Life Bytes: Chapter Two

Welcome to Chapter Two of Life Bytes. I’m not entirely sure why I’m calling these things chapters when they’re really just a series of blog entries, but I am. So deal with it. Anyway, continuing with the ‘if this was all a novel’ theme, click here for the back-of-the-book description of what this particular bit of insanity is about, or skip ahead and click here to jump straight into Chapter One. The choice, Captain Planet, is yours!

Also, my birthday is this week, so give me a present by sharing this series with your friends. Go on, click one of the share buttons above. It won’t kill you.

Chapter Two

Christmas, 1983

In the months and weeks leading up to every Christmas morning of my childhood, my parents, being a strange and conniving pair of offspring generators, would begin the annual tradition of convincing my sister and I that we lived in a Dickensian tragedy of abject poverty. We were told to expect no presents each year, on account of how we were likely to be shipped off to a workhouse at any given moment. Of course, it was always a lie, but we always fell for it all the same. Because we were kids. And we were stupid.

One side effect of my father working at an electronics store in the ’80s was that he was always bringing home interesting gizmos, which was great when it was my Atari, but when my mother began Christmas morning in 1983 by saying, “Wait in the hall with your sister until Dad finishes setting up the video camera,” his unlimited access to gadgetry began to take a turn for the worse.

This was the early ’80s, back before you could just whip out your cell phone to record a video. Instead, there was a lengthy setup period involving plugging a giant, over-the-shoulder camera into a VCR you had strapped under one arm while the other began the bizarre finger waggling necessary to synch the camera to the recorder and set the white balance. Of course, this was after you rigged enough lights to trigger a full-scale DEA assault today, just so you could kinda-sorta make out the various quivering shapes as human when you played the tape back later.

The downside to all of this video prep work to an eight-year-old waiting to see what Santa Claus brought him is that I was stuck in the hallway for what seemed like just shy of ten minutes passed eternity. The upside, of course, is that the video couldn’t be instantly uploaded to the Internet, because Al Gore hadn’t invented it yet.

“Ok, come in!” my mother shouted in the hesitant tone of someone who doesn’t know if the red light on the camera means it is – or isn’t – working.

A half-second later…

“No, wait! Stay there!” she yelled, louder and with panic. My sister and I could make out the muffled voice of my father trying to convince her that everything was fine. “Are you sure?” we heard her ask, worry and disbelief dripping from the question mark.

“Yes, sugar. The red light means it’s on,” said my Dad in the slightly increased volume and annoyed tone of someone who’s just realized that conspiratorial whispering just isn’t going to cut it.

“But is it recording?”

“Yes, honey.”

“Are you sure, because the VCR doesn’t look like it’s recording.”

“Is the red light on?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s recording.”

“Ok. But are you sure?”

My father’s sigh was audible far in the hallway as my sister and I finally decided to just sit down, leaning against the stuccoed wall while we waited. After about five more minutes of persuasion followed by confusion, followed by frustration, followed by reluctant acceptance, we finally got the all clear to come into the living room.

Approximately .0003 seconds later, I lost my damn mind.

Imagine this kid, only worse.

Insanity, it should be noted before we go any further, is a legal term rather than a clinical one. It is sometimes used in courtrooms to defend the crazy actions of crazy people on account of how they can’t be held responsible for all the crazy stuff they’ve done because they’re just so filled with crazy. However, it is primarily used to defend the crazy actions of sane people who, for whatever reason, briefly come completely unhinged and run about doing stupid things. This is called Temporary Insanity, and the point is that it has absolutely no bearing on whether a person is actually crazy or not. It’s just one of those things that happens inexplicably, like Austria’s Falco. Or blue eye shadow.

“WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!?!?!?!” I screamed as I rounded the corner and saw the gorgeous yellowed box of computational glory that would take over my life for the next few years. It was already plugged in and turned on, with a small television set on top of the case as a monitor. Again, I screamed. “A COMPUUUUUUUUUUTERRRRR?!”

I spent the next few minutes chanting some variation of the words ‘what’ and ‘computer’ while flailing my body around in the most spastic way imaginable, which is saying something if you can imagine me as a skinny little eight-year-old with a bowl cut and freakishly long arms. At some point, I calmed down and stopped embarrassing myself, but the videographic evidence remains to this day. Fortunately, it’s currently trapped between dimensions in the magnetic tape of a VHS cassette, and I have no plans of releasing it into the wilds of the Internet. So don’t ask.

I have no real memory of anything else I got that Christmas. When I look back on that morning, all I can see is the title screen to a game called “In Search Of The Most Amazing Thing” flashing on the television monitor of my Franklin Ace 1000. The computer was one of the many Apple ][ clones that flooded the market in the days before Apple employed specialized assassination squads to murder anyone even thinking about copying their engineering, which meant it was pretty much an exact copy of the famous personal computer that launched personal computing.

And I loved it.

Enter the solitude

By the end of the third grade, I was more or less out of the 'friends' I'd made during my Atari days. Sure, there were a few kids I knew that still liked to come hang out with me, but they were all infected with a severe case of nerdism, so they didn't count. Except that they did and I just didn't realize it at the time, on account of how I'd also been infected with the dread disease and just hadn't been smart enough to realize it yet. I would, though. And soon.

My third grade class was called "The Apple Core" because our teacher had a thing for apples, both the fruit and the computers. Our classroom was completely decked out with both.

Nerdism: It's nothing like this.

A typical third grade day in the Apple Core often meant arriving early and staying late, although this was more of a problem specific to my own experience rather than a summary of the average day for the rest of my classmates. At some point during the day, my teacher would say to me, “Go get me your Apple, Kristian.”

And I’d go get my apple, which was a bit of red construction paper cut out in the shape of the fruit. Every time we did something good in class, the teacher would make us go get our apples so she could whip out a hole-punch and stab a tiny circle or two into the paper. She called these ‘nibbles’ and they were the currency of the classroom. If you wanted to use the bathroom, you needed nibbles. If you wanted to go to recess, you traded nibbles for time. And, if you were like me and the only thing you cared about was getting to use the computer, you needed nibbles for that, too. So I loved bringing her my apple.

Of course, the teacher hadn’t quite worked out all the kinks in her system. For one, any fool with a hole-punch could create their own nibbles, which was surprisingly easy to get away with, provided you didn’t get too greedy with it. Second, since her currency was subtractive rather than additive as concerns the paper of the apples, it was impossible for her to remove nibbles once they’d been spent. If you were bad in class, she’d just rip your apple in half and toss it in the trash – but if you hadn’t done anything wrong, you got to keep your apple if you had a remainder of nibbles after concluding whatever trades you’d made with her.

The smart kids (us nerds) figured out early on to always leave a few nibbles on the apple, rather than use them all up in one go. That way, she’d put your apple back on the paper tree she’d constructed on one of the room’s corkboards. And, the frantic life of a third grade teacher being what it is, she would promptly forget that you’d used any of your nibbles. Between sneaking a hole-punch into class and our teacher’s lack of foresight concerning the remainder situation, my friends and I got a lot of computer time. All three of us.

We’d often stay in at recess to get some computer time in so we could die of dysentery or infect our wagon trains with cholera. And when our parents were late picking us up, we’d while away the time selling digital lemonade…when I wasn’t busy cleaning out my desk, of course.

Our teacher had a habit of periodically dragging my desk into the middle of the classroom at the end of the day and dumping its contents onto the floor. I was a bit of a hoarder in those days (and my wife will say I still am), so this was her way of making me purge: through public humiliation and staying after school.

But I like to think she was just looking for the hole-punch.

Searching for the most amazing thing

I spent the better part of the year at home with my Franklin, trying to complete the game I’d gotten for Christmas. It was a fun, if infuriating, little game from Spinnaker Software. Technically, it was ‘edutainment’ software, but this was over a decade before some asshat invented the term during the ’90s dot.com boom. To me, it was just a game, much like Oregon Trail, Lemonade Stand or the truck driving sim we played at school where you lived the glorious, text-based life of a long-haul trucker. Yeah, we were easily amused in the ’80s.

Anyway, In Search of the Most Amazing Thing started off with you, the player, being summoned by your Uncle Smoke Bailey to go searching for “the most amazing thing”. He provided you a ship called the B-Liner, which let you explore the world and interact with its shy inhabitants, who you communicated with by way of drawing out little line patterns that the game turned into tones called Musix. It was a weird little game.

I spent hours, days, weeks and months subsisting on the questionably-named food called Popberries while dodging deadly Mire Crabs in my jetpack and gathering intel from Musix trades, all with the singular purpose of discovering what (and where) the most amazing thing was. Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was doing.

The world of In Search Of was divided into the surface world and the underworld of the Mire. The game constantly warned you against going into the Mire, and suggested you get out as quickly as possible if you ever went spelunking beneath the surface. It was so dead-set against you strapping on your jetpack to go underground (yeah, it didn’t make a lot of sense) that it was pretty much the last thing you’d ever do.

So naturally, it’s exactly what I did.

One day, after finally getting so frustrated with the game that I decided to just murder my little pixelated character before rage quitting the game forever, I took him deep into the Mire. Very deep. So deep, in fact, that I eventually got bored and just wedged a book onto the joystick so he’d keep flying to the bottom of the Mire, sinking further and further into inky blackness with each refresh of the screen. So gleeful was I during these final moments of the little bastard’s life that I actually remember sitting there, watching him fall while I stared at the screen and smiled. The dude was going to die, and I was going to watch it happen. Evil had taken hold.

Except the guy never died. He just kept on falling and falling and falling. I was beginning to lose patience and was about to just switch off the computer and do something sensible like give the floppy disk a nice warm bath in soothing lighter fluid when it happened. The screen dissolved into nothingness and a bit of text began typing itself before my very eyes. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was something along the lines of, “Congratulations, kiddo. You found it! The Most Amazing Thing is…YOU!”

I just sat there, blinking my eyes in disbelief. After months of struggling to complete this game, I’d finally done it. On accident. While trying to murder the main character.

To this day, I don’t know if I just got lucky and accidentally exploited a bug in the game’s code, or if the programmer actually meant to bury the end of the game at the bottom of the Mire for whoever eventually discovered it through research and determination. In my case, it was pure homicidal rage. All I know is that I’d finally won, and I was done with the game. I felt great about that.

And a little ripped off. It was kind of a lame ending. Besides, I already knew I was amazing. Spinnaker Software could have saved us both a lot of time by just admitting that up front.

In any event, as soon as I walked away from the computer, I immediately called all two of my friends to tell them the news…and I distinctly remember how excited both of them weren’t. They didn’t seem to be impressed at all, which served as my first lesson in the harsh realities of life: No one cares about your shit but you.

Unfortunately, that particular lesson is one that would haunt me for the rest of my life, straight through to the present day.

And because I still haven’t figured out that no one cares about my life but me, be sure to come back next week for Life Bytes: Chapter Three!

There will be dragons….