Trade San Francisco for Cair Paravel

            by Sam Finn

 

            Have you ever seen a kid take hacks at the air with a floppy plastic sword?  That’s joy at its purest.  As long you don’t care about accomplishing anything, imagination will let you do anything you want.  Spending all your time in reality is just not as fun.

            In preschool I had an amazing time without toys or money.  The best game we ever played was Meanest Cowboy.  The idea was that the Meanest Cowboy runs around the playground shooting non-participants with his fingers while the rest of the boys follow him in a single file line making gunshot sounds.  Since I made up the game and had a black paper cowboy hat, I was always Meanest Cowboy.  One day another boy came up to me and said that he wanted to be Meanest Cowboy for once.  “Fine,” I said craftily, “I’ll be Meanest Sheriff,” and the game continued on with me still leading the column of cowboys.

            That game didn’t go over too well in kindergarten because the new kids there didn’t understand the necessity of me being alpha cowboy.  Instead, in what I think was a much less sophisticated game, we ran around the playground like we were Power Rangers and shot people with our invisible ray guns.  I campaigned very heavily at that time to get my name legally changed to Jason (like the red ranger) but to no avail.  It would have really been helpful too, because there was another kid in my class named Sam Finnegan-Brown.  Jesus, it was my name but more so!  Thankfully, he left in first grade to go to a different school and I never saw that copycat again.

            It was around this time that I started spending a lot of time at my friends’ houses on playdates.  The simplest games could hold our attention for hours.  The rope tied to the tree gave birth to a sport like the long jump, except you swung and flew off for distance instead of jumped.  The circular trash can was the funnest way down any hill, extra points if two people were inside.  The hose…well the hose was practically worth its weight in candy.  Water fights of course, but the Mud Bog was its biggest contribution.  We’d dig holes in my friend’s back yard, put planks of wood on the piles of dirt we’d made, and flood everything with a foot of water.  Then, we turned into pirates and threw our treasure (floppy disks, paper clips) into the murky depths.

            After kindergarten, my friends and I felt a new sense of independence and power.  We were old now, in a grade.  It soon became obvious to us that we needed to make a secret fort to live in and possibly take over the world from.  We did it in one of our backyards.  Using small shrubbery clippers from my friend’s basement, we carved out enough space in the hedges to fit four of us, but it wasn’t enough.  We needed more room for supplies so we expanded our cutting and even removed a plank in the neighbor’s fence.  Unfortunately, we ended up cutting most of the hedge down by accident and the neighbor yelled at us for invading his yard.  The hedge fort was over, but we didn’t mind too much; our moms seemed to all know its location anyway.

            One afternoon we decided to dig as deep as we could and make a tunnel under the street; we somehow knew there was a big open space under the intersection that would be perfect for a clubhouse.  Once we realized how hard digging was, we gave up on the tunnel but kept going with the Hole to see how deep we could make it.  Six feet, it turns out, and in the end we got stuck at the bottom.

            It was always a lot more fun planning and making things than actually using them.  I built a six foot wooden ladder to escape my room with but it ended up being more convenient to just jump in the end.  In hindsight, it would have been perfect for getting out of the Hole, but as it was, it probably just got used two or three times.

            In middle school, everything seemed to change.  It was more than twice as big as my elementary school and had the feel of a small city.  I could no longer walk at my own pace in the halls, just be swept along by the faceless human current.  At lunch, people hung out in big groups together to do nothing.  Often, there’d be just one real conversation going on between the most interesting (loud) people while everyone else listened and reacted.  In sixth grade I was lucky enough to be one of those people actually talking and I had a great time.  A lot of that popularity was due to my then unparalleled wit, but to be fair, it was a lot easier to be funny in those days.  My legendary burns included gems like “Todd likes Sharon” and “Dildoface!”

            When we were done eating lunch, we didn’t “play” like we used to.  The mindset was completely different now; everything had to have a purpose.  During elementary school, I used to play games like ball tag at recess, where you made up new rules every day and couldn’t win or lose.  We never could have done anything so childish at middle school.  Even if we’d wanted to, the school board had conspired to make the yard as uninspiring as possible.  The only thing distinguishing it from a battle-ravaged Eastern European city were the basketball hoops, sometimes tilted and always with torn chain nets.  Now basketball had a point, to win, and you had to play by the rules to do so.  I loved basketball then, still do, but it wasn’t the creative fun I used to make for myself.

            Of course, the time after school was different too.  There weren’t as many adventures anymore, mainly because of lack of interest, and I spent less time outside than I ever had before.  Mostly I just bummed around other people’s houses, doing very little.  We didn’t have to use our imaginations because we had video games to let us play out our fantasies.  The problem was that they weren’t our fantasies anymore, but some unknown Japanese programmer’s fantasies.  Nothing accomplished was special in any way because every possibility was designed to be possible; it was impossible to have your own idea.

            I regained some individuality in high school but I didn’t get a lot of chances to use it.  Homework flowed insidiously into my free time until nothing was safe from its relentless grasp.  There was never a true off day.  Doing sports kept me happy but exacerbated my time issues.  Cross country wasn’t just an hour of running every day, it was also waiting an hour after school, stretching, showering, and getting extra sleep.  In the spring, I’d do the same thing with bike racing.

            School, homework, work out, go home, shower, dinner, homework…by the time I was done, it would usually be around nine or ten and I often hadn’t taken a real break.  To make up for it, I’d stay up late talking on the phone or watching the kids on That 70’s Show sit around and do nothing.  To really have a good time, I had to wait for the weekends and try to cram in all the joy I could into two days.

            And what did I do on the weekends?  Basically just sex, drugs, and rock and roll, except that the closest I ever came to that was MTV and an acoustic guitar.  In reality, I would just try to see as many of my friends as I could.  Card games, bike rides and eating stuff from other people’s refrigerators was pretty much par for the course.  Never a party guy, my idea of a wild night was watching The Wedding Singer, Love Actually, and Wayne’s World back to back to back while eating quiche.  Sometimes I just wanted to think as little as possible.

            Once or twice a month, three of my best friends would come over to play Diplomacy, a board game like Risk.  Supposedly we were reenacting World War One but it was actually a lot more violent than that.  If someone conquered somebody else’s province they were probably going to get wrestled to the ground or tackled against the wall.  My closet door still hangs askew from Russell being thrown into it.  One time Daniel threw my laundry basket at Xander without knowing that my cat was inside.  The cat understandably freaked out, scaring Xander into a fetal position and making Daniel the butt of animal cruelty jokes for the rest of his life.  After the game we’d eat some crackers (we couldn’t cook) and play Stairs of Death.  One person put on a pair of inflatable shoes about two feet long and tried to fight his way up the stairs as fast as he could while the rest of us tried to stop him with pillows, stuffed animals, beanbag chairs, and human missiles.  It usually ended with the shoe guy throwing everyone else into a pillowy moshpit and jumping up and down on them.

            I found ways other ways to get back to my past too, even if I really was too old to be having that kind of fun.  As a camp counselor it was completely acceptable for me to run around shirtless in the sprinklers and toss little kids in the mud.  I got amazingly good at Pattycake and was famous for my lunchtime stories (mostly autobiographical with some dragons thrown in).  I became a folk hero.  The young would sit around campfires at night whispering about that rogue group leader who once, with the help of ten children, successfully lifted a Porto Potty off the ground.  Babysitting was fun too.  The last time I was there, my young wards dressed me up like a pimp and we walked down Solano so I could pick up some chicks.  It didn’t work but we had a good time anyway.

            In general, I was content with life, but I couldn’t be happy until I found love.  All those gratuitous hours spent watching romantic comedies had warped my mind irreparably until getting a girlfriend was the only thing that mattered.  Sometimes I’d just lie on my bed daydreaming, looking at the ceiling with a vacant smile.  Every year or two in high school I would fall for a new girl, and every year I would screw it up somehow.

            Ninth grade was the first time I was really crazy for a girl.  She sat next to me at the beginning of the year and she would smile or laugh whenever we talked.  When our seats were switched and she was across the room, I would spend whole classes staring at her with glassy eyes, having what Mr. Powers would call ‘fucking incredible daydreams’. One day she pulled out a banana, peeled it, and took a slow sensuous bite. I laughed so hard I almost threw up on the kid in front of me and got yelled at for disrupting class. She gave me her phone number but I was too nervous to call.  Instead, I chose to maintain an awkward silence for a year and a half and then ask her out (rejected). 

            As a junior I went to the other extreme and called the girl without being given her phone number.  In my defense, my friend dialed the number (from a phone book) and shoved the phone in my hands before I knew what was happening.  I wish I could say we were drunk or high but we were really just stupid.  Amazingly, it almost worked.  After some understandable awkwardness, we had a nice fifteen minute conversation and made plans for Saturday night.  On Saturday she called to say she was sick; we would do it Sunday.  Unfortunately, she was sick Sunday too and missed the next week of school.  We never talked about it again.

            During senior year I was more hopelessly devoted than ever.  I was friendly with her during class and we’d usually walk down the hall together after school, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask her out.  Whenever a good moment came up, I was too caught up in my own nirvana to consider ruining it.  I’d been told she wasn’t beautiful, but whenever I looked at her I saw the most stunning girl in school, and my stomach would jump for joy.  People would always ask me why I had such a big grin on my face after first period (“I love math!”).  One day during model congress, my beloved was making a speech when I walked up to the podium and kissed her.  And when she kissed back, pressing her warm body to mine, I didn’t care about anything else in the world, even that it was just a dream.