Exposed underwear, and salted nuts
Not too long ago I found myself sadly listening to ’80s popular musical hits while pondering a large bag of salty nuts.
Sitting there, I came to a realisation, I’ve enjoyed a lot of pleasurable experiences with nuts, salty or otherwise, over the years, and that pleasure is something I might never have known but for a single incident that occurred when I was around Nine-years-old.
So what happened?
I hated a lot of things as a child, balloons, clowns, other nine-year-olds, the Eurovision song contest and snow to name but a few, but nuts held a special place in hell as far as I was concerned I wouldn’t go anywhere near anybody’s nuts even if my life depended on it. So anyway, there was this girl that lived a few streets down, same age as me or thereabouts, let’s call her Belladonna, who despite my most vigorous efforts inexplicably liked me.
Now, I say she liked me, that was my parents interpretation of the situation, which was some serious bullshit. Because she “liked me” she would seek me out like a f**king hellfire missile in a cute dress and then kick me in the shins, hard, and laugh at me, give me Chinese burns* and laugh at me, slap me in the face (hard enough to give me a nosebleed on at least one occasion, oh happy times!) and, well, you get the idea.
Doesn’t sound so bad!
So anyway, I was minding my own business one sunny weekend afternoon, outside and doing my own thing because I was often not allowed to play inside, and trying hard to repress the aching loneliness that was slowly rotting my young soul from within, when who should show up! It’s Belladonna, and she has a big bag of peanuts. She knew I hated nuts, and presumably by now someone had told her that some people could die if they ate any, so she put two and two together and got “Let’s kill Nathan by force feeding him peanuts!”
Long story short, well not that short, it turns out that I’m not allergic to peanuts and I absolutely love them!
Get to the point..
The basic gist of this is this, If I could go back in time I would tell myself to start eating them earlier. With this in mind, I got to wondering if there was anything else I would tell my nine-year-old self. This is what I came up with, in no particular order!
5. It gets better.
No, not life, that remains a steaming pile of decomposing rat faeces until you inevitably die, or at least earn enough money to move away from your parents, I mean gaming! At nine I was still working with a Commodore VIC-20, I mean have you ever tried to play anything meaningful on a VIC? There’s only so many times you can stare into the abyss made corporeal that is “Home Babysitter” before thoughts of hanging yourself with the Datasette cord start creeping in. It seemed that life had plateaued, but so much more was to come. Just knowing that I would one day touch the rainbow that is Paradroid, or experience Earthly nirvana in the form of Biohazard would make the dark times seem so much brighter.
4. Sometimes unpopular is underrated.
At one point in the ’80s I found myself the, err, proud? owner of a green-screen Amstrad CPC464. It was a present, someone actually went to a shop and said to themselves “Ooooh, what’s that dusty computer in the corner there, the one no-one wants, I know, that’s the one for Nathan.” I was so disappointed I almost burst into tears, it felt like someone had excavated my chest and filled the cavity with leaden despair.
Yeah, I was a real dick about it.
The thing is I grew to love that machine, I mean it! It was more colourful than the C64 (the machine I actually wanted), had versions of all the games I knew from the ZX Spectrum, had great sound, and, most of all, it was mine. I lost a good few weeks ignoring it and wishing I was dead though, and that’s time I could have spent learning to draw boobies in Kuma Artwork.
3. There but for the grace of god.
So while I got a PlayStation, and with it wonder that was Ridge Racer, a colleague at the time went a different way, he went the way of the Saturn and Gale Racer. There was a time, when I was considering my options with a wad of cash in my hand, that I felt that Sega would be the better call. I had the option to import a Saturn instead of the PlayStation, and with it all the legacy 2D sprite based flotsam that infested the early release schedule. I could have been the one staring at Gale Racer and wondering where it all went wrong. I guess I got that one right, but still, just to be sure I would definitely tell myself to avoid that particular shit-show!
2. All things come to those who wait.
In time, I did grow envious of one particular colleague, while I had purchased a PlayStation and now grew weary of the one-trick pony that was Ridge Racer, he had a Sega Saturn and was reaping the bounteous branches of a release schedule full of the sort of sprite-based goodness I now missed. And Virtua Fighter Kids. The thing was that I had shelled out so many readies for the ‘Station that I could barely afford my mortgage anymore, and this made me sad. In desperation I actually became friendly with the guy so I could do social things like go round his house and play, which given my range of small-talk (“huh.” / “Yeah, cool.” / “Wh.. What? Um, coffee please?”) was no mean feat. It didn’t have to be so hard though, shortly afterwards a customer order for a Saturn was cancelled at the company I was working for and the boss figured he would struggle to sell it (We weren’t a game shop) so he just gave it to me! I guess what I would tell myself is that people suck, but you can profit from that suckiness!
1. Tucking in can be leaving out.
So, yeah, about the same time as I discovered that peanuts weren’t fatal to me if ingested, I also discovered that for several years I had been a laughing stock to most of the adult members of my family. Life gives with one hand, takes with the other I guess. I had a problem when I was little, I was quite tall for my age but, crucially, also very thin. I mean skeletal. This meant that most of the clothes I had were either massively too big for me or a little bit short. Being a self conscious little-boy I came up with a cunning plan to avoid exposing my belly every time I stood up, I tucked everything in!
To my underpants!
Turns out that this was a bad thing, as instead of showing everyone my belly-button I had been exposing my underwear while simultaneously giving myself a wedgie from the age of six, and no-one thought to tell me until my Gran took me aside at a family dinner party to suggest that maybe I find a more sartorially elegant solution to my height to clothing length dilemma.
I miss my Gran. 😢
Cover image courtesy of Petra / Pixabay
* I know, not hugely PC, but it was the ’80s