations when it comes to Halloween. As a kid there was nothing worse than running into another kid in the neighborhood wearing the exact same costume you had on. I rarely had to worry about that; as a kid my mom made a lot of my costumes, and looking back I am so appreciative of that. I was a little hesitant about buying the 12-foot skeleton because I was afraid everyone would have one and what’s the fun in that? Fortunately there don’t seem to be a lot of people shelling out $300 for oversized yard decorations, at least not in this neighborhood. They’re certainly not rare, but having one makes you an honorary member of the weirdo clan. There’s a whole ‘nother club of people who keep this things up year round, decorating them like leprechauns and the Easter Bunny and even Santa when it’s time, but again with my HOA in mind, I take mine down the first week of November like a thief in the night before some uptight Karen can stick a nastygram in my mailbox.

(I will admit to, on a couple of occasions, moving the skeleton to the backyard and lighting it up with spotlights just to piss off the neighbors. It’s ironic that the gate at the entrance of the neighborhood was designed to keep riff-raff out, when in reality they locked themselves in with me…)

Several years ago on Halloween when my kids were younger, I was out trick-or-treating with them when we knocked on the door of what seemed like a mansion. It was a large two-story house with white pillars on the porch and a fancy gold door knocker that was probably for looks. I used it anyway. When the man answered the door he gave my kids and I a look and then asked, “do you guys live in this neighborhood?” Casually I said yes and pointed down the street toward our house. The man then reached inside and grabbed a different bowl of candy. “Kids from this neighborhood get chocolate bars,” he said. “Everyone else gets apples.”

By “everyone else” he meant poor kids. See, my old neighborhood had kind of a reputation for decorating for Halloween and houses giving out “the good stuff” — so much so that families from other neighborhoods came to ours to trick-or-treat. We’re not talking about busses lining the streets or anything, but there were definitely a lot more people out trick-or-treating than there were people living in the neighborhood.

I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood. Everybody worked on cars in their driveways and nobody was rich. We didn’t have too little and we didn’t have too much but we always had enough. The thought of going to another neighborhood to trick-or-treat as a kid never crossed my mind. Why would it? In my neighborhood, the majority of houses handed out candy. And the neighborhood was safe.

It took me about 90 seconds to go from mildly amused to filled with rage as we left that guy’s house. It took a minute for it to sink in, but something about the situation really rubbed me the wrong way, for so many reasons. First of all, the kids who are trick-or-treating and getting punished for this are not the ones who came up with this idea; it was their parents — parents who, god forbid, took their kids to a different, potentially safer neighborhood where people decorate for Halloween and hand out candy. But it pissed me off even more because even though it’s been 40 years since I wore a costume and went house to house trick-or-treating, I can still remember the houses that handed out the good stuff. I also remember the ones that handed out bad stuff, like church pamphlets or rock hard popcorn balls, and I still feel all bad about all the eggs…

It was that year that I decided from now on, we hand out full-size candy bars on Halloween. To everybody.

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Life’s hard. If you’re a kid living somewhere where your parents are taking you somewhere else to trick-or-treat, your life is probably harder than mine. Can I solve the world’s problems? No. Can I give a kid a Halloween they’ll remember? I hope so.

I want to take a moment to tell you how my October has been going. On the first of October, I was furloughed. I haven’t worked, not been paid, in over a month. Less than a week after that, the pipe feeding our hot water heater burst, filling half our house with an inch of water. My wife and I spent a week bouncing between the house and a hotel as a disaster team cleaned up the mess. Carpet, baseboards, and ruined furniture have been removed. The total cost for the repairs is in the tens of thousands of dollars, although thanks to insurance, we’re only out of pocket a couple of thousand dollars so far. (Did I mention I’m not getting paid?) While removing soggy furniture from wet, ruined carpet I hurt my back (I have an MRI scheduled for next week). Over the past week, my daughter’s apartment had a fire — she’s okay, but the damage was bad enough that they’ve relocated her to another apartment (moving costs on us) and a couple of days ago, my son was involved in a minor fender bender (he got side-swiped by a driver without insurance in a parking lot). It hasn’t been a great month.

And you know what? Kids in costume knocking on doors and expecting candy don’t care about any of that, which is why I put a hold on everything one afternoon and dragged out “Skelly” (he really needs a better name). I set up the flood lights and I dragged out Slimer from Ghostbusters and my 6’ skeleton that normally stays in my home office (“Mick Rib”) and my plague doctor statue and a few other things. On Halloween night, I did my best to forget about the bills, the stress, all the static that comes with adulting, and sat out on the front porch handing out candy bars to kids. I don’t care what neighborhood they came from. All I care about is that they’re in costume and they say “trick-or-treat.”

I hope it makes their night as good as it made mine.

Happy Halloween.

The way kids celebrate holidays in public schools is so different than what I experienced as a kid. There are reasons for that and while some of the changes are for the better, that doesn’t keep me from cherishing my memories. It’s a bit like longing for the old days of mom and pop video rental stores while living in a world where I have access to tens of thousands of movies and television shows that I can watch on my phone while away from my home.

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. A big part of that was celebrating Halloween with my friends at school.

In grade school back in the 1980s, kids were encouraged to wear their costumes to school. I was a bus rider, so imagine that image — fifty kids in Halloween costumes, all riding on a school bus. Little ghosts, vampires, and monsters with school books in their laps.

I don’t remember if there were rules regarding our costumes, but thinking back there probably were. In younger grades, there was a pretty even split between homemade costumes and those plastic Ben Cooper costumes. While many kids brought masks, I think they were put away during lessons. There were always a few kids who came to school with their faces painted, and that was an all-day commitment.

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My biggest memory of Halloween in grade school was the “parade”. At some point in the day, all the students in our class put on our masks, lined up in single file, and visited all the other classrooms. Our school was relatively small — there were two sixth grade classrooms, two fifth grade rooms, and so on. We visited each room and stood side by side in front of the chalkboard for all the kids to see. After our parade ended, every other classroom did the same and walked through every classroom, including ours. Suffice it to say, we didn’t get a lot of schoolwork done that day.

What were costumes like? Not much different than today, I think. We always had the classics — Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman, and some poor child who thought wrapping himself in toilet paper and coming as a mummy was a good idea. Then there were all the pop-culture costumes. Some were store bought — kids dressed as Casper and Popeye and Darth Vader — mixed with a few Madonnas and Michael Jacksons. Then were would be a few original ones. My friend Chris once came dressed as Jaws. My buddies and I once dressed up as the Three Stooges, an odd choice in the 1980s.

In the afternoon we always had a Halloween party. One thing that’s changed is that today, kids (and parents) aren’t allowed to bring home-baked goods to parties. When my wife and I sent cupcakes for my kid’s birthday, they had to be store-bought and sealed. (And gluton-free.) When I was a kid, there were no such rules. My mom often volunteered to be the class’s homeroom mom, and she would always bring cupcakes with black or orange icing and plastic trinkets stuck in the top — sometimes they were little plastic skulls or bats. Often there were party favors like plastic vampire teeth or spider rings and man, I wish they made those things in adult sizes.

After a long day of parading around the school and consuming candy and cupcakes, it was time to ride the bus home. There were a few times (like that Three Stooges year) that the costume I wore to school was not the costume I wore trick-or-treating that night. Kids with painted faces washed their faces to prepare them to be painted once again.

Fast forward and I was so excited for my kids to experience the same things I did. They did not. I don’t think my kids ever wore Halloween costumes to school. There were never any homemade treats. Costumes and decorations in general got more tame. When I was a kid, a vampire’s makeup wasn’t complete without fake blood dripping from the edges of their mouth. As a kid one year our teacher decorated our class’s door with a skeleton hanging from a noose. I don’t think that would fly today. The same goes for fake knives. I remember lots of kids having rubber knives, or those ones that were spring-loaded so the plastic blade would slide into the handle to give the illusion that the blade was going into a classmate’s gut. Not every change we’ve seen over the years was terrible.

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I have a picture of me and my friend Scott which was taken Halloween night, 1976. I was three years old and he was four. I’m the ghost on the left; he’s the devil on the right. This was the first year I went trick-or-treating.

Trick-or-treating was the culmination of Halloween for me. I got to dress up in a costume and walk around my neighborhood collecting candy and looking at all the decorations. I loved every part of it. At some houses, older teens would put on scaru masks and jump out from behind trees or fake tombstones and scare us. I would scream and my legs would start to run on their own. Every time it happened I was convinced I was about to die… and by the time I got back to the sidewalk, I’d ask my parents if I could do it again.

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It was an entire night of mingling with fellow ghouls and ghosts and then when you got home there was the candy — oh, that beautiful, delicious bounty! An entire night of running around in the dark while dressed in a costume ended with the annual ritual of sorting more candy than any kid should possess into piles: chocolate, suckers, gum, random candy, and gross stuff. I would come home with a month’s worth of candy, which I would devour over the next two or three days.

Around the time I become a teenager, Halloween parties began to replace trick-or-treating. In seventh grade a friend of mine threw a Halloween party and while I so wanted to go, I realized that this was evolution; this was what we were supposed to do instead of trick-or-treating. Well, not me, friend. My friend’s party ended at 9 P.M. and asked my mom to pick me up around 9:30, which gave me enough time to knock on a few doors and fill my pockets with candy from strangers. I was not going gently into that dark night.

I turned 14 in 1987. In Oklahoma, you can get a motorcycle license at the age of 14. I had grown up riding dirt bikes and I jumped at the opportunity to gain some two-wheeled freedom! That’s me on the right and my mom on her Honda Rebel. Around that same time, I got a part-time job working for the city, manning concession stands at basketball, baseball, and football games.

My friend Louis also got his motorcycle license. He was my only friend who also had his license and so the two of us rode many places together. We also both played D&D, had similar computers, and rode skateboards.

On Halloween, 1987, the two of us came up with an idea for Halloween. We decided to dress up as undead versions of the Blues Brothers. Then, we would ride our motorcycles to a more affluent neighborhood to get great candy. I told my boss I needed the night off from the concession stand that night, and put together a spectacularly bad Blues Brothers costume. I wore a blue jacket, my dad’s fedora, and painted my face with white paint. I looked more like a ghostly hobo than John Belushi’s ghost.

Louis and I met at my house and rode our motorcycles, in costume, across town. We parked our bikes in someone’s driveway, grabbed our Halloween bags, and made our way up to the door. Full-sized candy bars, here we come!

Beaming with pride regarding our plan, we rang the doorbell. Moments later a man opened the door. Based on the look on his face, he was expecting someone shorter and younger. After a moment of awkward silence the man said, “aren’t you two a little old to be trick-or-treating?”

And it hit me. We were.

Both Louis and I had licenses and jobs. I don’t know why it hadn’t hit me before, but it hit me hard right there on that man’s front porch. I was too old to be trick-or-treating.

I didn’t go trick-or-treating again for almost fifteen years.

The ghouls don’t fall far from the tree, and I ended up with two kids who also love Halloween. Unlike when I grew up, my kids trick-or-treated multiple times each Halloween season. There was trick-or-treating at the school, trick-or-treating at daycare, and trick-or-treating at the zoo. There were a few years when they were burned out on trick-or-treating and candy by the time Halloween rolled around, but I did my best to convince them that roaming the neighborhood was the most fun. Truth be told, it was as much for me as it was for them.

My kids have now also aged out of the tradition. For a few years I had trick-or-treating withdrawal. We handed out candy to kids, but didn’t do much else. Eventually, I got my third wind. We haven’t gone all out, but we did pick up one of those 12’ skeletons a couple of years ago and last year I put on a simple (but apparently creepy) costume to meet visiting kids. I had so many kids take selfies in front of Skelly and I like the idea that I might be a part of their Halloween memories someday.

Like the movie, the goal of E.T. the board game is to help E.T. return to his home planet. To accomplish that, players must navigate their way through a spiraling playfield. Each spot on the board either awards chips (small cardboard discs) to players or takes them away. The player who possesses the most discs by the time E.T. reaches his spaceship is the winner. Along the way, players must assemble the transmitter E.T. must use to call his ship back to Earth.

I just remembered, I saw E.T.’s transmitter in person one time.

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In 1993, my (then girlfriend/now wife) took a road trip to Chicago. While there we went to the Museum of Science and Industry where they happened to have a traveling display of movie props and special effects. Along with Jabba the Hutt’s eyes and the prosthetics used in Mrs. Doubtfire, they had on display E.T.’s transmitter which… I mean when you see it in person, looks pretty stupid. As someone who has tried to build both his own lightsaber hilt and Back to the Future hoverboard I can tell you, remaking replicas of movie props is pretty hard, but I’m pretty sure I could built a replica of that transmitter with one or trips to the local Goodwill. Look at it! All you need is an umbrella, an old record player, and a Speak and Spell. It’s literally like a Halloween costume you would make in a rush if you were out of ideas. “Look, I’m a space transmitter!”

I digress.

Before I talk more about E.T., I have to tell you about this trunk full of Harfields.

My 20YO daughter has started collecting Garfield dolls. When they were little I showed my kids a few animated Garfield specials, but I showed them a lot of cartoons from the 80s. I’m not sure where her current obsession came from but here we are, and the best part of it is that it gives my wife and I one more thing to look for when we’re out thrifting or visiting garage sales.

A couple of months ago on Facebook Marketplace we found someone selling 30 Garfield dolls for $100. The best part of the deal was that there were a few duplicates in the lot which allowed us to give most of them to our daughter and sell the dupes to cover the cost of the entire lot. A win for everybody!

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While picking up the dolls the seller said she had a few other vintage items she was going to toss out, one of which was a ruined copy of the E.T. board game. I said I’d take it… and when I got it home, I discovered why she was going to throw it away. Saying the thing had suffered water damage is an understatement. It kind of looked like it was rescured from the bottom of the ocean. The box was almost completely ruined. The playfield itself, which is stored folded in half, was stuck together. The playing cards needed to play the game has signs of mold. There was nothing inside the box worth saving.

Well, almost nothing.

This is the E.T. figure that moves around the playfield. There’s a feature that allows you to “hide from federal agents” and put E.T.’s ghost Halloween costume on, which slides over the top of E.T. With a quick rinse under the sink faucet, the two pieces look like new.

Board games are constantly evolving. I’ve played E.T. the board game before and while not completely dreadful, it’s relatively slow moving and like a lot of games that capitalized on licensed properties, you could change the graphics on the board and swap out the play pieces and turn it into a game for just about anything. I’d say it’s more fun than the Atari 2600 games, but we can all agree that’s a pretty low bar.

Churches have a long history of such tactics. Once as a teen while bussing tables at a local pizza restaurant, I saw a folded dollar bill sticking out from a plate covered in pieces of crust. When I began to unfold the dollar I discovered that it was fake. The rest of the “bill” was an advertisement for a local church. For the record, our restaurant always looked like a complete disaster after the Sunday church rush. Nobody left a bigger mess, and instead of tips they left fake dollar bills for kids making minimum wage ($3.35/hr, back then) to find. Why would anyone start attending a church after being tricked?

In the late 80s and early 90s, skateboarding was huge. My friends and I spent lots of time practicing tricks in parking lots and neighborhood cul-de-sacs. We built a few “launch ramps” designed to shoot us up into the air (which they did) so that we could perform tricks (which we tried to do) before landing gracefully (which we never did). The thing we never had wa a half-pipe. None of us had the money to build one or a parent willing to accept the legal responsibility of having a gigantic ramp in their yard.

During the summer btween my junior and senior years of high school, I was headed downtown in my car when next to the interstate I saw agigantic skatepark being assembled in the parking lot of a local mega-church. I immediately exited the interstate and doubled-back to check out the skatepark.

The makeshift park had pretty much everything a kid could want in a skatepark. There were multiple slide or grind rails — metal pipes or PVC pipes mounted to long pieces of wood, designed for skaters to slide their skateboards down. There were launch ramps, much higher quality than the ones my friends and I had cobbled together using wood left behind at construction sites and rusty, mismatched nails. The impossible to miss centerpiece in the middle of the parking lot was a gigantic half-pipe ramp. It was at least 8’ high on both ends, covered in smooth, expensive wood.

I did not have my skateboard with me at the time. I was standing in the parking lot, mesmerized at this makeshift playground, when I was approached by an adult who asked me if I attended church there. When I said I didn’t, I was handed a flyer covered with pictures of skateboarders that also listed all the church’s service times.

It was basically an updated version of that dollar bill I had found years earlier.

Also, I have long subscribed to Mitch Hedberg’s theory regarding flyers. Whenever someone hands me one I imagine them saying, “could you throw this away for me?”

I quickly scurried away, but it hit me that it was Saturday. Sunday, the entire parking lot would be filled with church attendees.

Monday was Labor Day. The place would (hopefully) be abandoned. Monday would be the day I would skate that half-pipe. My first ever half-pipe. I told all my friends about my plan and when one of them said other kids might show up on Monday as well since school would be out, I suggested that we all meet at the ramp at 7 A.M. That was the plan, and that’s exactly what we did.

Getting a bunch of high school seniors to wake up early and drive across town at the crack of dawn on a school holiday was no easy task, but the thought of having an entire skate park to ourselves was too much for even my circle of friends to resist. Back then, the idea of carpooling was foreign within my social circle. The sun hadn’t yet peeked over the horizon when I pulled into the church’s parking lot. Over the next few minutes each of my friends pulled into the parking lot and parked next to me. Five or six cars all alone in a parking lot that 24 hours earlier had been filled with worshipers.

I grabbed my skateboard from the backseat of my car and started walking toward the makeshift park. I could hear my friends behind me as we walked past the slide rails and the launch ramps, making our way to that sweet, sweet, gigantic half-pipe. It was the thing of dreams. It was truly massive; as big as the Ark, I’d reckon. It must have cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars in lumber alone. It was as if God himself had picked up the perfect half-pipe from California and gently placed it here, in this church parking lot in the middle of Oklahoma, for my friends and I to enjoy. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity.

And as I turned around to look at my friends, I noticed… none of them had their skateboards.

And that’s when it hit me. None of them had come to skate the mega-ramp. All of them had come to see ME skate the mega-ramp.

Did I mentioned I had never skated a half-pipe before? None of us had.

There’s a scene in Sixteen Candles where Farmer Ted (Anthony Michael Hall) is attempting to explain his social status to Samantha (Molly Ringwald) by telling her he’s “kind of king of the dipshits.” Now, everybody’s the hero in their own story and while my circle of friends had nothing that resembled a hierarchy, that day, as the only one there with a skateboard… I was king of the dipshits.

If you’ve ever stood on the roof of a house you know that 8’ looks a lot higher from above than below. As I made my way up the rungs made out of 2x4s that had been affixed to the backside of the ramp, I felt myself getting higher and higher until I reached the top of the ramp. With the cold morning air blowing in my face I felt like I could see the entire world. I could see and hear the cars zooming by on the interstate, the same place I had originally spotted the ramp from. I could see the entire parking lot and our small huddle of cars parked nearby. From the top of the ramp our cars looked so sent and rust free. Next to the ramp I could see my friends, all waiting impatiently for me to “drop in.”

Dropping in on a half-pipe is a learned skill. The trick is to balance the rear of your skateboard on the edge of the ramp, holding it in place with all your weight on your rear foot. As you place your front foot on the front of the skateboard, in one fluid motion you “fall forward”. The most common mistake is to not lean far enough forward, which cases the skateboard to shoot out from under you.

Knowing this, I put on a brave face, took a deep breath, and making sure to lean forward I dropped into the half-pipe.

No, literally. I fell forward and dropped 8’ feet from the top of that ramp directly to the bottom, landing on my side. I don’t think my feet ever touched the skateboard at all. I just fell, like a sack of sand, 8’ down through the air landing on the wood below.

Go big or go home.

Often, when a person trips or stumbles, their biggest albeit irrational concern is, “did anyone see me?” But when you fall hard — I mean, really hard — you’re not really worried about that. I could no longer hear the cars whizzing by. I’m pretty sure my first thought was, “do I still have all of my teeth?”

Also, if you’ve ever stumbled and tripped over a curb or something, your gut instinct is to hop back up as if to convince the world (or maybe just yourself) that you’re okay. I did not hop up. I just laid there, staring at the bottom of a gigantic skate ramp.

After a minute or two I slowly made my way up to my feet. One of my friends had graciously walked across the parking lot to retrieve my skateboard. One bone at a time, I began taking inventory. Nothing felt broken and all my joints seemed to still be functioning.

After a minute of silence I finally said, “we good here?” Everyone nodded in silence and we all sauntered back to our cars, starting them up one by one and heading back home only a few minutes after we had arrived.

I don’t remember how long that makeshift skatepark remained there; no more than a month, I think. It had to be a logistical nightmare, not to mention a real insurance liability. I’m sure they kept it around long enough to serve its purpose, luring a few kids in with honey before dismantling it.

So I said to the Lord,
"Lord, you promised that if I followed you,
you would walk with me always.
But I have noticed that during the most challenging times of my life,
there has only been one set of footprints in the sand.
Why, when I needed you most, were you not there with me?"

The Lord replied,
"My precious child, those times when you saw only one set of footprints,
it was because while I was walking in the sand,
you were skateboarding in my skatepark nearby.
But don’t worry—I saw you fall and it was divine.”

I recently visited Incredible Pizza and saw an iteration of Whac-a-Mole where you smack Minions from Despicable Me. The history of Whac-a-Mole is one of my favorite and somewhat depressing arcade-related stories. It is the definition of the story “nice guys finish last,” although nice guys can also dust themselves off and try again, which is what happened in this case.

The roots of Whac-a-Mole can be traced back to a single event: the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) of 1976. It was at that show that a Japanese company named TOGO displayed the first Whac-a-Mole-style game… except it wasn’t called Whac-a-Mole back then — it was called “Mogura Taiji”, which doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

Now as the story goes, two men at the show (Gerald Denton and Ronny Anderson) saw that original Japanese machine and quickly tried to build their own, which didn’t work very well and sometimes didn’t work at all. Denton reached out to another man, Aaron Fechter, and tasked him with improving the game’s mechanics and building a prototype, which he did. Fechter designed an air-based system to shoot the moles up from their holes, built a working protype, and officially dubbed the machine “Whac-a-Mole.”

Here’s where things get dark. Denton, now in possession of the machine, showed it to a man named Bib Cassata, the owner of an arcade named Bob’s Space Racers. Bob saw the potential of the game and purchased it from Denton. And, since no one along the way had bothered to do so, Bob trademarked the name Whac-a-Mole.

Bob Cassata went on to make millions of dollars licensing the name and rights to build similar machines. You’ll notice Aaron Fechter’s name has dropped out of the story. Fechter was cut out of the deal and got nothing.

There is a silver lining to this story. Using a similar version of the air-powered solenoids he had used in his Whac-a-Mole machine, he began putting together large air-powered animatronics. Those animatronic figures would ultimately come together to form one of the greatest bands of all time… Showbiz Pizza’s house band, the Rock-Afire Explosion.

Fechter learned a valuable lesson about trademarks and was quick to trademark his new band. When a deal was reached to install Rock-Afire Explosion bands in Showbiz Pizza locations, Fechter retained the rights to the band and a tight grip on their development. He developed the software used to program the band’s performances, and believe it or not, Fechter also provided the voices for Billy Bob Brockali, Looney Bird, Rolfe DeWolfe, Earl Schmerle, and for a short time, Mitzi Mozzarella and Beach Bear. According to Wikipedia he also provided the voice of Fatz Geronimo from 2006-2020. Having been screwed out of millions in the Whac-a-Mole deal, Fechter was not about to let that happen again.

There’s a second twist to this story. Because Fechter retained the copyright and trademark to the Rock-Afire Explosion, Showbiz Pizza did not own the rights to the band, their likeness, or their music. Every single item sold featuring a picture of the band was putting money in Fechter’s pockets. Showbiz Pizza put pressure on Fechter to sell them the rights to the band, but he refused.

So, like any good business would, Showbiz Pizza bought out Chuck E. Cheese. Many people assume Chuck E. Cheese put Showbiz out of business, but in fact it was the opposite. Why are there still Chuck E. Cheese restaurants and no Showniz Pizza places? Because after purchasing their competitor, Showbiz began converting all Showbiz Pizza places into Chuck E. Cheese restaurants… because not only had the purchased the name, but also the rights to all the characters.

This left Aaron Fechter in the dust a second time.

Aaron Fechter is still around and lives in Florida. He still owns the trademark and copyright to the Rock-Afire Explosion and owns a warehouse where he works on new inventions. He’s a little kooky and sometimes a little out there, but I think most inventors and visionaries are.

Now one thing about events that happened 50 years ago is that different people remember things differently. The history of Whac-a-Mole is mostly from Aaron Fechter’s point of view because he’s the one that tells it publicly the most, and over the years people have pointed out that the story has changed slightly, and that none of the other people involved all remember the events happening the same way. The one thing they all agree on is that Fechter built and named the original Whac-a-Mole machine, and didn’t make a nickel from its sale.

Despite losing the Showbiz Pizza deal, the Rock-Afire Explosion lives on. Many complete bands have been sold and resold. Some are in the hands of private collectors (check out the Rock-Afire Explosion documentary!) while others have been restored and are being reintroduced to a few restaurants around the country. I’ve got a feeling we haven’t seen the last of the band or Aaron Fechter. Every time the band performs, it’s a good, good night.

Now, you could say I was lucky or unlucky depending on your point of view, but in the late 70s my dad purchased an antenna that allowed us to get HBO for free. We watched a lot of HBO and then one day — August 1, 1981 — the feed we were getting switched and instead of getting HBO we started getting this new weird channel that showed music videos 24/7 called MTV. I think we got cable pretty soon after that and were lucky enough to have both HBO and MTV.

But like I said, not everybody in the early 80s had cable, and not everybody who did got MTV. Of course MTV was not the only place you could see music videos — HBO launched their show “Video Jukebox” three years earlier in 1978 — but it was the only place to see them 24/7. That being said, MTV’s popularity lead to lots of knock-off shows, one of which was Friday Night Videos.

There were a series of events at NBC that made Friday Night Videos possible. Infamous NBC executive Dick Ebersol was co-producing a Friday night show called The Midnight Hour. In 1981 he left that show to co-produce Saturday Night Live with Lorne Michaels, and canceled The Midnight Hour. To fill the now vacant timeslot, NBC signed a two-year deal to broadcast a Canadian show, which got viewers SCTV from 1981-1983. When that deal ended, NBC needed a new Friday night show and, based on the popularity of MTV, launched Friday Night Videos.

Friday Night Videos ran for 90 minutes every Friday night. In the beginning they didn’t have VJs like MTV; they just showed videos, which were introduced by an anonymous, off-screen voice. Over time, the show began to add more MTV-like features, like head-to-head battles where two videos would be pitted against one another and viewers were encouraged to call a 1-900 number to vote for their favorite. After a couple of years, the show added celebrity hosts.

In the 1980s I knew lots of people who had not yet adopted cable. Cable television was a huge shift in that people were suddenly paying for television. Before that, all the major broadcast stations like NBC, ABC, and CBS were free. There were also lots of rural areas where cable simply wasn’t available. For those people, shows like Friday Night Videos were the only way they could see music videos at all.

Friday Night Videos had one of the most memorable opening segments and songs I can remember from the 1980s. Synth-rock filled with stereo panning played over a stylized animation. I don’t know who recorded that song but if they made other songs like it I would stream it 24/7. The 80s were rad, yo. And while few TVs had stereo speakers at the time, the show was also broadcast on the radio which (a) sounded awesome in stereo and (b) was an easy way for a kid like me to record new songs onto cassette tapes.

Friday Night Videos evolved throughout the years. In 1987 it got bumped to an even later timeslot to make room for Late Night with David Letterman, which up until then had only been broadcast Monday through Thursday. To keep the show fresh, new features like clips from stand-up comedians and live musical performances were added. Each segment that was added meant fewer music videos were played. The show was renamed multiple times (Friday Night, Late Friday) and by the end, just like MTV, they stopped playing music videos completely. On a show originally called Friday Night Videos.

I didn’t have cable television in my bedroom until I was in middle school, and that was only because a friend of mine went up into our attic, added a splitter to our incoming cable feed, and helped me run coax cable down into my bedroom. Before that, we only had cable on the television in our living room and while I spent plenty of time watching MTV, cartoons, and lots of other things, when grown-ups wanted to watch something we had to defer to them. Every Friday night in my bedroom I would stay up and watch Friday Night Videos from 11:30pm-1:00am (Central). Most of my friends did too and it was always fun to watch the show and imagine all my friends at home watching it at the same time.

Wikipedia says Friday Night Videos aired from 1983-2002, but that includes those later less-music-oriented incarnations. Friday Night Videos “proper” aired from 1983-1990, which for me was fifth grade through my junior year — the perfect age for music videos, style, and rock and roll.

Earlier this month I attended the International Retro Computer Expo in Hurricane, West Virginia. For the expo, dozens of people who still love old computers bring old machines and old software to show and share with like-minded friends. For this year’s gathering I brought my old Apple IIe computer and one of the first games I ever played on the system, Swashbuckler. To complete the theme I decorated my table with some ocean and pirate-related items purchased from Amazon. $20 will get you a plastic table cloth, a decorative fish net, a small box containing 48 miniature fish, and a stack of plastic pirate-themed cups. Not bad, mateys.

The first model of the Apple II went on sale in the summer of 1977. That was followed by the Apple II+ which was released in 1979, and finally the Apple IIe (“e” for “enhanced”) in 1983. Each of these machines were slightly better than the previous model but to be honest if you aren’t into old computers they all look the same.

Now here’s an interesting fact that’s going to become real important in a couple of paragraphs. The original Apple II and Apple II+ did not have lowercase letters. All text was in uppercase, which made programming simpler, took less memory, and made everything feel like it was shouting at you. SYNTAX ERROR!

Back to the game I brought… Swashbuckler. Swashbuckler is a relatively simple game to learn and play, although by “simple” I mean it takes using 8 different keys on the keyboard — three to move and five to control your sword. It’s less complicated than it sounds.

The Apple IIe I brought to the show is 42 years old and has not been treated particularly well. I store it out in my workshop on a shelf where it is subject to dirt, sawdust, and bugs.

Old computers were pretty resilient, but they are becoming more fragile as time goes on. Sometimes the failures are catastrophic and sometimes they are very minor. My Apple II experienced what would seem to be a very small failure — so small that I didn’t even notice it until I arrived in West Virginia.

My Caps Lock key quick working.

On my modern computer I couldn’t tell you the last time I intentionally used the Caps Lock key, but on the Apple IIe, at this particular moment, this presented a very unique and specific problem. Because the key failed in the “off” position, the computer was stick in lowercase mode… which wouldn’t be a problem unless you wanted people to play a game written in 1981 on a computer that did not recognize lowercase letters. To the Apple, “M” and “m” are two completely different characters and so by the game did not recognize any of the keys unless you also held down the shift key or the caps lock key which, in a game that already requires you to keep your fingers on 8 keys, is pretty difficult to do without a third hand.

Fortunately for me, my computer failed in the best place possible — a room full of super smart people who live to diagnose and repair old computers. As I stood there with a hopeless look on my face, multiple people descended on my computer. After talks of removing keys and soldering things, it was decided the simplest solution would be to tape the Caps Lock key down, locking the computer into uppercase mode.

The fix worked. People loved playing the game — both older guys like me who remembered the game and, surprising to me, younger kids who love learning about old computers. It was a super fun weekend and I was glad to have everything up and running. Now I am home and soon I will be firing up a soldering iron to keep this machine running a bit longer.

Somewhere between “Stairway to Heaven” and “Sweet Child ‘O Mine” lies the opening riff to “Crazy Train,” performed by Randy Rhodes on Ozzy Osbourne’s debut solo album, Blizzard of Ozz. Ozzy, having just been given the boot from Black Sabbath, thought his career might be over. As the story goes, Sabbath’s former manager Sharon Arden picked Ozzy up by his drunken suspenders, put him on the path to a new solo career, and, a couple of years later, married him.

Right up there with cats fighting and fingernails dragging across a chalkboard is the sound of teenage boys trying to learn that riff. Anyone can learn how to play “Smoke on the Water” or “Iron Man” in about five minutes, but that opening riff to “Crazy Train” takes timing, skill, and more than two fingers. It’s not just enough to know the notes; they’ve got to bend and flow and let’s face it, most of the kids in my neighborhood were not Randy Rhodes. But that was probably my introduction of Ozzy Osbourne — the summer every kid in my neighborhood with an electric guitar sat around butchering that riff.

In 1985 I met my buddy Jeff, who was a big fan of Ozzy. I copied his Diary of a Madman cassette and while I didn’t like it was much as I liked Blizzard of Ozz, it was still more Ozzy. Later that year but still in seventh grade I met another kid named Matt who was either too cool or too high to give me the time of day — he had one foot in the skateboarding scene with the other planted in heavy metal. In journalism class of all places I noticed he had the new Ozzy album, The Ultimate Sin, sitting on his desk. Somehow I talked him into letting me borrow it for the night (he was probably high) and I made a copy of it, too. The dual-deck stereo got a lot of use in the 80s.

I didn’t get into Black Sabbath until I discovered all my favorite bands were not only influenced by them but were also covering their songs. Anthrax’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath”, Megadeth’s version of “Paranoid”, and Faith No More’s version of “War Pigs” convinced me to check out “Ozzy’s first band.” In the 90s, two albums of Sabbath cover tunes were released (Nativity in Black 1 and 2) featuring even more versions of Sabbath songs. By then of course I was fan.

Diary of a Madman could have been a great name for Ozzy’s biography. Within just a few years he nit the head off a bat (he thought it was fake), bit the head off a dove (he knew it was real), got arrested for pissing on the Alamo while wearing a dress, and, if Nikki Sixx is to be believed, one upped the guys in Motley Crue by snorting a line of ants off a sidewalk.

I used to do a really funny impersonation of Ozzy in high school, based on his appearance in The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. The key to the impersonation — mine, anyway — is to start talking about something, do some random British-sounding mumbling in the middle, and then end the sentence with some compeltely non-sequitur phrase. “The key to writing a good song is (mumble thingy stumble mumble) scrambled eggs.”

The first time I saw Ozzy perform live was on September 25, 1992, in Oklahoma City. It was a fairly infamous show; Layne Stayley, lead singer of opening act Alice in Chains, had just broken his leg in an ATV accident and performed the entire show while sitting on a couch.

The next time I saw Ozzy was in April of 1996, with openers Type O Negative and Sepultura, before the split. On that tour Ozzy’s backing band consisted of Zakk Wylde on guitar, Mike “Puffy” Borden on drums, and Robert Trujillo on bass who was on loan from Suicidal Tendencies as he hadn’t yet joined Metallica. When people asked me what songs did Ozzy perform I would just say “all of them.” Like, every Sabbath song, every Ozzy song… just everything. What a great, great performer.

Had that show been a few years later, I probably could have afforded or even obtained tickets. In 2002 The Osbournes debuted on MTV, turning the former self-acclaimed “Prince of Darkness” and his family into household names. Before The Osbournes, metalheads like me had posters of Ozzy on their walls. After that show, you could buy doll versions of the entire Osbourne clan and give them to your kids… which I did.

The Osbournes relaunched Ozzy’s career and put the rest of his family’s face in front of the world, too. I had mixed feelings about the show at the time. I didn’t care that Ozzy was often portrayed as a fumbling and occasionally feeble old man; it changed him from being the Prince of Darkness to an old goofball. The upside to it all was an entire new generation of kids discovered Ozzy’s music, which almost sorta/kinda balences out the fact that the show also helped launch Kelly Osbourne’s singing career. Oof.

When I was a kid, Ozzy Osbourne was scary but in a comic book way. In “Bark at the Moon”, Ozzy drinks a potion (a’la “Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde”) and turns into a werewolf, only to be pursued by townsfolk and spend a lot of time posing in front of a fog machine. It’s silly. It’s a three-minute horror movie that aired on MTV multiple times a day.

In the early 2000s a friend gifted me a mega-guitar amp, one with four 12” speakers and a zillion watts of power — a bit overkill for a guy who barely noodled around on the guitar, but it made me feel like a rockstar even while playing songs in my living room. It took me a long time but I finally learned that opening riff to “Crazy Train”… and “Paranoid” and “Iron Man” and a lot of other Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne songs. You would be hard pressed to find a metal guitarist that, if they weren’t directly influenced by Sabbath, was influenced by a band that was influenced by them. For six decades, Ozzy put out some of the greatest music of all time.

Rest in Peace, Godfather of Metal.

When I was a teenager, music was everything to me. It wasn’t just a form of entertainment; it was a big part of my identity. By the time I hit middle school all my old Star Wars posters had come down and been replaced by pictures of Motley Crue, Metallica, and Ozzy Osbourne. I sorted my friends into groups based on the music they listened to: I had my heavy metal friends, my alternative friends, and my rap friends. One time while flirting with a girl I asked what kind of music she was into. When she couldn’t name a single band or even a song she liked, I lost interest in the pursuit. I knew then and there it just wouldn’t work out.

A subset of one’s music collection could be found in a person’s car. There were people who kept a few cassettes scattered around their center console and in their glove compartment, but real music aficionados like myself carried tapes around in large briefcase-sized cases. Most of those cases held 30 cassettes — three rows of ten — but I ended up with a double-sided one that held 60. The top of the case was filled with 30 metal tapes while the backside was split between rap and alternative. (In what world would an animal put the Cult next to the Cure?) The collection was painstakingly curated and sorted — not alphabetically, but by bands and subgenres. By the time the early 90s rolled around, the metal tapes had to make room for a row of grunge.

One band I never got into was KISS. I was too young to experience the first wave of KISS with makeup, and the 80s version of KISS dressed in neon seemed geared toward the ladies. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a lot of KISS’s earlier material now, but if I had my choice between Metallica’s Master of Puppets and KISS singing “Tears are Falling,” put me squarely in camp Metallica.

In the fall of 1989 a friend of mine invited me to go to the state fair with him and some of his friends — a group of guys I knew of, but didn’t know well. I had just turned sixteen and was old enough to go to the fair on my own. When I was a kid, going to the fair with my parents was all about walking through the buildings, looking at livestock, and eating food. Now, as a teen, the fair was all about the midway — the rides, the sideshows, and the nightlife.

I don’t remember whose car we rode to the fair in that evening, but I could tell it wasn’t my crowd by the music we listened to: Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and KISS. This was all new to me. Everything about the evening was just a little off.

After parking we entered the fair and made our way down toward the midway. To get there we had to walk through a long line of vendors. Each vendor sat underneath a tent with half of their goods inside their tents in the shade and the rest spread out on tables, cooking in the sun. And while the stuff they hawked inside the various buildings was crap that didn’t interest me (Gunsu knives and knock-off sunglasses), the vendors lining the way to the midway contained a goldmine of treasures for teens. We’re talking small mirrors with band logos on them, bandanas, belt buckles, knives, handcuffs, and Chinese throwing stars, all baking in the heat under a mixture of smells: body odor, fried food, and weed.

When I was a little, little kid — four, maybe five years old — my grandma took me to the grocery store with her. While there I saw a Brach’s Pick-a-Mix stand. These stands had bags which customers could fill with hard candies and caramel squares and buy them by the pound. I knew that the candy was not free, but having it all out there was too tempting for me. I reached over into one of the bins and picked a piece of candy. I then circled the display with the candy hidden in one of my hands, desperately trying to open it somehow within a closed fist. When that didn’t work I turned around to lean up against the display and, with both hands behind my back, opened the candy. With one hand I slipped the wrapper into my pants pocket while then pretending to cough — again, I was five years old — and slipping the candy into my mouth.

Lest you think I was too young to understand what I was doing, I was positive that the minute I ate the candy, sirens would go off. Each time an announcement on the PA system would begin I just knew they would be shouting my name — or worse, paging my grandmother. It was too much for me to take, even as a child. I never again stole anything from anyone.

Until that day at the fair.

I don’t know what made me do it. It was a crime of opportunity, really. Sitting on the very edge of a table I was passing I saw a tape: a copy of KISS’s latest “greatest hits” album, Smashes, Thrashes, and Hits. The tape was so close to the edge that, had anyone bumped the table, the tape would have fallen into the street.

In a timespan of less than five seconds I spotted the tape, realized the vendor was inside his tent and could not see me, and — as I walked by — snatched the cassette from the table and dropped it into my pants pocket as I passed by.

Immediately someone walking behind me shouted, “Hey! That kid just stole a tape!”

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What I should have done was play it off as a joke before walking up to the vendor and paying for the tape. That’s not what happened. Instead I panicked and began to run. I ran as fast as my stubby little legs could propel me. I darted in between couples and around families through a crowded midway. After a block of running I began cutting in between tents, zig-zagging my way toward the rides as if a sniper was taking shots at me. I didn’t know at the time that nobody was chasing me. In my heart it was a fight or flight moment, and baby, I was flying!

According to Google, approximately 82,000 people a day attend the Oklahoma State Fair. I was wearing a black t-shirt and a pair of blue jeans and it’s a good bet thousands of other kids were dressed just like me. Finding me again would have been like finding a needle in a haystack, but that didn’t seem to slow my pulse.

In the days before cellphones, getting separated from your party was a pretty big deal. There I was, with 82,000 other people, no sign of my friends, and no ride home. I’m sure I had a quarter in my pocket for a payphone (my mother wouldn’t have let me leave the house without one) but didn’t want to use it. Even if I called my mom for a ride home, how would I make my way through the SWAT teams that were surely waiting for me just outside the gates?

Eventually I did catch up with my friend and his pals, right outside the Man Eating Chicken tent (a story for another day). I’m sure we rode some rides and went to a few sideshows but frankly I don’t remember anything else about that night, other than the fact that I spent the entire evening waiting for someone to recognize me and yell for the nearest cop to arrest me.

On the ride home that night, I pulled the tape out of my pocket. “Hey, put this on,” I said. Finally, I had an “in” with the KISS crowd.

The tape, of course, was damaged. No audio would play from the right channel. I had half a copy of KISS’s Smashes, Thrashes, and Hits… the left half. Whether the vendor knew it was bad or it had been damaged by sitting out in the sun, I never knew. All I knew was, it hadn’t been worth it. Even if the tape had been brand new and undamaged, it wouldn’t have been worth it.

I kept that tape in my tape case for the longest time. I never listened to it, but I kept it there as a reminder. Every time I looked at it I got a pit in my stomach.

And, true story, a few years later someone broke into my car and stole, among other things, all my cassette tapes. Including that one.

I grew up with one foot in the city and the other in the country. My childhood neighborhood was located right where two cities and counties came together. Our phone number belonged to one city and our mailing address belonged to the other. Technically I didn’t even live in the same city where I attended school, but I could hit it with a rock. To the south of my neighborhood was a convenient store where my friends and I played arcade games, bought soda and candy, and skateboarded until the owner would run us off; directly behind my house was an unkempt creek that might as well have been the jungles of Cambodia. We lived ten minutes away from a grocery store and less than a hundred yards from crawdads and snakes.

Most of the neighborhood kids I ran with were a year older than me, and most of them had one or more older brothers. When they weren’t busy beating us up they would share stories of girls and beer and cars… all sorts of things we had no experience with or were even that interested in.

One story I remember the older kids telling me about were the Great BB Gun Wars. The wars took in and around an abandoned house not far from our neighborhood. No safety equipment was involved, although there was apparently a gentleman’s agreement as to how many pumps a rifle could be pumped before firing. While nobody ever lost an eye or ended up in the hospital, it was apparently an errant shot to someone’s forehead that put an end to the war.

I had no interest in partaking in a BB gun war — like, ever. In a neighborhood full of reindeer who liked to occasionally lock antlers to sharpen them up and see who was the strongest, I was Rudolph — a weirdo who liked to read and play on the computer as much as I liked being outside, was always picked last when it came to neighborhood sports games, and would find an excuse to go home if forced to take my shirt off in a “shirts vs. skins” game.

Eventually those older kids grew up and moved away, and then it was our turn to rule the neighborhood. We were the ones with motorcycles and go-karts and eventually cars and stories about girls, even if most of them were made up (both the stories and the girls). I don’t remember terrorizing any kids younger than us. We were a more civilized ruling class.

I don’t remember where I first heard about Roman Candle fights. If you don’t know, Roman Candles are tubes full of fireworks that shoot about ten fireballs out of the tube up into the sky. I believe the directions say you’re supposed to bury them in the ground before lighting the fuse and running away, but none of us ever did that (unless an adult was around). We would just hold the tubes in our hands, light the fuses, and shoot them into the sky as if we were wizards shooting fireballs from a magic wand. One day we learned that Roman Candles can backfire and after somebody shot themselves in the crotch with a fireball, we learned to hold them out to our sides after lighting them. Amateurs would hold one up like the Statue of Liberty’s torch, while the rest of us would light two at a time and hold one in each arm as if they were a snow skier’s poles.

Somebody somewhere once saw a beer, a tube, and a funnel all in the same place and said, “hey, I got an idea!” I can only assume something similar happened the first time someone shot a Roman Candle at another person. Now like I said, I don’t remember where my friends and I heard about Roman Candle fights — in fact, I think the only thing we had heard about Roman Candle fights was the name. None of us knew what the rules of engagement should look like. All we had was the name to go off. And to be quite honest, I’d rather get hit with a fireball than a BB any day.

In the summer of 1990 I had just finished my junior year of high school. I and most of my friends were all working at various fast food restaurants. Even though most of us were only making $3.35/hour (minimum wage in 1990) or maybe a few coins more, this new source of income was enough to fuel our increasingly dumb ideas. It had paid for the rope we used to pull one another on a skateboard behind our cars, and for the wood we used to build increasingly large and sketchy bicycle ramps.

And when pooled together, it was enough to buy a couple of cases of Roman Candles, especially on July 5, the day fireworks are sold for pennies on the dollar before being packed up to be resold 51 weeks later.

In the end three of us agreed to do battle: myself, my friend Jeff, and an acquaintance, Bob. Jeff and I had been friends since middle school, but Bob was a newcomer to the group. I didn’t even know him all that well — my friends had met him through vo-tech and he started coming around. Bob was the type of guy who would snort packets of sugar and chase it with packets of hot sauce — anything to get attention or impress his friends. Tlalking him into a Roman Candle fight wasn’t that difficult.

The rules of engagement were pretty simple. Each of us would start in a different driveway. Putting your hand on the garage door at the end of that driveway was your base, a place you could not be shot. Other than that… I don’t think there were any rules. There was no score, and certainly no safety equipment. The three of us divvied up the Roman Candles we had purchased and went back to our assigned driveways before someone shouted “GO!”

It should be stated that word of this insanity had spread. In my mind a couple dozen kids (and more than a couple adults) had gathered to see what we were up to. My next door neighbor’s mom stood by with a garden hose, ready to extinguish anything that might catch on fire — you know, a front yard, someone’s house, a kid’s t-shirt…

Upon hearing the word “GO!” the three of us slowly walked toward the center of the street with lighters in one hand and Roman Candles in the other. Each of us had our own style of attack. I’m the sneaky and shady one, the one most likely to shoot someone when they aren’t looking. Jeff is more fearless and brave than I am; he’ll walk calmly into battle and calmly back to his base when it it’s time to reload. Bob was like a kamikaze pilot who would run toward us at full speed with no plan as to what he would do when he was out of shots.

For a few minutes, it went about as expected — three teens all wanting to shoot fireballs at one another with none of us particularly wanting to get hit by one. If this had been Call of Duty I would have been a sniper, trying to hit opponents from afar. Jeff would be a guy on the front lines who advances, finds cover, shoots at the enemy, and strategically retreats. Bob was Leroy Jenkins — run toward the enemy and engage as quickly as possible, consequences be damned.

The thing about me and Jeff is that we know one another; I know he’s fearless and he knows I’m a sniper. As the two of us began approaching one another in the middle of the street like it was high noon in an old western, we suddenly heard Bob yell as he ran toward us, full speed with a lit Roman Candle in hand. As I turned in hopes of guarding my face and taking a fireball to the back, I heard a sound. The sound was similar to that of a can of pop opening after being shook violently. In this case, it was the sound of a Roman Candle fizzling out.

Like I said, jeff and I had known each other for several years at this point and the two of us have always had (and still have) the ability to communicate simply by looking at one another. Without saying a word, the two of us lit our Roman Candles and began to chase Bob.

“Base! I’m safe!” he yelled as his hand touched the garage door at the end of his assigned driveway. Whatever he said next was cut off by the sound of the first two Roman Candles hitting him squarely in the chest.

“Stop!” he screamed, quickly balling up into a fetal position. We did not stop. From a distance of no more than five feet away, Jeff and I stood over Bob, shooting him repeatedly in his back and side. While I don’t think he got burned, his formerly white t-shirt definitely had round burn marks all over it by the time we were finished.

By the time we were finished pelting him, everyone who had come to see our neighborhood’s first (and potentially only) Roman Candle fight was either clapping or cheering.

It’s been 35 years since the Great Roman Candle Fight of 1990. I still talk to Jeff multiple times a week. Neither of us know what happened to Bob.

When my kids were younger we would buy them an assortment of fireworks to pop on the Fourth of July. My wife always makes sure there is a pail of water nearby and enforces all the safety warnings and labels printed on the side of each firework.

I have been instructed never to tell them this story.