Category Archives: Seriousness

'member when…

Posted by Beebins on

I feel a lil’ old. The kind of old that you feel when you see chitlins running around that were born during years you actually recollect. Chitlins, such as they are, that weren’t even properly formed a decade ago. So I got to thinkin’: Rather than writing up the tired and overdone retrospective of the current year or a “hey here’s what might not be fail and AIDS in the coming year” list in honor of the new year, why not take a look back to the last time there was a nine at the end of year? Way back in 1999, a whoooole decade ago. Here’s what I remember:

- Half-Life. Actually scratch that- I remember the world BEFORE Half-Life. Before breaking open crates for ammo was just plain logical, before playing a game with a voiceless hero was an artistic “choice”, and well before ten minute opening sequences set in-game, on a rail, were tired clichés (yay Far Cry 2!). But in January of 1999 I opened up my new PC Gamer (South Park “The Game” on the cover; whoops) to find their highest-rated game ever, and that fall when I finally played it, I was completely sucked in by it. Without the blood on, of course.

- Team Fortress 2 is announced and man, was it awesome looking. Team-based WWII combat (and with Saving Private Ryan fresh out on VHS, a WWII game was all sorts of awesome), intense action, lips that would synch to player voices… I ‘member seeing it in PC Gamer and thinking it would be every bit as awesome as Half-Life. And when it was actually released THIS year, some people thought it was indeed (despite tossing out the WWII thing because let’s face it- that horse was flogged to gibs a good five years ago).

- Tribes (yeah, I was a gamer; deal with it). Listen here kids- before your fancy, state-of-the-art Crytek an’ Source an’ Bungie games, there was Tribes: Team-based gameplay, matches with up to 64 players (not to mention mods that took it over 100), multiple types of vehicles including APCs and scouts, sniping as a strategy, mortars, and of course, maps with endless terrain. In 1999. With DIAL-UP. You wouldn’t have the Battlefield series (especially 2142), you wouldn’t have Planetside, and given that Halo was an RTS game when Tribes 1 was finishing up development (and didn’t officially release until almost a year after Tribes 2), you probably wouldn’t have that either. Am I biased? This game ate up half my childhood, so probably. But I still believe it to be one of the most influential sci-fi shooters and multiplayer games ever made.

- Columbine. Just got home from school, passed by the TV and there were all the folks piling out a school window into the hands of SWAT teams. Then I went outside and shot some hoops. Nobody was getting shot, I didn’t live in Colorado, and it was a nice day out. I mean I had a fucking paved driveway, come on.

- Limp Bizkit. Heavy guitars that we uncultured lil’ fellas had never heard the likes of before? Dirty lyrics that we had to hide from our parents? A vocalist that was all rebellious sounding and a face-paintin’ guitarist? You bet. We were doing it all for the nookie. Sadly, the only reason we were was because we were too young to understand just what that meant and why it’s one of the worst choruses to ever reach mainstream popularity.

- Korn. Follow The Leader. This was the forbidden music. All In The Family? You didn’t listen to this anywhere within ear-shot of your parents. Personally, I found the whole thing so foreign it was a little intimidating (what’s a twelve year old who grew up listening to Bryan Adams supposed to make of Davis’s spastic beatboxing?), but fascinating enough that, for awhile, I’d listen to “Freak on a Leash” before getting out of bed in the morning for school. And this was long before “burning a CD” meant anything other than lighting it on fire, so we got out our best dual-deck cassette players and copied it to tape from that-one-kid-whose-parents-didn’t-care-what-he-listened-to. Thanks Levi.

- Bawitdaba. Da bang da bang diggie diggie said the boogie an’ up-jumped-the-booty.

- Napster. Holy shit, music on your computer?! 96 kbps mp3 files that take only half an hour to download? The future was already fuckin’ there, man.

- Tech TV. Ok, this wasn’t 1999 specific, but still. Leo. The Screen Savers. Call For Help. Gamespot TV (or “X-Play” as it is today). I look at G4 and still shudder with sadness at how they destroyed one of the best channels on television.

- The Sixth Sense, and the shithead at recess who spoiled the ending for me. Thanks Matt.

- 13th Warrior. Did anybody who made this film like it? Nope. Did anyone see it when it came out? Not really. Did I love every single Viking-laughing, gory arm-falling-off-the-bed moment of it while my mom winced beside me in the theater? Yes. Yes I did.

- Star Wars! Oh the merchandise, the hype, the throngs of crazy people waiting in line on the news. Mountain Dew and Pepsi cans with Star Wars stuff on them, tie-in contests from nearly every consumable-item-producin’-company you could think of, new toys, an impossible PC game! It was all terribly exciting. Especially since I was entirely too young to understand just how awful Episode I was when it finally came out (though I was astute enough to think Jar-Jar should die a painful, fiery death).

- New Years Eve. So there I sat, in the living room half-paying attention to the TV and playing Pro Boarders. Yeah, back when this was graphically acceptable. Everyone was all “OMG the world is gonna end” and it was allegedly suspenseful (unless you were hidin’ in a bus buried under ten feet of earth, like so many in Montana), but I personally agreed with the whole “we didn’t start counting at ZERO you morons!” philosophy. And then the clock turned, there was much hullabaloo on the television, and I went to bed.

Year turns are, in themselves, kinda boring like that. But thinking about all these memories, most of which I can remember like last week, it’s more than a bit amazing how much life has changed in just 10 years, both personally and from a global perspective. 10 years ago I was in sixth grade, awkward and quiet. I’m now a college junior in a mass media major, where I want as many people as possible to see what I do. Football at recess was the source of all our drama, now it’s Myspace. The internet was a fad; it’s now as necessary to life as water and food. Most of us couldn’t imagine owning a cell-phone (and in all honesty, most people in Troy still can’t), much less uploading videos we record on one to a website that’ll share them with potentially millions of people.

So on this New Year’s Eve, I look back at life in general an’ think about how it moves through time. It’s been quite a trip so far, and with any luck, each and every one of us will have more bizarre memories to share after 2009.

Unless the weevils revolt.
Goddamn weevils.

A thread of childhood

Posted by Beebins on

Trampolines are a subtle way for parents to try and kill their children. “He accidentally launched off the side and compressed his spine” is easier to deal with than “I accidentally threw the little shit off the roof” I guess. But somehow, almost invariably, the kids with trampolines were the ones you wanted to hang out with as a wee tot.

Before living in Troy, one of my best friends in New Meadows had an enormous rectangular one (in addition to a SNES and an RV that we used as a fort- fuck, that kid was awesome), and it was always a matter of begging my mom to be able to play on it. As long as somebody was watching. Not that we needed supervision- Christ, I was five, maybe six years old. Practically an adult. So we’d bounce up and down, getting ridiculously high (stop giggling), and accidentally steal each others’ bounces. On a side note, I always found that damned terrifying- here you are, being innocently thrown up and down on this rubbery material, you land, and then fucking LAUNCH high enough to see your mom in your house five miles away yelling “you’ll break your legs on the way down!”. Here I am, 21 years old, and I still don’t understand the physics of that. Probably why I’m a film major.

Anyways, despite the fact that I loved hanging out with that kid, that trampoline was a big deal in itself when ever I went over to his house. So when we moved to Troy, I gravitated towards a neighbor who had all of the same cool shit.

I remember the first time I saw the Ramondellis- 250 Hummingbird Lane was a freshly tree-decapitated plot of dirt with a massive hole in the center. They (I’m not sure who “they” were, only that in later years it became obvious that “they” suck at building basements) were just starting to do the concrete for the basement, and I was standing in the backyard (though it was still just a bunch of entertainingly malleable dirt/clay). It was cloudy I think. Anyways, from up the back hill come these two unfamiliar big kids that my brother apparently knew, but I didn’t. Jeni and Griffin. They had left Shan below (typical game of “let’s see if we can get rid of the little one”), and a few minutes later he appeared.

Shan was a douche. I like him fine now, but not everybody is a little ball of sunshine as a child (myself obviously included). But we were neighbors and I was new, so a friendship was “encouraged” (after all, the only other person my age in the neighborhood was Jordan, and wimmins were gross). And it was ok, because he had cool stuff like a console and, yep, a motherfucking trampoline.

So we hung out occasionally. That’s how I came to know Rich, as “Shan’s dad”. A large man (at least when you’re seven years old), a scary man (when he yelled at Shan), and a man with a hammock.

Trampolines. One summer day we were bouncing- typical day really (if only fucking around on a trampoline were a common activity for adults). Something happened that caused me to swear. Like most kids by the age of six, I had a full vocabulary of swear words (as much as parents will try to pretend it’s not possible, sorry, we were all swearing at recess by kindergarten) so it wasn’t a huge shock to Shan or myself. But just to be a dick, as his dad walked by, this happened:

“Oh and Dad, Chris is swearing.”
Oh no. Oh no oh no oh no, he’s gonna tell my mom.
There’s a fretted brow and look of dismay.
Rich: “How old are you Chris?”
“…10”.
He shook head, then went back inside.
No parents were informed.

I figured he was an alright dad at this point.

Flash forward to Junior High: One of those bullshit days where we don’t get P.E. and are forced into Health stuff in the library (Health: where, prior to broadband, all adolescents got exposed to childbirth, successfully killing masturbatory needs for a week). We walked out of the doors by the library- you know, the ones that take you through the last little vestiges of Jr. High lockers, the half lockers stacked on top of each other where those unfortunate souls with last names at the end of the alphabet are relegated to. Nowhere near as cool as a locker in the hallway.

Anyways, it’s myself and Matt Etienne. He’s on about something, I forget what, and I probably wasn’t paying attention anyways. Mr. Ramondelli was though:

“You talking to yourself Matt?”
I snicker.
Matt sputters.
“Hey you know what Matt, that’s ok. You know, some of the best conversations you’ll ever have in life will be with yourself.”

That quote has stuck with me as clearly as the day he said it (at least six years ago). It was just… True. Even before he said it and certainly to this day, I’ve always been able to figure things out better (or just amuse myself) via self-discussion. I guess it was just refreshing to hear an adult say that.

So what’s the point of all these trampolines and swearing and schizophrenia-in-denial anecdotes? Childhood. Growing up. Troy, MT. These are the things that Mr. Ramondelli has been and always will be inextricably linked to for me and, I believe, for most of the kids that grew up with me.

Living in a town of one thousand people means that you see the same faces almost daily for the duration of your stay there. For me, Mr. Ramondelli was “there” for 13 years of my life. Around the neighborhood, at school, at the store where I worked- and the fact that he no longer is, well, it could be sad and I’m sure it is for a lot of people. But for me… It serves as a catalyst to all sorts of great memories I hadn’t thought about in years: Line-driving a softball at him in P.E. and getting that “holy shit” look in return, busting out the scoreboard with a kickball and wondering if he was gonna flog me, watching him try to deal with Kenny (“my dog eats popcorn”, “…That’s great Kenny”), having to do those hilariously-bad plays in World History (solely for his amusement, I’m convinced), his curiously wandering into Mr. Jones’s class when he was bored across the hall, and just that enthusiastic voice that no one who ever hears it will be able to forget.

Mr. Ramondelli.
Yeah.
The next generation of Troy kids will be missing out.