Being up in the middle of the night in the summer of 2003 watching adult swim in my (parent’s) basement as a kid. I had horrible anxiety and trouble getting along with other people for various reasons, and my parents weren’t much help. When I was here watching this, in a room I never usually went in, it was like being in a different world. I felt calm for the first time in forever, and the weird adult swim stuff made it feel even more otherworldly and separated from my normal life. The adult swim bumps and content from that time are so cemented in my mind but looking at it now they’ve changed so much, so many times. I’ll still remember it the way it was.

The simple quiet of a warm summer afternoon. I’m watching one right now on a deck over looking a rocky yard and a small lake nearby.

I grew up poor and never knew it until I grew older. We had enough but never enough for luxuries. In the summer I’d have a breakfast of tea and toast and be gone all day. I would go home for a small lunch and that was all the food I had and I never cared.

On days like today, I would just go roaming around everywhere with my friends. Like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn we’d just be outside doing nothing and everything all day long.

I’m in my 40s now, my bones ache, I tire easily and my friends are long gone either on their own path or gone from this life.

I miss those days and I miss my friends.

Surfing

MULE on c64. Whenever I get a new computer I put an emulator on it first.

Being outside in nature. Even landscapes that look “dead” are full of life and history if you slow down and look closely around you.

I grew up wandering my grandparents’ woods as a kid, I associate being out in nature in general with being unobserved and not having to mask, which is just more relaxing.

$1,000 cash

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The smell of the white smoke from grass/brush fires, we had so many of those where I grew up.

Flipping over big rocks to check out the life underneath!

The Orion and/or Tristar pictures logo.

This sounds kind of sad, but bear with me. This was c. 1976-1980.

My father was mostly absent, but I prefered his neglect to his abuse, so that was okay. He’d go on business trips a lot. My mom was an alcoholic, and sometimes she’d be passed out for days. I grew up an only child in a suburban home, and some weekends a year, I had the house to myself. From age 8-12, I had a few weekends here and there where fortune fell upon me and I’d be alone in the house with no real responsibilities. Friday night home from school to Monday morning going to school, all I had to do was check if my mother was still passed out, and if so, it was like one long vacation from my life to be myself. Bonus if there was still food in the house, which usually there was something I could cook myself.

I wasn’t allowed to watch TV as a kid, except sanctioned PBS shows, but we had a small B&W TV in the kitchen for my mom’s soap operas and cooking shows. I’d drag up all my Legos, pour them on the kitchen table, and watch “illegal TV” all weekend while building stuff with my Legos. Eating when I wanted to, or not, and I had free reign of pretty much anything there.

My positive childhood memories are scant and few, and most are just things like that. Like “sometimes the sun came out, if only for a brief time, before the storms returned.” I have a lot more as an adult.

The Lion King and Shrooms. No, not together

Fresh cut grass before a rain.

Fresh cut cucumbers. When, growing up, I used to fish for Rainbow Smelt. Freshly caught, they smell like freshly cut cucumbers. I always get a flash back when I get that smell.

Am I the only one who can’t think of anything like this?

Flying ant day.

Once a year, on a warm and still summer evening, just on sunset, the sky would fill with hundreds of thousands of winged ants. It was magical.

Then one year we waited for them, but summer turned to autumn and they never came. And like that, the magic had gone forever.