1993.

New Year's, 1990! It's the end of the world as we know it.  My first memory was right after Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve "American Gladiators" premiered on NBC right in front of me and my EXTREME brother with no WARNING!!!  Needless to say we had to beat each other up with nerf guns and couch cushions with our friends every chance we got after sampling the eXtreme power of American Gladiators and the spirit of yuppie "one the edge" cross-training going on across the world, America.

We got a Super Nintendo.  This was super important.  So much so I'm almost ashamed of now as an adult.  I met a different kind of friend, definitely NOT a yuppie.  Jim Averill.  Jim's parents were old hippies and punk rockers from the 70s as far as I pieced together and they had the coolest books at their house like "Bored of the Rings," the old Tolkien satire.  Jim said to my dad the first time he came over to spend the night, "death was my only enemy until it saved my life."  That really amused him and kind of disturbed him, but my dad was always opened minded and had a pretty cool science-fiction book collection of his own, even had a couple of 80s L Ron Hubbard thrillers in there.  He's read everything by Frank Herbert.  He's a better reader than me.

So yeah, as we approached puberty I rebelled against the jock-driven order of the playground and elementary.  I found pain and death at the top where the tallest kids would fight each other to be the best at kickball or basketball and there was all this hatred.  I had sort of an in with those kids because I wasn't afraid to fight anybody or feel pain, but at the same time I found on top of this hierarchy was a forced system of cruelty - either make fun of the kids that are weaker than you and win and be cool, or not be #1…

I rebelled against this and went off to the periphery of the playground games to bring all the outcast kids together into strange games of tag built around our favorite "violent movie" themes.  We'd play "Aliens vs Predator" before we ever heard of it.  I mean you could make up any ego and we'd just run around the slide shooting at each other and pretending the sand was lava or the whole thing would explode in 30 seconds like the colony in "Aliens."

The cute girls didn't like this in me.  I had good clothes and thus rich parents and could play sports so all that I had missing was the ability to make fun of people and thus make myself move up the social ladder in order to be a successful person.  I tuned out.

Jim and I would organize funny plays with Ryan Fournier and Mikey and Corey Woods and whoever else making fun of Star Wars decades before the youtube Star Wars satire trends.  And yeah, I'm sure everyone did it, but I remember specifically the scene in Jedi where the Emperor is electrocuting Luke and Vader looks back and forth before he kills the Emperor.  Well anyway, we just had him look over and over again for like 40 seconds rotating his head and had a big laugh.  We used to hide in these tunnels and say "the birds" where gonna kill us like Hitchcock's "the birds."

The teachers said I did not listen well but I got great grades.  They said I was compassionate but too unafraid to do my own thing and not worry about sticking out.  They said that to my parents as a sort of compliment and a concern.  I went to the principal's office occasionally for acting out and trying to be funny.  I wasn't as bad as the text-book problem children, but I was running with them a little.  I always had to do my own thing.

What's important for this period is that my relationship with Jim continues even though I told him a couple months ago that I was Jesus and he is a devout Satanist.  I told him how this didn't bother me and how I lament how popular culture lumps Jesus into cliches and into the opinions of the spheres that follow me.  That night Jim admitted seeing the lightning flash out of my body around his town of Viroqua, WI and the power in his town was knocked out but what was reported to be a squirrel although I wouldn't doubt my presence disturbed the electrical equipment and I apologize.  Jim said, "I always knew when I was a kid I would be the observer."  He too admitted his feelings of fate along with the apocalypse and the return of Jesus.

If you read the sutras, particularly "The Threefold Lotus Sutra" it speaks of when Sakyamuni and Maitreya would preach at the assembly and flashes of light would appear in the air and shine throughout the universe even flashing in the lightless hells.  This is the very light you are seeing for Maitreya is me, and Maitreya is Jesus Christ.


Me and Jim wrote this song from Children of the Night and turned it into "Ninjas of the Night."  This was during the TURTLES era and we shoulda sold the song to Pizza Hut and became awesome.  We still should.  I was out delivering pizzas one night in the mid-00s and I remembered it and when I got home I sat and wrote it all down.  Jim will come back into play latter with these Zany ideas as the story now moves into the painful trials of puberty and the mid-90s….