Skip to main content

Keep the car in drive.

The other day I decided that it was finally time to get rid of my toys. It was something that I had been thinking about for a long time, but never acted on for multiple reasons. Chief among them, the fact that I still played with them from time to time. I'm just a boy. I can't resist opening my Lego box or busting out my action figures every once in a while. You just get that urge to sit down and let go of all of the nonsense you're forced to deal with every day. Plus, I mean, some of these toys are pretty badass. I'd sit down and play with them until the sun came up, unfolding a plastic drama on my carpet and realizing I'd never be able to part with any of it. The sentimentality and the creativity they fueled.

But, after months and years of telling myself I would and after months and years of being told I should, I did.

And it was so easy at first. I mean, when was the last time I played with G.I. Joe? Or those generic soldier action figures? Just as soon as I'd spotted them, they were packed up in bags and boxes, ready to disappear. And then, the old books I never read. And I cleared the clutter off my bookshelves and consolidated everything to maximize space.

Then, I sorted through the Star Wars action figures. It was almost a mindless operation. I'd grab a handful of them or one of the vehicles and drop it into the cardboard box. I didn't want the Tatooine Landspeeder with the faulty windshield anymore. I didn't want the Naboo Speeder they'd bought for me to play with at the wedding in California anymore. I didn't want Prince Xizor or Grand Moff Tarkin. Or the rest of the characters I never really liked. I did want, however, Luke Skywalker. The figure I'd gotten for Christmas and held onto so tightly while watching Return of the Jedi again, lightsaber in his gloved hand. I did want Han Solo, frozen in carbonite. The figure I convinced my mom I needed to have in order to finish my collection of protagonists from Return of the Jedi. I pulled aside just a couple of memories for myself, and put the rest away. It was easy enough. Just cleaning.

Finally I got to the Lego box.

The bad Lego sets left immediately. The knock offs, the sets I never liked, the little $2 ones, the old kits I never played with in the first place. But, as the remaining bricks dwindled, I came to the real reason I still had a Lego box in my room. Among the handful of vehicles that remained, a collection of unattractively constructed ships and cars that had cannibalized greater builds, sat my prized fleet. Three jets I'd built years and years before. They were, in many ways, perfect. The look, the design, the capacity, the function. Even seven or eight years later I was still proud of them. And among those jets, the first one I'd built. It even had "wing lights" to differentiate port from starboard. And a space for the engine. And turbines. I played with that ship for years. I did research into jets and jet design and engineering before I finished building it. I read books, searched the internet, and studied pictures. In the end, I built a Lego jet that I was more proud of than many other things I'd done in my life. In the end, it was a bunch of random bricks that a boy squeezed together. In the end, it wouldn't fit in the bag whole.

And in the end, I broke it apart.

It was a horrible, gut-twisting feeling. As I peeled away the layers of Lego bricks, I could see where the dust had settled and outlined where they had once sat. It wasn't just a Lego jet I was dismantling and dropping in a box to give to some unappreciative child. It was my childhood--an integral part of it, at least. With effort, I dropped all the pieces into the bag and put it with the others. I saved my little Lego pilot, though. My Lego avatar who flew that jet to Hell and back a hundred times over. Who climbed mountains and explored the ocean and colonized space and defended foreign civilizations. Through whom I lived vicariously.

I hate growing up.

Comments

Unknown said…
We have something in common there..
I like to play with it to..

Popular posts from this blog

Side effects include constant irritability, being an ass.

It was a typical day in MUS 307 . A typical day where nobody pays attention to anything the professor talks about. A day where people play shitty flash games instead of take notes. A day where people sit and refresh their Facebook newsfeed instead of follow the slides. A day where people roll their eyes and go to sleep instead of listen to the music examples. A day where people get up and leave ten minutes before lecture ends instead of having the God damn decency to stay the whole time and pretend to be interested. I mean, if you're going to be so unaffected by the music we're studying in class then why the fuck did you take the class in the first place? Fuck it makes me mad. And I haven't even started talking about that fucker who sits in the back and tries to whistle along with every song that gets played in class. Alright, dude, we get it: you are just too cool and you know everything about jazz, ever. You know every standard ever written and everybody's so...

So, I mean, there's that.

So I went to church again. I slept through most of it but I woke up to hear this: "Oh Lord you are holy indeed. You are a fountain of holiness." Dang, I thought. That is pretty holy. I saw The Nightmare Before Christmas again recently. That is still one of my favorite movies. I never get tired of watching it for some reason. I remember the first time I saw it quite clearly. I was about 5 years old at the time, I think. My dad and I were in the Albertson's video store looking for something to watch as was our Friday night custom. I walked through the aisle, glossing over the scary movies as quickly as I could without looking like I was scared. My dad pulled me aside with a video in hand. "What do you think about this one?" He held up a cover with a skeleton on the cover and 'nightmare' in the title. "It doesn't look very good." I said nonchalantly. "It looks lame." I rolled my eyes and turned away, playing it cool....

Pseudo-science (like psych).

I consider myself a man of science. I try to approach problems and deal with them logically, using observations previously recorded to handle new problems. So of course my interest was piqued when someone I knew posited that men are needier and more complicated than women. An interesting theory. But to properly examine it, one must understand the concept of sexual selection and its two aspects: male competition and female choice. Which brings us to point one: men are needier [in relationships] than women. This is true. In a natural/primal setting, the males are generally love-'em-leave-'em kinds of guys. Their main objective is to reproduce as much as they can. Humans, in their infinite wisdom, have decreased the emphasis on this to the point where it has become a footnote in male purpose. Civilization dictates that, instead of finding a partner for the sole purpose of reproduction, males find females for life companionship. With the effective removal of their natur...