Theatrical Muse Reboot - #57 - Describe your funniest childhood memory
You know, I'm not entirely sure what I would call my funniest childhood memory. I recognize a lot of these things I start with a certain lack of certainty (haha, that's just a funny phrase, how oxymoronic) and almost always end up on my soapbox by the end of things, but I guess that's just how I do things. Bumbling into the right answer one blind trek through the dark room of my mind at a time. This is probably how anyone goes about doing anything but it strikes me as particularly funny coming from me for reasons I can't quite narrow down.
I don't exactly understand what qualifier we're using for 'funny', here. There are probably a lot of things that seemed really funny to me when I was younger that looking back on now I wouldn't call very funny at all. A lot of things that I thought were hilarious at the time that really angered or scared my parents because of the danger or stupidity involved in them. A lot of cruel things that might have come up in that way that things do, during childhood; after all, I think children--especially those in the middle school range--are actually the biggest assholes on the planet. Yes, I did just go ahead and say that. Children have an amazing propensity for being very self-centered at the end of the day and don't yet have the filters programmed in that generally keep us from being complete doucherags to each other. Socialital niceties have to be learned, after all, or it's all the law of the jungle out there. Go read the Lord of the Flies if you don't believe me. How you get through life having missed that book is beyond me.
Anyway, I am casting back through the annals of my memory to try and find the thing I would account as my funniest childhood memory. This might take a moment. Or, you know, a bunch of moments.
Shit.
You know, for all my vaunted memory, I can't actually come up with anything. THAT'S right, you just saw Martin Grey admit that he can't remember something. I mean it's not that I can't come up with childhood memories, I have plenty of those, but it's more that something about being put on the spot has sort of made all the potential memories shrivel up and die in the back of my head. Something like the intellectual--or retrospective?--equivalent of erectile dysfunction. Who would have ever thought that a rock star would suffer from something akin to performance anxiety?
I don't remember my childhood being filled with a lot of moments that could have filled a ninety-minute comedy flick. Maybe that's par for the course; real life so very rarely actually mirrors what's going in those movies. There are a lot of moments in time where my own dumbassery got the better of me, mostly when I was in high school, so maybe a few of those will stand in for the missing acme of the hilarity of my childhood.
There were a lot of soda machines in the cafeteria of my high school. I guess they figured if we were going to hop ourselves up on sugar and caffeine and refuse to pay attention in class they might as well get some money out of it. I can't count how many times those sodas were rigged against the user. I think I spent half of my high school career with sticky eyebrows on account of some soda or another exploding in my face while I was trying to eat lunch. Maybe that's the real reason I started with the dredlocks. It was just getting impossible to comb my hair out with the residue of Mountain Dew holding it down.
There was the time Rudy walked right off the end of a retaining wall because he wasn't looking and managed to faceplant into a trash bin. He's always been kind of small so that mostly ended with two be-Conversed feet sticking out of the top of the bin kicking wildly and a lot of Spanish cursing. Rudy was a prodigy at cursing, he learned how to do it at a pretty young age. Or there was the time I was over at Alan's house and didn't want to go home so we took the front wheel off of my bike and hid it in the bottom of his pool (it was tarped over) and then claimed some hooligan must have taken it and I couldn't go home until we hunted down the culprit. That lasted a couple of hours before it started getting dark and my Dad came over to put an end to the nonsense.
I was like twelve, and my butt was red for two hours after that, but boy it felt like a stroke of genius at the time.