THE DUMB STUFF

When I was a kid me and my brother used to play this pretend game called “Jonny and Freddy”. The narrative, such as it was, was about two orphaned toddlers who lived in a hospital, and the general idea was they were kind of an element of chaos who break loose, take over the hospital PA, yell a bunch of gibberish over the loudspeakers and for whatever reason the entire hospital staff has no way of stopping them. As the game evolved there are a couple of doctors who are the only people that can reign them in. There's a fat doctor named doctor Shepard and then there's a thin guy and I forget what his name was. I portrayed Jonny as wearing a light blue onesie and having black or brown hair that stuck up in all directions. Freddy wore a black onesie and had red hair that stuck up in all directions. Past the initial notion of the two babies wreaking havoc on the PA system there really wasn't anywhere you could take it. I think the two doctors were eventually supposed to adopt them or something.

Jonny and Freddy. I have no idea where the hell that was going. Probably nowhere, which added to its naïve charm.

Funny thing was, I remember my parents having a distinct hate-on for the game. I mean, they actively DID NOT WANT US TO PLAY IT.

Kinda like when I had this dayglo orange rabbit's foot that I used to call “Blurp”, and I used to pretend it was a Kaiju, draw comics where it was fighting other monsters and whatnot. Blurp conveniently disappeared at one point. I spent months, maybe years, agonizing and trying to find it. “I'm sure he'll turn up,” my Mom told me. Later on she confessed that Blurp “disappeared”, because it's just not socially acceptable for a 12-year-old to be running around with a stupid orange rabbit foot, squawking, “BLURP! BLURP!”

I never got to have any fun back then.

THIS WEEK'S PLAYLIST:

SKINNY PUPPY-”Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse”

SKINNY PUPPY-”Rabies”

(All Skinny Puppy all the time!)

Copyright 2018 Molotov Editions

YOU CAN PICK YOUR FRIENDS, YOU CAN PICK YOUR NOSE....

“Repeat after me,” said Billy Weldon. “AAACK!”

“Repeat after me,” I SAID. “AAACK!”

“No! No! You're nor supposed to say, 'repeat after me'....”

Those childhood games confused me.

(They still do.)

Billy Weldon was my best friend in those days.

We climbed trees, caught frogs, built secret forts and sang dirty songs together.

When he was mad at his mother he'd call her “Bean Bag”.

She was none too amused but I always laughed. That joke was pretty funny.

His Dad was a weird, white trash neo-Nazi type

who never wore a shirt and always yelled at me to get out of his yard. I didn't understand that—I didn't

understand a lot of things.

Being friends with Billy was an odd experience.

One minute you'd be laughing and joking, the next he'd turn around and slam a rock into your face.

The subtle nuances of kid life were a a bit of a head-scratcher to me. You had your enemies and they were your enemies. You had your friends and they were also your enemies. Some concepts were never easy to grasp.

Once I was in a fist fight with Billy and he pounded my face in while his grandmother stood on his back porch cheering him on. I wasn't sure why she wasn't cheering me on, since it was obvious to me that I was the Good Guy.

My family moved away and Billy and I fell out of touch.

We met again in our early teens and hung out for an afternoon. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't quite the same.

He played football. I drew pictures.

He liked John Denver. I liked Alice Cooper.

Some differences are just irreconcilable, I guess.

Billy died when we were both in our early twenties;

He was in the Army and he crashed his jeep on base. Very bad form.

I was a dishwasher at the time.

I didn't go to the funeral—I had to work that night, but there wasn't really anything left

that I could relate to.

“Repeat after me. AAACK!” He said.

“Repeat after me. AAACK!” I said.

Copyright 1996 C.F. Roberts, 2015 Molotov Editions