In which the Audience is treated to a bit of an origin story.

I attended Catholic school as a child at what I can only assume was at the insistence of my father's mother who was a needlessly surly individual with a love of tacky horse statues, the bible, and poorly applied lipstick, in that order. The school was a large and unwelcoming brick building with an attached church and a playground made of concrete and donated railroad ties. The classrooms were equally unwelcoming and some equally concrete. Being in those classrooms felt like being in a box, and despite the love that I have for giant empty boxes that can easily be made into rocketships and caverns to explore, I hated being in school. My teachers never opened the windows which made the rooms stuffy and overly warm. Lessons were constantly peppered with thinly veiled scripture delivered in a way that wasn't fooling anyone and only succeeded in reminding me that before I could eat lunch I had to go to Mass, which was the most horrible thing I had experienced so far In Life. Being a standardly produced seven year old, it was hard for me to sit still and be quiet while a man in a dress swung a foul smelling ball around his head and spoke about things I didn't quite comprehend in a voice that sounded like nothing I'd heard on TV, and so was not worthy of my attention. As a result I was constantly talking and fidgeting and getting in trouble.

Standard Catholic school punishment for one of my age was Beating The Erasers. I'm not sure if you've done this before, but its wonderful. I couldn't fathom how people of apparent authority and education could view this as something to avoid. For those unfamiliar, Beating The Erasers would happen directly after lunch, when freedom and playtime were still fresh in my mind, and entailed taking a wicker basket full of chalk-dust covered board erasers that had been used all morning outside, which is exactly where I wanted to be. I was then required by biblical law to clean these erasers. To do this, one would hold an eraser firmly in each hand and smash them together with all the delight that a child who is knowingly about to be covered in dirt can muster. Each time I would bang the black rectangles together a plume of white dust would shoot out the sides inevitably clinging to my Jesus endorsed wool uniform. After several solid whacks the dust cloud would settle leaving me pale and ghostly with a white haze in my hair and on my face. The second stage of the sacred process would be to hit the erasers on the brick wall of the school, which would leave behind a white eraser shaped print that, thanks to my natural talent for Legos, had its potential realized and the side of the school quickly became the canvass for cityscapes, letters, and oddly boxy animals. The final phase would involve me wandering around the pavement kicking rocks and using my Giant Ghost Monster Talent to smash the newly discovered White Rectangle City until someone would realize I was missing and come to collect me. I was always careful to keep one dirty eraser in reserve so I could claim the job was not yet done. After all, Jesus doesn't like liars.

Perhaps a more appropriate punishment would have been to send me to the playground, which killed no fewer than two dozen children a year. The playground's outer perimeter was a chain link fence in a state of magnificent disrepair. Bits of sharpened metal jutted out at odd angles ready to skewer the next inattentive recess goer. Rather than tend to the inevitable bald spot that would occur in a playground lawn the school opted to bury the whole thing in loose gravel several meters deep. Walking from one place to another was like walking across the surface of a too soft mattress. Children were constantly falling in an effort to move from one death trap to the next. The only thing that made moving easier and contained the mountains worth of loose gravel were the railroad ties which were rivaled in pokiness only by the fence. Splinters were commonplace and removed with grim determination. The stabbing got in the way of a good slide after all. The only thing not always sucked into the mass of gravel were the posts of the swing set, which as far as I remember remained delicately balanced on the brink of toppling over with the slightest amount of movement. While I don't recall them ever actually falling, I do remember the terror I would feel when I would be on the swings and look down to see the post lift itself from The Gravel. The one upside to The Gravel was that, when compared to the surrounding cement and large chunks of wood, it presented a relatively soft place to land when, at the apex of your swing and terror, you would hurl yourself into the sky and hope for the best. While this plan never failed me, one of my schoolmates was less than fortunate and in a swing jump that would be spoken of for hours to come, failed to clear the last giant splinter and fractured his skull on a railroad tie. That was the third time I saw an ambulance in person, and it was still much larger than the toy version I had at home, which made me rather disappointed in my trinket. My schoolmate returned to school some days later with a shaved part on his head and several thousand stitches. I like to think he was never the same afterwards, or could suddenly play the piano, but I don't actually remember either way. No one bother to replace the blood soaked railroad tie.

The only pleasant memory I have of that school (aside from Amy, which is another story) was the Halloween Festival. It took place in a large empty building, perhaps the gym, but to be honest I don't remember my school even having a gym. Supervised Calisthenics apparently would have gotten in the way of Supervised Prayer. Regardless of where it took place, the Halloween Festival allowed me two opportunities: The chance to not wear my uniform, and the chance to win cake.

If you wore a costume you were allowed to participate in the Cake Walk, which involved a series of numbered sheets of paper taped to the floor in a vaguely circular pattern and worked much like musical chairs, with the participants walking around the circle listening to Monster Mash. The music would stop and with all the enthusiasm of a nursing home cribbage game Someone In Charge would call out a number. If you were standing on that number, you won a cake. An entire cake. All to yourself. When you won a cake you left the circle of paper and went over to the cake table where all the poorly made cakes were arrayed. My mother made the same cake every year. It was a bundt cake, chocolate with chocolate frosting, with candy corn arranged in some design on top. It was lopsided despite the use of a cake pan and perhaps eighty percent frosting, which made it the most popular cake on the table. It was a brown donut shaped pile of diabetes and I was always crushed when I couldn't win back the cake I had brought. As for not wearing my uniform, the Festival allowed me to essentially dress myself in any kind of ridiculous pile of stuff I could scrounge from my house. I would often wear pants as sleeves, backwards shirts, too large hats, and the occasional garbage bag. This of course caused my mother to not let me leave the house for fear the neighbors would think I was retarded. Each year I would come down the stairs with my newest "costume" and she would stand up, shake her head and point back upstairs. In the time it took me to return to my room and take off my Mattress Strapped To My Back outfit my mother would have created a masterpiece in seasonal horror using common household goods. My favorite was the mummy, which was made from our only white set of bedsheets and all the toilet paper in the house. She also managed to produce a small pile of makeup to color my face and hands with. It had extra Stringy Bits that dragged out behind me and tripped up my fellow Cake Walkers, which pleased me greatly. Her most awkward, yet in retrospect her most creative, costume was the Mexican Jumping Bean. I had been in my room de-costuming for no more than a few minutes when she produced a large frame made of sticks and circles of styrofoam. When I asked what it was she told me to be quiet and do what she said, which is how a good amount of her parenting went. It was strict, but remarkably effective. She had me climb into the oddly shaped monstrosity and promptly wrapped me in her favorite costume crafting tool, the bed sheet. This one was brown, and fitted, and was just big enough to cover the whole frame, leaving my head and hands free. I looked like Violet Beauregarde from Willy Wonka, but was an unsettling shade of brown. I couldn't move my feet very well and had to shuffle everywhere, which was fine, because I was supposed to be jumping anyways. The also gave me the chance to trod on Cake Walkers toes in an effort to cripple them, thus ensuring I got my own cake back.

I only attended that particular school until the third grade, but it was enough time that, without even realizing it, I learned the artistic value of not being worried about being dirty, became fascinated by my first Massive Head Trauma and was surprised that my mother was good at something outside the field of momhood. But even more importantly, it was plenty of time for me to figure out that conforming to what others wanted of me wasn't something I enjoyed and the further I was from what they wanted, the more cake I got. Which I still think is a good bit of Science.

In which The Narrator is informed that people still want to read this, and, in realizing he has nothing to say, instead recounts a tale from childhood.

When I was growing up I lived above a woman named Jan who was very fat and played the bagpipes. My family lived on the top two floors of the house, and she occupied the basement. I used to play in her yard all the time, because, due to my kindergarden idea of wealth and possession, since we lived in most of the house, all the yard should be mine. I was kind enough to allot her the small strip of weeds that ran down the east side of the house, which I also played in, but I never left my toys there, because that was her yard. I even let her keep some of her things in My Backyard. After all, even though I was six, I was still civil, and it helped that her doghouse made a wonderful ladder for me to get into my tree. Of course, every time I would climb into my tree she would release her dogs which were of a breed that I have never seen since and each were the size of tigers and had a taste for little boys. I would stay in that tree while she laughed, rolls jiggling, until she called off her hell hounds and returned to her bagpipes and I was able to run back to the front of the house to safety. I didn't like Jan. Once she let me try to play the bagpipes, but to prepubescent lungs this proves impossible. A fact which once again set her shaking like the green jello and marshmallow dish that my mother was convinced I loved. I didn't.  

When Jan moved out I declared a national holiday and promptly built a treehouse in My Backyard of staggering proportions using all the wood I could break off of our fence. I also moved into her apartment.

Upstairs, in my kitchen, was a terrifying door that had been painted over so many times you couldn't see the crack in the frame in some areas. It was also blocked by a table and several boxes and I was convinced that through that door came All Things Scary. As a child I was not often scared, except of course by the movie Pet Cemetery, and who wouldn't, and so it was no real challenge for me to move the boxes and the table, chisel away some paint and open the door. Once my mother found me in my newly claimed staircase she informed me that it led to Jan's apartment, which of course meant an Expedition was needed. The door at the bottom of the stairs was unlocked, but was slightly blocked by something on the other side. Being a small and spry Adventurer I squeezed myself through the small gap and found myself in Jan's vacated apartment. I also found myself mostly stuck behind an abandoned bookshelf. After being there for what I'm sure was months I was able to slowly squeeze into My New Apartment to find it was furnished with a slightly broken bookcase, two boxes containing things I no longer remember, a book of carpet samples, and several spoons. Over the next few days I moved out of my parents house and began moving things into My New Apartment. I took action figures, my pillow, and enough soda, crackers and candy to feed me until college. 

The next logical step was of course my housewarming party. This was carried out wonderfully thanks to Jimmy and Gabe, two brothers who looked nothing alike and lived around the corner from me. They were also the only two kids on the block who had their own television set. Once I told them about My New Apartment it was only a small matter of tricking their mother into leaving the house so we could go out the door with their tv. We planned for days and eventually decided that it was best to just wait for her to go to work and then hide the tv outside. Once darkness fell we would smuggle the tv around the corner and down the street to my house. The following night we did just that. The walk back to my house must have taken several hours and crossed many miles and the entire time I was convinced we would be jumped by any number of roving gangs with clever names, butterfly knives, and matching hats. Having executed our master plan to steal a television and eluding any potential turf war we returned to My New Apartment with the tv, which was joined shortly by my nintendo. We stayed up all night playing Galaga. 

As I sat there on my couch that looked suspiciously like a book of carpet samples eating candy from the bag with a spoon I felt sophisticated and adult. And I knew that I would never have a better apartment, regardless of how much fence wood I could steal.