Ninth grade (Wow still 1992 technically). School wise it was more of the eighth grade, skipping when I felt like it, lunches at home, you know the norm. A few consistent stories of never trying to make it on time for second period. Near Rico’s pizza in the same shopping center there was a family-owned doughnut store. They were known for not checking IDs on cigarette sales, which probably helped them fiscally being so close to a junior high. Well, in the mornings I would catch Chris H. and others on the way to school and double back with them to the doughnut store.

Yeah, with all the other stuff going on in my life, Chris H. and Jared are still around through eighth grade. They just never caught onto some of the other hobbies like I said. Along with that they tried going to Sam’s house just once, on New Year’s Eve 1991, of all nights and then shied away from it. They were looking for more edgy, cool kid things, I guess at the time, so Sam’s romper room wasn’t their cup of tea.

Although Sam might have been edgier than the both of them in all honesty. It was during eight grade that Sam famously told his father to “eat shit and die!” in response to the proposition that he should turn off his computer monitor so the screen didn’t burn in a destroy it. I don’t think at this point Chris H. was telling off his dad like that. Back to school mornings though.

Now I didn’t smoke but I enjoyed hanging out and not going to class so I would go with and just chill in the shopping center while we missed large swathes of my English class second period. Mom one day got a call on those truancies and later talked to me about them. She said she couldn’t comprehend why she would see Chris H. come to the door to get me and then watch us all walk the opposite way from the school, which was half a block away. Priorities Mom, priorities.

Later that year in English class I had a big clash over the state assigned Hartbill essay. The essay was a state requirement to graduate High school and was administered that year. The essay topics were out of touch topics developed by state officials in the education system trying to show off how important their plans are to cover up how meaningless a lot of their redundant jobs are. Seems I might have a bias here. So, 14- and 15-year-olds statewide, many of us in pretty nice simple happy lives, have to talk about deep meaningful life changing events in a structured soulless four-page essay.

Now being less than a year since Andrew and the train, any kid in our class could have milked that tragedy for an easy pass. I instead took it at face value, feeling gross at the idea of exploiting an actual tragic event to talk about how it was for me, and wrote some satire about Sam turning into a monster under the guise that turning into a monster was a change, thus a changing event. My mockery of the topic got me in a fair amount of conferences about why they couldn’t pass the essay. Seems I met with the requirements structurally and so on, but since the topic was not what they wanted they had to not pass the paper. And I had to hear about how if I would have just taken the topic seriously, I would have been fine. Probably because they had to fail me for mocking the stupidity of the assignment.

This led to some tension at home for a while when they tried to get me to take the essay over again. I refused basically on the grounds that their reasoning was stupid, and I would just do the same thing again. Chris M. helped highlight this all by writing some bullshit on an event that didn’t actually happen to him but was what the adults wanted to hear. Which was to my point and what everyone was just doing, writing a bunch of baloney to get the stamp of approval. Later in college I would title an essay “bullshit” about this entire event and the school systems need to have kids lie to them. Sadly, I think its lost to time now.

This made for a lot more tension in second period too. Because after a year of being tardy a lot, here I was fighting one of the main focuses of the year on grounds of trying to be so intellectual for students it veers the other way and having to endure a teacher for the class that counseling thought I should like. Why, well solely on the grounds that he was young and into heavy metal music. In all fairness that damned him right there, I had my rebel streak since elementary school, I had seen Star Wars, rebels are the good guys. I wasn’t going to be good for that class the rest of the year.

Third period was Physical Education in the ninth grade. I wouldn’t bet more than a quarter on who my instructor was for that class. I spent the first quarter of class that year walking the track with a young lady named Jeneve. How did that start I don’t know really. She was someone I knew from being a student at the school seventh and eighth grade. But prior to this class I had never really engaged with her. Perhaps it was that we both seemed to be over running the track, so a casual walk and talk became a good use of time.

What I do remember is as we neared Christmas break, she had a friend named Willow, who Chris H. had decided he needed to take to the school’s winter dance that was coming right before winter break. I guess one thing I can give Chris H. credit for was he was always true to himself on that front. While it seems comical, there is something reassuring that without doubt Chris H. has a damsel in his sights.

The girl named Willow was in his for this dance. Well, we had a problem. Remember those morning trips to the doughnut store? Remember the calls home and remember I just let detentions mount up? Because well who cares? Well, those are supposed to be cleaned off your record if you were to attend school events. Thus, he conned me and another friend into hard serving detention the week leading up to that dance under the pre-tense of taking girls to the dance.

I don’t know why the school allowed us to clean up all those hours in four days, seems Chris H. was good at whatever con job he was selling that holiday season. But there we were Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday sitting in the detention room to help Chris H. out.

And in this case, I can state the following. It’s weird being a sidekick to a plan. I don’t know how anything was setup, I just know the girl Chris H. liked was a friend of a girl I would talk to during P.E. She happened to go to a different school if I recall and therefore I was some sort of go between that also had to clean up their act for a week with Chris H. to make this all happen. What was this though?

Oddly I don’t remember the dance to well, I remember a very small amount of Chris H. being dressed up and then all of us hanging out on the lawn of the house across the street from the school and Jeneve spilling out her purse. And that’s about all from the very important freshman winter dance that I served some of my only detention for. What a memory. Decades separated I see what Chris H.’s main plot was there, but in the moment it didn’t feel like some take girls to the dance plan, it seemed like another episode of Chris H. likes a girl and asks her out in a different way. And I still don’t know if he used me and Jeneve in these plans or he just thought making us work together for him was helping a brother out, as the kids say.

By second semester P.E. I just remember playing with Kim who I would have my next period class with. I don’t know why the change. I don’t think it was because Chris H’s Christmas dance plan was a disaster or anything like that, in fact, I think maybe Jeneve just had a different P.E. class. And so, like the days of our lives or whatever, sand in an hour glass, semesters change and we spend P.E. with a different girl.

Now Kim we have met before, just not in name on here. She was our friend’s trepidatious friend from the last day of seventh grade. That was the first I knew of her, sitting quietly in the corner as the bigger personalities of that day did there talking. Then after that a mystery, she was kind of a school first goody-goody and so I didn’t pay to much heed. We had an awkward interaction at a school dance once before the ninth grade and that was pretty much it.

But this semester we had P.E. and Mr. Klinger’s fourth period art class together. For reasons that I also can’t remember, we just took up the front table as a two-person group and just drew and socialized the entire semester. To the point where the rest of the class just was a side note. The nice thing about having a Klinger art class too was the grade was never in question. You just turned in whatever you had at the end of the day, and you got your A.

First semester we had Art as well, we begin me in this case. I ditched to art class so much that it is hard to know what happened when over the course of two years. But I do know the most memorable punt, in the “punt, no punt” game occurred there.

So let me elaborate, for whatever reasons, in night grade a game was invited in which a young gentleman, if he were to bed over, would have to say “no punt” or, anyone in the know, would have the obligation to kick him square in the posterior. A stupid game yes, but it went on for a while.

As one might think, there was an incident in art class, where sometimes these bad behaviors would occur. One morning or afternoon, an eighth grader who had been participating in the game, in what I assume was an attempt to move up the social ladder, happened to bend over in front of Chris H, Jared and I think someone else that I wasn’t as tight with so I don’t remember who it was. Anyway, as he did so he forgot the magic words and a series of boots to the butt came out fast and hard. Chris H, as I remember was in a steel toed boot face too, thus when contact was made it was substantial.

I know this because at this same time, while “goofing around” at the L street house, Chris H managed to kick right above my eye with those same shoes. It stung, and when I went to check on it in the bathroom mirror, oh my, the swelling had created a baseball sized lump on my brow.

So, the boots to this kids backside, his name was Charles I believe, were no joke. So much so that, even though he had been playing things pretty tough with us older kids, the blows brought him to tears and an outburst about the situation. Much like Jared with the toy chest back in the seventh grade I think the pain ended up hurting his pride enough that it caused the event to push him over the emotional control we all try to have. Kid are cruel. And over the course of two years I seemed to be a party to some disasters in that classroom, but other than the incident in eight grade in the drama class, I was just adjacent and never saw the long arm of the law on these things.

And that was the morning for the end of the school year. Forget English class, come to P.E. and art and hang out with Kim. Who was not someone I normally would have been hanging out with at that time in my life. Of course, then it would be lunch, Chris M. and I would run off, then the second half of the school day would start.

Lunch was a pretty standard fare. Other than the one day in the spring of the talent show it was almost always me and Chris M. going to the L street house, Ramen noodles and Comedy Central. I feel like I have typed this before, but I wouldn’t know about Norm Macdonald’s family being in a duffle bag if not for the weird stand up clips show that was on during lunch time every weekday that year.

Fifth period Math that year had another long-standing story, which was although I passed the class, I had built up such animosity with the instructor that my credits weren’t awarded somehow and it was not until the last quarter of my senior year that oversight got fixed, giving me a little early graduation of sorts.

Considering how my math class the year before was, when I got the same teacher’s wife the next year, I thought things would be decent sailing. Instead, I got a throwback to the sit in one place and be quiet and thus math that I didn’t gel with very well. I was a talker, I talked. The year before talking was the least of issues in math so it wasn’t a big deal. This year it would be.

I got to know a girl in that class named Kelly. I knew of her, spoken with her, all the like, but I think it was this math class that we realized we had the same disruptive energy. I had found this in the eighth grade in the U.S. History, now once again I found another person to be quietly mocking the silence with. The game I most recall was pantomiming throwing grenades at each other. Why that one, probably because of the over acting of the deaths from shrapnel.

This behavior led to me getting some unnecessary attention and boiled over into just plain silliness. Late in the year getting up to get a calculator at the proper time got a tantrum from the instructor. Remember mainly because everyone else around the incident was in shock as to what was going on. An eighth grader in the class, Doug, who at that point I didn’t know very well even tried to speak up a little on that occasion. To no avail though. I hadn’t even prepped for a clash. It was a very random event but explained the negative moniker that class and grade seemed to carry with until it got fixed during my senior year of high school. Algebra one, same as Algebra two.

After Math though I destroyed my geography class. All the drama with my other “core” classes and then I get world geography for one semester and just slam dunk it, even with my rampant class ditching. Most memorably I did my large assignment on the country of Liechtenstein, which I attached an accompanying alternate historical timeline based on a Civilization playthrough. (About twenty pages). See that one computer game, miles of footage.

But most of ninth grade was art class, and ceramics class. Why ditch to the room when you can just have the class on your schedule. And this weird thing happens freshman year, they let you push some classes back to sophomore year, like Biology. So, I was able to just not have to deal with science class and whether I wanted to go or not.

Academically then maybe not the best year of my life either. I’m rebelling against the state exams by ditching English class to hang out with my friends working on a nicotine addiction, getting iced out in algebra and just skipping the other core course for the year. I come and go to school as I see fit. At school that is who I was. Now at home we had our side hustles with the computers and the BBS, and all the other things that kept the folks happy that things might turn out okay, but at school, yeah Luke Skywalker, wait I guess sometimes I was the sidekick, Han Solo? Chewbacca? Whatever we were cool, so what do bad asses have, a punk band.

1993 as a year will kick off of course midway through ninth grade. For now, I feel like it kicks off to very little fanfare. Whereas the year before New Year’s Eve was some ruckus at Sam’s house, whatever took place for the holiday in 1992 has escaped my memories for now. So, the year doesn’t really begin for me until the end of the month. During Super Bowl Sunday, on the 31st of January, Chris K. invited me to come along with him and his dad on some family social visits to the bay area. In retrospect I cannot tell you why I went along on this trip. Maybe it was because Chris K. didn’t want to go and used the fact he endured my family during the summer trip, or under some pretense that something cool might happen, but what I remember mainly from this ordeal is sleeping in the back of cars being bored out of my mind and wishing I could have watched the Super Bowl instead.

Of course, that Super Bowl wasn’t terribly exciting, so whatever in the long run with that too. I don’t think I was as disappointed with the NFC championship game that year as I would be the next, I didn’t know what I think I just took as a bad luck day was going to become the next few years of people acting like the Cowboys were the second coming of something special.

After the last day of January, we almost instantly feed into my birthday. Once again though, whereas in eighth grade we had the impromptu Rico’s Pizza birthday bash, what did I do for my birthday this year. Beats me. I will say this though, considering timing, the Christmas dance back in December and then hanging out with Chris K. a lot right now at the end of January and February, this is all probably when Chris H. and I were having a spat over some issue that eludes my mind. I know for like a month and a half we are at odds, and this seems to be the time that makes the most sense. I would love to be able to tell you what the drama was, but as I said every bit of it escapes memory. Probably because it was over something terribly unimportant in the long run, and because what follows once we make up was way more memorable.

However, in contrast to all my forgotten memories, and obviously skipping in my mind from Chris H’s January birthday and my February 3rd one, I remember Chris K’s birthday party from this month. I think perhaps because it was the only large scale one for him we had? I guess that makes sense. Since this would be the time his Dad was around and presiding over the apartment, I can see where he was allowed to have an all night birthday bash with his friends, where in I remember his mother maybe being less keen on late night shenanigans.

I won’t lie, I actually really liked Chris K’s dad.  I always, even back then, thought it was genuinely cool of him to drop everything and move to Davis to watch Chris K when Chris’s mother decided she needed to move to Portland to write her novel. He could have easily said no when he found out Chris K didn’t want to follow his mom up north and force him to move with her. But Chris K wanted to stay with his friends and what he had become familiar with and his dad was cool with moving to Davis of all places to make that happen. Then of course his dad also did the solid of getting him that drum set when he wanted in on the band coming up later. He also had to endure what felt like some ire from Chris K himself, which I know soured at least me and Chris M a little bit on Chris K’s behavior, if not a couple more of us that were privy to it. But I guess as with all kids that age it seems, everyone around can see how hard your parents are working but you just think they are dorks trying to tell you what you can’t do.

His dad, Mike, was also just more interactive with us. His time there felt brief, but I guess he came sometime in my eight grade and then stuck around all the way through my ninth grade. So, a little over a year. In fact, knowing Davis, it was probably winter of 1991, through August of 1993. Just to end on a lease month. Which might work out since I think Chris K. moved apartments after that, even though he was in the same complex. As well as I remember his mother being back later. The only reason I know it must have been that long was that I did spring break this year with Chris K in Portland to visit his mother and there was the Friday night in the eighth grade where Chris M. was talking about how the girls in English class put makeup on him (something I missed that day because I was ditching class in the art room) and Mike, who had a couple of drinks that night while watching us, had a comedy take on the situation. Mainly telling Chris M that that was the girls way of saying the door was open for him to walk right in.

That was, however, I think what helped endear him to us and annoy Chris K. a bit. He would be more prone than say, my parents, to stay out in the living room when we were all playing video games and the like, and since he did drink some, would get a little silly with his captive audience of teenage boys. But, as I said the rest of us just found it funny, and Jake I remember especially being okay with Mike going on about his high school band and watching the “Deadworms” video he had. Whereas I can see Chris K probably saw that video a million times and thought it boring.

That all aside, now back to Chris K. and his birthday. Yeah, his dad would be prone to letting us all come over and hang out all night, which is what the plan was. I think this rowdy bunch consisted of me, Chris M and Marty, Jake, Sam and Joe T. (who I don’t know if he has come up yet in any stories). There might have been a couple more kids, but that is who I remember being there, I don’t think Keith came down from Nevada City, and I am not sure if Frank came to visit either, but they might have, it is hard to remember every time they came to town.

There might have been some attempt with that group to play AD&D or maybe even Illuminati or something, but I mainly remember video games, Jake abusing Chris K’s cat “Hemp” and what I feel like was copious amounts of pancakes. Which I think were all homemade by Chris K’s dad and was maybe the first time I ever watched Chris M. keep stuffing food in his mouth until he could barely chew and wondering if he would choke on his own food joke.

And I don’t think I have explain the cat named “Hemp” yet either, which I probably should have earlier, and may eventually do so, but for now here is another side story.

Chris K had his favorite pet, a cat named Shadow. I was obviously a dog kid, and as I was coming to find out in my teen years was pretty allergic to cats anyway. But Chris K., Chris M., Marty, these guys lived in apartments, which back then were pretty much a cat or smaller pet environment. So, while George got all the puppy love from the boys, there were so many cats. Chris M forever was tied to one of the many cats I remember his family having, Luey, and then there is Marty and the cats, but I need to stay on task.

While Chris K thought the world of Shadow, as he started hanging out with all of us more and more in 1992 after Keith moved out, he also latched onto the word Hemp. Hemp was like our junior high giggle thing to mention all the time because it was like we were talking about Marijuana, but we weren’t. Covertly edgy, in our dumb little heads. So, it came to pass that, maybe around his birthday in 1992, Chris K. wanted a kitten, and he wanted to name it Hemp.

That was an interesting time, because it was obviously not too long before his mother moved, and dad replaced her as the food distributor. Then the apartment obviously had a well-established alpha cat already. I also remember Chris K’s mother didn’t like the name. She didn’t think it befitting a young lady, such as Hemp. So, the cat got a bit messed with as she started insisting on calling it Mary Jane, which if I recall got shortened to Jane. But to the boys the kitten was Hemp. Hemp got, well maybe not abused, but while Shadow was grumpy and sacred to Chris K, we were allowed to play with the new cat a lot more. So, yeah by Chris K’s birthday party I remember Jake having a grand old time with Hemp while we all sat around the place.

It oddly occurs to me as writing this that during the mid 90s there were so many pets at different households that were characters of that time. Obviously George, but here we have Hemp, and Shadow. Then there were the other cats, Luey who will get some mention in my art section, Then Oliver with Marty and so on. All these animals are gone now, but other than the sad day with my own, George, they all lived on past high school and our branching out into different lives so I don’t know how any of their tales end, even if I do remember Luey’s tail exploding on more than one occasion. In this case, especially to Luey who was the fat cat we all enjoyed the tales of, Rest in Peace guys, George still hates you all because your cats.

Back to the birthday. As the night moved on, the numbers that were awake or in the living room diminished and it ended up being me, Chris M and Joe T, watching either me or Chris M play one of Chris K’s newer games Soul Blazer.

It was a fun game so watching it was entertaining enough, but we also were getting to that place teenage boys get to when they have stayed up too late and have crammed their faces with sugary pancakes and soda all night. Hysterics. Thus far too long was sent gaming and laughing ad nauseum on a joke about a made up cereal brand called “Shitty-O’s” which we pointed out to each other, their brand mascot demanded that “Shit is for kids!”, and maybe “It’s good shit!”, but most memorably with “Stupid shit, shitty-o’s are for kids!” Sometimes I miss finding that kind of thing endlessly funny at 4 in the morning.

After the February birthdays end, we march into, well, March. March looks to be one of the more packed months of the ninth grade, thanks to some fortuities file backups to floppy disks done at the time, I know that spring break occurred now and that the Sarlacc Software birth along with probably the birth of my band, which will have it’s own section, just like Sarlacc Software, were all this month. It’s actually quite a lot.

First, we have spring break with Chris K and visiting his mother. Which wasn’t really a visit more than Chris and I on trains for long stretches, being stuck in an apartment in Portland and playing a fair amount of my made up RPG while his mother got mad at Rush Limbaugh on the radio. Which is an interesting thing I have seen other people do, which is listen to something you know is going to make you mad, and then talk at the program on TV or the Radio as though your harsh worded comebacks are changing something. But I know this is probably retread.

It seems the trip along with the discovery of Qbasic on my PC led to this being a time period I started working out a lot of things with My Game, including the first revision to the Word Perfect document it was originally made on at Sam’s house. Then those adventures with Chris K in Portland I think worked into what became the story line for the basic program version I was making. Which then in turn got Marty salivating at the idea of making games on the PC and bam Sarlacc Software and all the PC stories that are going to come from there.

What then gets lost to me, is it seems at school Chris H and I made up for the mystery drama of the last couple months. I would think this after spring break; however I almost have a loose fuzzy memory over the quest for Chris K’s dad getting Chris K his drum set marching hand in hand with the trip to Portland. Meaning that there is a chance Chris H and I formed the idea already and, the last band member, which was Chris K, was getting worked out during the break. I don’t think the drum set was an easy purchase for Mike and thus from conception to band that actually existed there is some time here.

The weird overlay is that it was during the same time Marty, and I started wanting to hawk software. These are two separate worlds in my brain. Marty, who would have been at Midtown for this school year was heavily into using the PC they had there to work on our projects. So that left me at Holmes to start talking about teen anger and punk rock with Chris H. But the idea that some afternoons would be spent going over to the Tolentino garage or the music store to buy more strings with Chris H, were juxtaposed with afternoons with or nights with Marty downloading files and talking about bad Qbasic game design is mind blowing. This gives of the idea that every day in March was one or the other and explains why I probably didn’t get a lot of schoolwork done at the time. I had two full-time… hobbies.

The Band though has it’s own story which is coming up.

Too bad it’s another year until I start taking pictures. I need to draw more, but for now to fill the void of these junior high years I have yearbook pictures. Anyway, now we move onto the rest of Spring, and Kim. Kim may oddly be the only friend from high school that I have no candid pictures of, which I think speaks to how weird the next few years will be. Of course, as I just wrote about I was already in a weird two separate worlds, with school and the band, and then afterschool and the band or the software company, and then in trots Kim.

Somewhere along the path of throwing basketball’s in puddles during P.E. and talking about what bands I listened to in art class, Kim decided it was a good investment in my time to call her afterschool and continue on talking. As I expand on my BBSes and phone lines, I will explain some of the technical issues with this, but for now I will stay simple to this story.

This story then being that in he Spring Kim and I started talking, usually when someone else was on the computer. I would sit on the phone and she would explain soaping techniques and asks questions from magazines (two actual conversations I remember), while one of the Chirses or someone played games, or worked on Sarlacc.

One distinct thing is it seems to have started happening heavily after the Talent show and then the addition of Jake to the band. Why? Because in all these afternoon memories of Kim calling on the phone, I don’t remember Chris H. having much input on things like he did back in December. Instead, as we will see later, Kim started interacting with me on the phone and Jake, who would be present a lot more, and in more than one case eventually would have me call her from his apartment.

Jake is an important run off of the band story. Jake in some ways, although as I’ll point out in a bit not immediately replaced Chris H. This is why in my mind there is this Chris H cutoff point, even though like most things it was a little more gradual, what really happened is after all was said and done the role Chris H was taking in my timeline got usurped casually by a new guitarist. And since Jake had been around with everyone before, it doesn’t feel like I traded one friend for another, just that I didn’t want to tag and would rather write dumb songs about Marty with Jake instead.

So, mixed in this confusing spring of having a band with the old guard, which for this is Chris H. suddenly the new nerdy norm, of Jake, Marty, Chris M and Kim work their way in for the summer. While no one here besides Kim, to most extents, hasn’t been hanging around for a while now its sort of the priority shift that makes things seem so sudden.

Let’s add to the confusion. During the last minimum day of the year, probably in late spring, I wish they had old school calendars still around. Jake, myself, I think both Chris M and K along with a couple other friends ended up at one of the regular romps for such a day, the downtown Taco Bell. That fine afternoon we decided to get small sodas and see if we could drain the soda fountain of all its dr. pepper.

A bold experiment, but as time moved on, we could not consume so much carbonated liquid. So we sat outside taking turns filling up our cups inside, then coming out and dumping the soda into the gutter. While doing this act of noble charity, a young lady, I should have mentioned by now but may not have, Lacey (editing my story into sections has made this so hard to keep track of people). Lacey informed me that there was a church sponsored roller skating event that evening and was curious if Jake and I would come to it with her and Heather.

I want to say, that being a find upstanding young man I told her I would ask Jake and find out, but I think I just said something like “sounds cool” while slowly pouring out a cup of Dr. Pepper. She filled me in with the details, and later that afternoon whatever ride she had procured for us would come pick Jake and I up at the L street house.

Now normally this would be a blasé story about how Jake and I went roller skating with the two nice young ladies and everyone laughed as I tried to learn how to skate. Since at this point in my life I had never done so. Ha ha, what a cute story about me falling on my butt. However, this is ended up being a story for far different reasons.

As we got bored trying to turn the Dr Pepper into tonic water for the evenings Taco Bell patrons, we started walking home. Jake and I knew we had to be there in time to get picked up, and so it started to dissipate our gang of soda thugs. But, Chris K ended up coming all the way back to the L street house with us instead of branching off at the K street apartments with the other kids that dwelled there. Confused but assuming he tagged along to get in some gaming before we left we didn’t question it like we should have. We mentioned we were taking off with Lacey to everyone, which is why everyone else took off for other adventures, but Chris K was Chris K so we just assumed like I said it was for PC gaming or SNES, or something.

We were wrong, he had apparently decided he was also invited along on this trip, which Jake and I didn’t really figure out until he loaded himself up in the car and left Jake and I awkwardly holding the ball on that one. It made things how you might stereotypically think and is one of those weird sitcom style teen stories I am assuming we all have a few of.

And that is neither here nor there. That was a long time ago and any agendas that might have made awkward, well all those parties have, as far as I know, gone healthily on their way, and I don’t remember many of the details of. What is important historically for this silly event was it was where I mark the first sign of summer of 1993 Chris K. That version of Chris is the one that did just what he did here, invite himself to other’s things, items, and so on. This would become a markedly worse issue over the summer.

Heather from the trip, however, seemed to be involved in a lot of stories in this short window of time. Jake, being into AD&D got her to invite some of the gals over to his place to do a dungeon campaign. That ended up in never getting off the ground and Heather talking about wanting a baby dragon, most of the time, much to the annoyance of Jake.

Then there was the old system for signing up for high school courses. We had a day assigned to go over as ninth graders to the high school and select index cards as available slots in classes, then turn them in to get a finalized schedule for next fall. I will then forever have Heather’s note to watch the children show Barney writing on my folder from that event, which I think I have found and should scan in to match up.

That was an interesting day anyway. Singing up didn’t take a half day, and somehow Chris M and I ended up playing basketball on the seriously worn blacktop behind the old gym at the school. The asphalt, which had large cracks and was wavey, wasn’t ideal. But somehow Chris M was managing to sink half court shots NBA JAM style consistently on it.

How all this truly escalated though I don’t know. And how I was about to end out the school year spending most of my free time on the phone with her is just an odd turn of events. This is once again where my brain has compartmentalized so much from this era that it almost makes no sense to me.

I still am trying to find a good way to explain this. This school year came off a summer trip that Chris K tagged along on, Then I was super into what I feel like was my 9^th grade self at the beginning of the year, to embarrass myself here I am:

He was kicking it with:

There was ditching class, doughnut stops and graffiti, then a band and that Christmas dance. Then we end up the year on the phone with a straight A overachiever while working on a computer bulletin board system and managing a fake software company. And I would through Chris M’s picture in for this one as well, but I have plenty of photos of him since he survived into the camera era during high school.

It also as I keep droning about wasn’t a clear-cut path. Chris H and I seemed this year to either be best friends or at each other’s throats for some reason. But after the band explosion, man that section is just below but it plays into things here. Anyway, after that I still did some things with Chris H. Now exact timing is hard to figure out but Whole Earth festival, I am pretty sure Chris H and I went with some of gaggle of girls from school and then got dreadfully bored as they dipped in and out of clandestine meetings under pine trees in the UCD quad looking for fun.

The Summer of 1992 saw this weird little window where Sam was living at 1111 J street in an apartment. We had been used to the house the year before on Mulberry with its back entrance to the University Mall and SF2 machines, so him being a block from the L street house was an odd change from those sleepover weekends with the boys.

However, as Davis goes, August/September brings new leases and Sam and his family moved into their new location. A right-hand turn from a place called cactus corners at the far end of Russell Boulevard and just maybe in city limits, his family moved to a prefab farm house on the outskirts of town owned by a landscaping company.

If we had fun in a regular Davis ranch style house with the lawless nights at Sam’s old house, well this was about to awaken some demons in us. The house, which I believe to be a two-story Sears prefab.

The houses seem to be from the early 1900’s and while they have obviously had work over the years, the first picture is a recent google image of the house, then an ad for the old prefabs and then just another one that seems to match the design I found on google.

Now with all this about the house, I think there were some modifications to the house or remodels since its original construction, because I remember his grandmother moving into a back area of the house that somehow doesn’t fit with the rest of the layout in my mind, I might be wrong, but there that is.

There was also a large barn out back with a basketball hoop, a hedge maze on one of the side yards, and then an electric gate leading into the driveway with a small fleet of landscaping vehicles. Then just farmland in each direction from there. Sam of course, got the master bedroom again and weekends out at Sam’s were renewed for this year.

With much more space we began to do more it felt like out here. Without video games nearby we had to entertain ourselves out in the country and did so. One notorious weekend, one in which Keith came to visit, all of us minus Sam, who just almost refused to do any of the physical activities we engaged in, went on a surrounding farmlands adventure.

Nearby was a sheep farm, and somehow Keith got to chasing the poor guys around with a stick that we dubbed the sheep-slayer. Which is a weapon that I think I had pop up from time to time in little RPG adventures. This day’s adventures ended with us finding a small irrigation underpass that went beneath the country road Sam’s house was on, in which we decided it would be awesome to paint “evil” graffiti all over.

This activity made sense since I think this was right around the Chris H trying to get everyone into tagging window, and of course we had a history with Sam and his Lovecraftian humor, so we thought it a hoot to make a demonic tunnel on the outskirts of town. This weekend I think was the one that ended with Keith breaking the electric gate by trying to ride it on Sunday afternoon. Which I think also marked the first time Sam’s mother started to wonder how much “shenanigans” was going on.

This would lead up to something but not as of yet. There was another visit from Keith, and Frank as well this time, in which Sam’s little brother Mikey, who I recall being around three or four by now was audibly refusing to potty train or continue on with his diaper wearing. This resulted in a weekend where his little brother was “shirt-balling” around the house and using the bathroom as he pleased.

This is as bad as it sounds. It culminated at night that same day when Keith, preparing his spot in the living room floor to sleep on, found a deposit left by young Mikey. Frazzled, he went to the kitchen, grabbed a paper towel, picked up the offending item, marched up stairs and told Sam’s mother that “This is unacceptable!”

Of course, though I have told that story, I had to tread through some of this it seems when going over gaming, because one of the greatest non-game related gaming events happened that same night later in the house. Along with this same weekend being the one where that angry potty-less toddler got hog-tied upside down by Frank to a bed post when he wouldn’t calm down. It was a crazy weekend.

Now it wasn’t all mayhem, Sam’s PC was still there and trying to get time on it was always a thing. Now in ninth grade we were listening to a lot more music, and I remember Chris M in particular putting on the Ugly Kid Joe album a lot, along with a couple others. There was also some notable fun on one of Keith’s trips down where we found Sam’s father’s 1970s Playboy collection and marveled at how much time had based in those 15 to 20 years…. Relative time.

Mikey, who obviously was going through a toddler mayhem stage also got some ire from us. One weekend Sam’s mother bought a large box of vintage transformers at a garage sale for him. We then used them as things to throw at him to keep him out of the TV area as we watched The Simpsons. Since these are generation one transformers, we are talking to die cast metal ones, they were no joke to throw.

Mikey though loved him some Simpsons, and the one line I can remember him saying was “I’m Krusty the Klown and I’m going to kill you!” Which seemed to come out a lot when Sam would assign, much like with the Christmas tree, Chris M to watch Mikey when he was becoming a pest. Mikey affectionately, maybe, called him Uncle Pris, maybe with some heavy-handed instruction to do so, and got Chris M saddled with babysitting.

That didn’t dampen Chris M’s resolve to hang out with all of us on the weekends out there though. And in early 1994 when Sarlacc Software was born, Chris M stared working in Qbasic on his game, titled “Sam’s Mansion” and obviously inspired by our time out there.

Interestingly it had to have been about the time Chris M was starting on that endeavor that the night we thought about but didn’t make crop circles in the field across the street happened. While we didn’t do it, the idea was thrown around, and that is important. Oddly, and like a lot of things I don’t remember these details, but oddly this was also the weekend I think myself, and Chris M at least started getting tired of well, I think Sam. Somehow during this time Sam’s attitude shifted from wanting to do anything with the rest of us and somehow, we seemed to be going to Sam’s inspire of Sam. The story with Sam and his dad and Keith and the kicking, that was also near this time.

Then I think the next weekend or so, Jake, and Chris K went out there, maybe with someone else and exact details are sketchy, but maybe tried to start one poorly. Anyway, the crux of the situation was that Sam’s mom after two years almost of these weekends finally cracked. Starting with Keith breaking the gate and then the slew of things Sam told her that night after she found out about the boys going across the street into the cornfield to fake an alien landing, decided something needed to be done.

One of those things was she called my mother. This is why I can remember I wasn’t at Sam’s, and it was when the novelty of the location was wearing off. Instead, Chris M and I were over at the L street house in the front room for some reason or another when Mom came out to tell us about all the things Sam’s mom had to say. And once again like with Chris H, Jared, and that story, which actually might come after this one, my mom was happy that we were at home when she got this call.

We talked to her about this all and sort of expressed that we were kind of over going to Sam’s at that time and in all honesty that was kind of where that went. I don’t know for sure for Chris M., but I think me, Jake and Marty never went out there again after that all went down. I don’t think Chris M did either but since I feel like he was more of a Sam original like Chris K, that Sam might have tried to get him back out, even if it was just to watch Mikey.

But for the most part that was the end of the lawless Sam weekend. Right about in that window with Sarlacc Software, the band, the BBS and everything else, these nights of ice cream, running around the country after sheep with a stick, loud music, and angry dad and some Illuminati were gone and then all to be jammed into a fantasy horror game Chris M was going to make for the fake software company. I also have to point out that for some reason Marty started calling the game “Sam’s Charlie Mansion” and that has been logged into permanent memory for my whole life since.

image 36 Y.S.S. 2.0 playing in Mom's stupid on a Sunday afternoon

Not all of Karl’s interactions with our friends ended in nights in the slammer. Now that sentence makes sense in my giant write up and not here, however I love reading it so it stays. This is going to have to be a new segway into this story though. Okay lets tart by rehashing some old ground.

//oops a paragraph i was supposed to look at for being out of place, well skip this one for now it wont be here forever. Karl would split a lot of time in either mine or Jake’s room back then. Afterall, Jake came into our lives in junior high due to him being a guitar player. Karl while at Holmes Junior High started to veer into a love of guitars and heavier music. In general, while at Holmes Junior High is when I saw a lot of teenagers have their own moments in time where they were figuring out their musical tastes and forming bands. So, it may come as no surprise this was my time too.//

I started my tenure at Holmes Junior High school in the Fall of 1990. I was excited at the prospect of it all. For one, I lived just around the corner from the school, making the walk to school in the morning about a minute long. Second sixth grade had gone swimmingly for me. It was a fun year which I met a lot of new kids, I was actually in the same sixth grade class as Karl and Nate that. Nate and I had taken our love of the Mike Tyson’s Punch out game for the Nintendo that year into a sort of daily comic boxing league. Once we got passed Karl and Nate as well as a couple other students, I was attending sixth grade with a whole new class of kids at a whole new school from the ones I had been with since kindergarten. Which gave me a bit of confidence in meeting more new kids just one school year later.

Seventh grade was going to be another change of scenery and the last one had gone so well I figured things could only go up. But seventh grade was different. One thing I didn’t really get as a child was that by sixth grade you’ve spent a large portion of your life getting into the flow of how elementary school works, thus the change in structure from elementary to secondary school is unintentionally jarring. Not always in a bad way, but you have to start redesigning how you live in the new school paradigm. Since I liked to draw during class, I found it easy to sit wherever I was assigned, draw in my notebook and move from class to class without much notice from the authorities.

 So, I spent most of first two months of school trying to understand the new social structure of having several groups of “classmates” and other kids that were just, well up to other deeds. Admittedly I didn’t pay much attention to the upperclassmen, until my last class of the day, Math, none of my classes intersected with older students, so I just got to knowing kids in my grade. This exercise though would come to an extreme halt once the first progress report came out. While I had found a way to not be disruptive in class, I was also just drawing and ignore most of what was going on in front of the class for the much more interesting world of the new teens.

After that rude awakening I was presented with a path for the future of my public schooling. Shape up and focus on the class or be the kid that can draw, that likes to have fun with everyone. I chose the latter. It was around this time that I met Keith for the first time. Keith also drew a lot in class instead of paying attention. He also liked being silly and drawing weird comics. So, we melded into friends doing these things together. From there I have hit upon some of the friends I met through Keith, all three Chrises, Marty and so on. It will be Chris H. that we will touch upon for now though.

Chris H. was a “new” kid. He had just moved to Davis for this school year from Saudi Arabia. His dad, American, worked for Saudi Oil, or a Saudi Oil company I don’t remember the details and for reasons unknown to me, as I was a child, they moved back to the U.S. in the summer of 1990. Chris H. now had to make a whole new group of friends. When you are a kid, this can seem like a daunting task. But luckily for Chris H. he was a skateboarding child as well. Through having to go outside and find places to skate he met Keith and another relevant friend of ours in Junior High, Randy E. of doggy door fame.

However, Chris H.’s skating career would hit a hiccup when he broke his arm. He would eventually recover from that broken arm, get back on the horse and break his other arm. It was around this time in the Spring of 1991 that I started getting to know this Chris. Chris H. not being a comic artist at the level Keith, and I were at, was still really into it. And drive if is 90 percent of the work he was 80 percent there. So, while he was unable to skate, he started getting heavily into the comic world Keith and I had created. While working multiple different stories, one large comic world was born based on fellow classmates all being in a made up two versus two basketball league. This league was based on the games we would play in the driveway of the L street house. Yeah I had a garage hoop growing up, what of it?

Chris H. would start drawing more crazy adventures of a core group of friends and their time in junior high. Chris H. would also become friends with a kid named Jared. Jared I already knew because his mother, who was also new to Davis, was Mormon and since she had a kid my age my mother had volunteered us to help them move, along with a bunch of other family activities. As summer was approaching the three of us became quite tight knit. By that summer me, Chris and Jared were also doing paper routes together, working shlubs as it could be said.

Caught back up we now finally in 1993 find ourselves back in the summer of 1991.

The income from the paper routes helped us get into going to the movies a lot that summer, and renting videos too, but we definitely enjoyed the big screen. We did multiple viewings of Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey all the way out at the Woodland Mall’s multiplex. Really, we saw just about every other goofy movie that hit that summer, after all we were thirteen, comedies were kind of our “jam”. In fact, going to the movies was such a big deal that summer, that when I got in trouble for hitchhiking out of scout camp that summer, one of the punishments that was deemed “fair” was to ban my access to going out the theater for the rest of the summer.

 The Job at the Davis Enterprise that summer was interesting as well. I had been delivering papers now since I was eleven. Now in 1991, I respected the job so little that with Marty in tow I change the headlines of the newspapers to an inside joke for our amusement. Some of changes to my work ethic for the local paper started here during the summer. Chris H. had become somewhat chummy with the circulation manager we all had when he and Jared started their jobs as carriers too. He was a young guy, probably a university student, so we all felt it okay to mess around with him, you know, tease him and the like. I can even remember Chris H. borrowing money from him for food purchases. What I found out there was that when you’re a kid and your “boss” just feels like someone you can walk all over, work feels pretty good. Because of that, when they changed circulation managers on us, it was a thing. (so many sos)

Chris H. though didn’t migrate to this being a change. We now had an older woman in charge, surely, we couldn’t joke around with her and especially the money lending for lunch is probably over. Chris H. though was still looking for handouts, and much to the surprise of Jared and I it worked. I did notice her getting annoyed a bit more with our silliness, but we were thirteen-year-old boys, and just weird by nature at that point. I figured since Chris H. was getting money so that was understood.

Now after the theater ban I got slapped down on me for my scout camp misbehaving, movie days became more movie nights. I may have technically been under restriction at this time, but as I’ve said before the L street house had become a spot kids would go to hang out and my parents were okay with that. If I haven’t implicitly said it before my mother always felt safer knowing we were being dumb in the house where she could supervise us versus out on the streets where anything could happen. So, even though movie night rentals were sort of skirting around the movie ban, they were allowed.

So, as we are learning in my stories, there is one of the given examples, in this case movie night, I can distinctly remember. That night we rented of all films, Summer School, which I remember my mom enjoying, even though when I was older and rewatched the film it certainly doesn’t feel like her cup of tea. A lot of the movie while funny is forgettable over time, well except, always answer multiple choice with C, that was a mantra that had stuck from the film, through society really, it was a well setup joke. But the movie isn’t the important part, just that we were there watching it.

Watching it on what I believe was Friday night. Saturday would then come and go. Thankfully the local paper we delivered didn’t have a Saturday issue. That was always a day off from the paper folding grind. Sunday morning would come, which was the one day a week the Davis Enterprise had morning delivery. That Sunday morning paper had quite the headline. The headline was a story about a woman who apparently on Friday night, the night we were enjoying the exploits of a teacher dealing with a rag tag group of summer school students, had been walking the local greenbelt and was mugged and raped maybe robbed as well, just all the bad things they warn young ladies about when walking in the dark by themselves. Truly horrible, and in our little town where stories like that were not only not the norm, but just didn’t happen. As the next few days passed the story got consistently reported on, it was a big deal in our quiet little town. Then came the police sketch.

My mom was reading the article when the sketch was printed in the local edition. All three of us happened to be at the L street house when she was doing so, and she stopped us and had a little laugh at how the perpetrator of these crimes kind of looked like all us boys if we got put in a blender and were made into one nasty stereotype. Although it was most Chris H. like than anything else. She told us she’d be worried if she didn’t know exactly where we had been that night, which of course was sitting in the television room watching a movie and eating ice cream with her and Dad.

As the story kept unfolding that was more of a profound statement than she knew. Why? Remember that new circulation manager we had that summer, she hadn’t come into work since Sunday, kind of odd, and somehow shortly after the sketch came out, we found out she was the victim in the greenbelt mugging.

From there it was quickly reported that the entire story was a fabrication, she made the whole thing up. That’s when we started to realize that the similarities in descriptions of the attacker and us weren’t just funny coincidence, but probably a subconscious or conscious effort to describe those she didn’t like dealing with at work. But as it turns out the police were suspicious of her story enough that they did some digging and found out this was actually a pattern with her. She had reported false felonies before, made the news and then had to duck out of town because they were bogus stories. Some sort of weird attention seeking malady. Suffice to say she sort of disappeared after this. But it’s safe to say we all dodge a bullet with that not being the first time she tried such an odd stunt, or she may have just keep going down the road of the perpetrator being “our” type of kid.

As the summer that year (1991) would draw to a close, our comics focused heavily on the upcoming eight grade school year. It was also this autumn that art and skateboarding weave into a new interest. One that made sense since it was always there, but since we were just kids, we had to discover it, music. I can’t pinpoint the eureka moment our group had with “hey angry music suits all this other stuff were doing really well”. In fact, there may not have been one. Instead, it might just have been influences from older people in the scene just trickling down. Sort of, I’ll explain. Let’s see what I remember.

image 37 Operation Ivy's self titled compilation album cover and Soungarden's Badmotorfinger album cover.

So, from influences unknown, Keith started talking about and possibly was sporting a cassette tape from a band called Operation Ivy. Chris H. was into them soon thereafter and it came across that it was “music for skaters”. Thanks to my paper route a while back I had bought myself my own little television. It was mainly used for playing Nintendo, however somewhere along the timeline from 1989 to the fall of 1991, the price of having a second cable line in the house went down drastically. And it was this fall that we all would start watching a lot of programming on the MTV. During this time MTV was transition from Hair and Boy Bands to a little more grounded metal/punk rock bands. Grounded may sound weird to describe bands in those genres but remember the Hair band era was over the top glam, seeing slightly older kids in bands that dressed like us and sounded like we would if we played in a garage seemed way more down to earth.

Another institution in town would help with this growth. Downtown had this weird little CD store called CD Research. Instead of your Tower Records, where a customer would go in and look at a bunch of albums cover art and ask an employee what was new or good in the genre they liked. CD Research was instead setup like a bar, you would come in, sit at the bar, the employees would hand you a giant catalog with all the CDs they had available, you would get your own headset along with a cd player and listen to whatever you wanted. Soon we would buy into Nirvana which I would purchase at CD Research, and shortly thereafter while at the Woodland Mall with my mother, I was looking to spend some money and bought Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger album in my one and only CD long-box. I would also get Baseball Simulator 1.000 on the same trip. One new album and a new SNES game in one trip.

Then I finally we would come back around and I got my own copy of Operation Ivy, called Operation Ivy. And then, thanks to being able to sit down and scourer though titles at the CD store, we were led to other titles like an EP from another local group called Greenday. Before you knew it a CD collection that didn’t exist in the seventh grade was growing. I had to procure mom’s cd player on the old five finger discount, and we started listening to a lot of music while drawing comics, or playing video games, or watching cable television in the L street house.

Once thoroughly through the eight-grade transformation in 1992, that summer we would be treated to the Davis Teen Center holding an all-ages concert featuring of all bands Greenday. It was what could possibly be described as an unsafe good time. For a lot of us younger kids it was our first “punk” rock show and while I can’t point to this as the “eureka” moment of what was to come it wasn’t a non-determining factor either.

That summer, I had been away for a bit and didn’t spend as much time with Chris H. as I had the summer before. But post that show at the Teen Center we all sat outside at the park and went over mosh pit battle scars and stories from the show, it wasn’t said, but a feint hint of the future was in the back of our minds. We needed our own band, we needed to have that.

The formation of this Band would take some time, due in part to Chris H. and I having some sort of fight during the ninth grade where we didn’t speak for a while. I don’t remember why, and I don’t know where it fits in exactly during this time other than during the ninth grade. But it makes sense, Chris H. and I had become close enough friends over time that his parents would leave him with us when they left the country. However as much as Chris H. and I were alike, he also always wanted to dive deeper into the parts of our developing personalities he thought were important, or as an adult I would say stuff he thought was “cooler” to be into. I however was still open to a lot of things, in eight grade I was still playing organized football, the other two Chrises were big on going over to Sam’s house for board games and the like. There were other interests than just being one kind of teenager.

 So, I started splitting time between friend groups. Instead of trying to get them all together. Then there was the time Jared, and I were over at Chris H’s house in his room and saw that he had tagged “White trash and Proud” on his wall. Chris H. lived in a nice house, of which his parents owned two of in the neighborhood. He was considerably better off than I was, and a lot more than Jared was.

In fact, I can remember one incident where Chris H. was talking about how poor her was, too which Jared and I pointed out the hypocrisy in what he was saying. Doing this upset him so much since he was cultivating an image at the time that he got up and stormed out of my room and left the house that afternoon. He also had a lot of disparaging things to say about “jocks” during this time, to which instead of bring up football, I countered with skateboarding requiring athletics, wouldn’t that make skaters a king of jock, to which again he got very angry. So while I don’t remember what our fight those couple weeks were about it did slow the band creation process down.

But the drive to play punk rock was too great, we mended fences and we started to build the band. Now as an older observer to my past life, it seems like we just get Jared, and we start a three-man band.  That was sort of that social group, and when Chris H. and I did something, Jared usually followed.

That’s not how it broke down though. I had for a small time about a year or two prior, taken classical guitar lessons, so I just figured that to be my job. I would strum and yell about how angry we were at all the establishment stuff we didn’t like, which Chris H. and I sometimes didn’t agree on. Chris H. also wanted to play guitar, figuring it to be a lot of power chords he could learn and of course cheat with raw attitude. With that we had then was two very inexperienced guitarists. The next part seemed to come out of nowhere to me though. Chris H. said he had a friend that played bass. He did, one year behind us was James T. and he legitimately had learned bass guitar and had what was very important to our endeavor, an open garage to play in. He was in.

We had a trio of strings now, pretty important but we were about to find out the great hardship for all young men in a new band. A drummer. A drumming rig was not a common tool among kids. The year prior that ninth-grade class had their garage band, and they performed for the school at their talent show and had one of the drummers in our age range. There was a band at Emerson, they had another one of the drummers. We didn’t know at the time but the only kid with a rig at our school willing to play was in a band with Karl already. We were going to have to actively recruit someone to the drums.

Then there was Chris K. He wanted to be in our band, no cares to whether we functioned or not just a desire to be in it. His father who had spent some time in Davis watching Chris K. when his mother ran off to Portland to write her great American novel, was a former teenage garbage band member. Chris K. went to him with the dilemma of wanting to be in the band. The Dilemma of the band having no drummer and his need to fill that space. His dad obliged. While I don’t want to sound rough or mean, I knew as a kid his dad wasn’t what one would call financially comfortable, so at what was probably at a great expense, his dad bought him a full drumming rig so he could join the band.

That was the lineup then, Chris H. and Chris K., James and me. Chris H. very quickly got to naming the band. I think he was looking for something he found deep, something that said punk rock skate kids in the 90s were cool. Let’s see if I can remember it exactly, his thought process led him too, drumroll, Incompetent Degenerates (of) Society, or I.D.S. for short. Whatever, in the end I think we all just wanted to have fun, so I was okay with it, plus the name as just I.D.S. worked in the semi-punk genre we aspirated to. A lot of very successful punk bands carried abbreviations as names. Who cares if there is Infant Death Syndrome, am I right? So, with what was starting to become the last of my saved-up paper route money I bought and electric guitar, and we thrashed!

Chris H. and I would break strings playing too hard and we made angry sounds. Like we were supposed to! Which as bad as it really was, was a great deal of fun and in the spirit of things punk rock. James as I said actually held some talent, so I don’t blame him if he was bored with the antics, and to be honest I think Chris K. just hit whatever drum he felt like most of the time. It’s punk it almost sounds better random anyway, for us it would do. 

And for a while that was all we needed. Chris H. and I especially enjoyed the being in our own band part of it. I made stickers and drew posters. And we hob knobbed with everyone. We were ninth graders with a band man. One afternoon when Chris H. realized he didn’t have any backup strings for the broken ones on his guitar we spent the whole time in the halls or the Art room pan handling for money for the band. We made more than enough to go downtown after school and get new strings along with some Taco Bell.

The downfall of the fun that was I.D.S. though is sort of a weird story and really didn’t need to happen. We were what one could call experimental chaos punk (or bad). Chris H. wanted to write, (what I think he thought were profound songs), about the nature of boys in athletics sexuality. Yes, really. I was just happy to make angry noises, I liked the attitude and cared little for making points. We should have stuck with noise in my opinion, it’s what we were good at. But I think Chris H. had hire aspirations or maybe motives I didn’t know about. But those were our band’s two personalities.

Next up while trying to define what our identity was came the school talent show. I don’t know why, but for whatever reason showing off your high school band at the school talent show was a thing. The year prior the guys a grade ahead of us, many of them whom we knew, showed off their band. It was just the thing to do. It makes some sense I guess, until the talent show only close friends ever hang out at band practice and it’s not like teenagers can play at bars. But Chris H. and I especially were building a following at school so Chris H., for almost the only time I can think of, got to school bright and early to sign us up for the show. Were we performance ready? No. Did it matter? Nah.

Those couple of weeks setting up for the talent show was actually very interesting for me. Initially we had a meeting with all the “talent” for the show to discuss what we would do at said show. Most of the performers there came from either our band or Karl’s band. Karl in his transition phase right now was still more on the shy Karl side versus the metal Karl side of his personality and was the lead guitarist for his band. Nate played bass. I don’t know when that happened, but it made sense that Nate was in Karl’s band. Their slightly goody-goody drummer was named Ryan to add to the confusion of similar names in the room, luckily, I will just call myself me or I most of the time. Nik who was a friend of Karl’s that I only knew, at the time, as the kid that made fun of the poor kid in science back in the seventh grade for living in one of the city’s only trailer parks, was their other guitarist. And on the mic was another Ryan. This Ryan may have had different band aspirations, as well, that maybe didn’t match that of his friends in the band, but they were all elementary school friends, minus Nik, so he was in. In the story to come he is the Ryan I will probably be calling by name, Ryan M. on the drums was just a nice quiet kid, who happened to have a drum kit and location for them to practice.

Then you had us in our little rag-tag group, and at that point maybe a couple of seventh graders. Maybe I haven’t hit on this point yet either. But during my day, a seventh grader was almost non-existent if you were in the ninth grade. So, when I say maybe there was, there could have bene thirty, I don’t remember, I really only remember the two bands being at the meeting.               

Things that stick out from that meeting were that me and Chris H. were really the only people interacting in the group most of the time. Case in point, Chris H. was interacting so much he just named Karl’s band for them. Not aggressively, when the teacher in charge of the show asked Karl’s group what their band name was, they all sort of shrugged and said they didn’t know. Chris H. swooped in and saved the day giving them the moniker “Morbid Thoughts”. A year later Karl would name the band after a dragon from the Dragon Lance series he was reading, Silvara, that is a name for later though. Yeah, look some kids are super weird as far as shyness at that age, others are more domineering and sometimes those kids just name your band with the word of the day, for that month it was morbid. Remember that word of the month.

 Once the setup meeting was over, we had to get to, well having a song with a beginning, middle and end. I’m not sure who was the catalyst of being worried that our angry incoherent yelling didn’t have those parts and wouldn’t work in front of the school at lunch. But it was probably Chris H. I remember feeling that now he was really invested with how we were perceived by others, so the absolute lack of talent may have been worrying him. Anyway, we brought in some older friends, the ones that had the band from the previous year to write a more structured song for us. Let me point out I was fine with that, even though I had already realized we weren’t classically very good and felt the band was more attitude, which really all punk rock is if you want to generalize. I still was amenable to having a song we could perform.

What we got was a little simple song for us to try and learn quickly. The song was what I would call “metalesque”  with lyrics that matched that tone. And so, we began the process of learning a song. I practiced my simple guitar part and my timing on the lyrics. Chris H. was having to learn his part as lead on the guitar and it was having mixed results. Eventually the friend that wrote the music Eric, yup same Eric from eighth grade with the chicken maneuver for a dollar, see intertwined my story is (thanks Yoda), took over his part and Chris H. got my rhythm part. Suddenly I was just the front man, my guitar stripped from me. Now all I had to do was remember a few lyrics and keep timing. Simple enough, being that I was hanging out with Chris K. a lot, I practiced that timing for better or worse with him on the drums. But since I had worked most of the time on the rhythm guitar part with the lyrics in the end watching Chris H., or listening to him rather, was where I cheated most of my queues.

 The day of the show finally arrived. Being too outgoing for our own good, we dragged kids down from the high school to partake in the event that was “our” talent show. So there are a lot of sayings about hubris and flying to close to the sun, and falling etc. If maybe we weren’t fifteen we might have seen that our egos were maybe getting to big here. This in some reality was the first performance ever for the band, but by now the buildup, our marketing as it were, was so big we might have outgrown our britches. It was a big deal all morning that day, I.D.S. live at Oliver Wendell.

However, what I remember was how messy the setup during fourth period before the lunchtime event felt. Maybe I expected too much but setup, but it just felt like everything was a hot mess and no one seemed to be on the same page as far as how to setup the equipment for the two bands. Also, maybe because of this, or just anxiety I didn’t know I had then, nerves started to kick in a bit for me at that point, turns out I could get nervous, lesson learned. I think if we were just having fun, I would have been okay, but it suddenly became serious time for everyone, but I was feeling like it was amateur hour watching things get put together. I guess maybe years of recitals at the L street house made me stuck up.

We were to follow Karl’s band during the actual event. Watching their rehearsal, I should have paid better attention to their lead singer Ryan, I didn’t. That will cost me dearly in a little bit. When the time came to perform in the gymnasium, the first act up was this little seventh grade girl singing on her own, which we were all really cool about, too pat on one’s own back. There was no real sound system in the gym, so she was just plugged into one of the many cheap guitar amps we had out on the gym floor, and it was fine for a junior high production. Or do I call it a high school production, hard to call, the rest of us performers were freshmen, either way know that it’s during the ninth grade, and in Davis calling it junior high or high school is the same difference.

Karl’s band was up next, good old Morbid Thoughts. We sat behind them and listened to what sort of felt like chaos. Some of this is attributed to all the sound being blasted out of those tiny little practice amps and us all sitting behind where the sound was trying to project too. I also figure there were two things going on with Morbid Thoughts, one Karl and the band had a piece of music, probably written by Karl, which they were trying to play. And two, Ryan had lyrics that didn’t match but he wanted to say that matched an opposing style of music he was into. The end result was that everything just made a hot mess. It sounds like a harsh take, but this clash of styles will follow Karl and his band as it becomes Silvara and they play more High School shows, eventually leading to, spoiler, Ryan finally getting the boot from the band. In all honestly though I was probably too close to the general issue or Ryan having a different “style”, in fact what I was about to find out what a huge issue Ryan’s “style” could be.

And the very issue of clashing styles was a hindrance in high school to Karl and company. By that time Ryan notoriously just laid down on the stage and performed his version, while the rest of the band, now a few years into practicing these same songs tried to cover it up, so knowing were the future is headed with Morbid Thoughts, the idea that some of the chaos was coming directly from Ryan holds merit. Is a demerit?

If not a style it was just a bad decision the way the vocal setup was going. I know we rehearsed ahead of time but for the life of me, I didn’t know or notice he had the mic plugged into a little practice amp behind the drum set. (Chris K. and Ryan M. were sharing a kit that day for speeds sake). Anyway, during the inaugural and only Morbid Thought’s performance we all could hear Ryan’s weird vocals quite clearly not knowing it was coming from behind the drums and that for those in the bleachers they probably weren’t getting the same performance.

When it became our turn and we started off as we normally had been. We had hit James’s garage pretty hard that week and were maybe comfortable with our future of sin. The was the song name, A Future of Sin, which if I recall was coming our way. Snapback, sorry, Anyway I was about to find out that from the performance area all I could hear was Chris K. banging away at the drums and really that was it. So, my nerves heightened, and I got worried. Interesting that Ryan had just performed an entire song this way just before us.

 I looked over at Chris H. since his changes where how I felt confident in knowing when to start my part. But there on the junior high school gym floor the drums were just so loud and random sounding, that even watching Chris H.’s fingers wasn’t working.  Things were going to shit. I had practiced with the drums a bit, but by now and no offense the Chris K, they sounded about as on time as our friend J.F. when he claimed he would be over in 15 minutes. Which is to say not. I quickly degenerated, probably to the delight of Chris H.’s band name, into a swear word riddled tirade about not being able to hear anything. It was a disaster; I am pretty sure we sounded like more of a mess than Morbid Thoughts. I just vented my frustrations, and we ended the song like it was all planned. The kids still cheered for us like we accomplished anything beyond damaging some ear drums. Seems you can have all go wrong, but if you’re a ninth grader you get graded on a peer review curve.

Now luckily for me that little peavy amp wasn’t to audible in its place. Its poor placement probably saved me from getting in trouble at school that day, although I did get asked later the next day by a couple friends if I was really saying what it sounded like I was saying. The answer was yes, and I was angry. But the performance itself was such a mess that we just packed up and left school for the rest of the day once we were done. We knew it hadn’t gone right and we wanted out.

Once we got to deliberate it turned out everyone was having a similar issue, so no one really knew what was going on and had to just play what they thought they were supposed to at any given point. This may also have explained why Karl’s bound sounded a little more experimental than expected. Seems a junior high gymnasium with a bunch of cheap equipment bought by kids starting garage bands isn’t great. We got real angry about it at the local McDonalds. But once everyone sort of agreed that the whole situation was a mess we felt better and just went off to play hooky from school the rest of the day.

However, the legend of my tirade gave us some “street” credit, if your streets are full of nice suburban houses. Problem was after all that I didn’t want to try and do anything serious again. I felt the band was more for the fun of us in the band, not to let crazy situations like the one at the talent show piss us off. I wasn’t about to get that angry in front of that many people again. I don’t know specifically how everyone else felt, but I think especially Chris H. was able to power through the ordeal because there was sort of a fault that could be made in the situation.

This was around the time I had made friends with Jake, who was in the band at the other junior high in town, even though he was attending Holmes with us. Kids. I started getting him into the idea of making silly random punk songs and then started to push I.D.S. to move that direction and just let Jake experiment with the guitar all over the place. Oh yeah, I moved Jake in to play guitar since it seemed I would be stuck on vocals only from talent show on. Chris H. seemed to especially not like this idea, and at a heated meeting over the bands direction in James’s backyard ended with Jake and I skipping off hand in hand. I.D.S. would soon be retired from this earth. Chris H. had expressed some worry about the songs that Jake and I were working on that may make us look less manly than he was hoping for. So, we had fun with that and thus the skipping off hand in hand.

Jake and I would just go our merry way, retool into the silly punk we wanted called Yoda Sex Slave (YSS), and just perform songs during garage rehearsals, make silly t-shirts, and enjoy the time. To be fair Chris H. just kind of gave up on the I.D.S. dream for a life of graffiti art anyway. The downside to all of this is that after the talent show event, I just became the vocals for every incarnation of the band, and that guitar I took all that money out to buy just became something I would sell later to my nephew Justin for twenty bucks.

Oh yeah graffiti art. So, Karl’s band, ye olde Morbid Thoughts. Morbid, the word of the month. Sometimes Chris H. and I were rebelling against different things I think. Chris H. during this whole punk exploration also started to become enamored with graffiti or tagging. Chris H. also found using the word wholesome as a put down to be quiet fun. Now I can’t remember for sure if that became the word he was using to tag things. I don’t think it was, I feel it was something shorter. But he used the word a lot in normal conversation.

So morbid came up on a vocabulary quiz in class. Not sure which, maybe have bene my English class, might have been someone else’s, might have been Math. Doesn’t matter. All I remember is the sheet of paper that defined the world as something “unwholesome”. Makes sense why maybe that word would rise up into our friend group slang. So then of course we get Morbid Thoughts, the band that swept the gymnasium before I.D.S….

But it was more. Since Chris H. and I had some arguments that year but now were in a bad ass band, I maybe tentatively agreed to go tagging around town with him. With no tag of my own, since this was kind of his scene, I just used our word of the month. So for about a month, armed with thick permanent markers I would run around with various amounts of Chirses vandalizing buildings with the unwholesome word.

With the fallout from I.D.S. dissolving I was able to give up this life of crime that I was secretly begrudgingly doing. But the tags were there. Thus it came to pass, as the bible would put it, that while sitting at home one day Mom would come in the living room and ask a question.

“Why is it that I saw the word Morbid you guys all keep on one of the walls at the Long’s drug store?”. So yeah maybe using a word we are abusing isn’t the best tag in the world. Mom knew, we shrugged. Over the years she got it. All of us but Chris H. pretty much quit around the end of the band anyway, and it was Chris H’s on going walk into the life of tagging/graffiti art that then became the focus of remembering that little word. Because Chris H. never stopped, I guess with the background in art from seventh and eighth grade, coupled with the loss of the band it would become his new fixation, the cool rebellion against he man.

The summer that was coming was to be a pretty big change in my adult development. My band goals were different and I guess not wanting to have to admit to morbid on the side of the drug store I would find myself hanging with other people a lot more. So much more that here in the ninth grade of my story Chris H. makes his exit. This isn’t a move away from Davis situation like others before, he was always there, we still talked, but his part here ends. Now his story is probably interesting, I know his life of street art got him in some thick issues during those high school years and I think beyond, but I don’t really know the details, we wont see Chris H again until I run into him getting a 40 ounce at the Nugget Market in 2002.

In three years at Holmes Jr High I would form the basis for what the 90s are in my mind. Getting asked to play football help rekindle the desire to watch the games on Sunday. In turn by the Ninth grade I was managing to get Sundays off. My whole life Sunday’s were Church days. Initially I had every other Sunday to myself but by the end of this school year I had reclaimed Sundays as my own. Early on I remember using my new free Sundays for things like getting together with Chris H. to go over to Karl’s and try and see what his band was all about, but after a while I just remember Sunday mornings being a time when I could sleep in and have some alone time in the house with George.

That may seem weird but if you have followed as a little kid I was always doing things, activities with Melaine around, and as I got into my teens we started having people over at the house so much a lot of times it was still the same vibe, but then oddly for a couple hours Sunday morning, other than George wanting in and out of the sliding glass door, I could just sit around and mess with computer, or watch football, which as the 90s move forward I would do a lot of.

Junior High School also set a pretty decent tone, or motif to what I felt life was. I wasn’t studious, I got real mad about the Hartbill essay and its politics, but in the end I actually enjoyed the experience, not of the Hartbill but of junior high. Thanks to the open campus lunch pass system I came home for lunch every day, with friends and we were of an age where eating Ramen seemed cool. Thanks to Klinger’s art class I was able to avoid classes I didn’t want to go to and I just hung out.

Now three years in we established a lot, I talked about how big Street Fighter 2 was, we had some mornings with Marty going off about his time at 7-11 in the morning, but it also included trying to play while at Sam’s house, walking to 7-11 I the afternoon from the K street apartments to play and eventually getting a SNES copy of the game to play at home. We would spend hours going over computer games, designing my personal RPG in word perfect.

Then there were all the nights spent. Initially it wasn’t a big thing, Keith came over one weekend to stay and shocked us all with his Ramen as a soup unwavering ideal. Whereas everyone else in the L street house had always done it as a noodles only. Chris M and Marty and Chris K all lived in the same small apartment complex so you could always just got home at night, so hanging out there didn’t require staying over. Then there were those couple trade offs with Jason in the seventh grade. But not much.

//It wasn’t until the 8th grade that gaming and crashing late at night became regular. And once that flood gate opened it was just open for the next seven years or so. For these years it was primarily Chris K, Chris H and Chris M. eventually it would just be Chris M. but there was my mom’s favorite era of Ryan and his friend Chris and his other friend Chris and his other friend Chris, a joke she stole from Newhart. Chris K, would stay playing games so much that in the summer of 92 we just brough him with us on vacation.

While not a celebrated event, this became the common for the L street house. Until I moved out in 2000, this trend of the house just having people awake and doing things at any hour of the day happened. When I moved back later too in my 20s the pattern continued. The amount of kids that slept on the living room floor or couch is quite substantial. And as much as my parents lodged noise complaints over the years there was also a statement from Mom that made it all okay. This was tolerating the noise was worth the fact no one would ever mess with our house at night, since there were the lights on and people moving about. Take it how you may, but the rest lost to noise was balanced with the peace of mind that nothing bad was going on during the darkness of night at the L street house.

This made Saturday mornings, er afternoons depending on your point of view a weird time of kids getting into routines. Mom seemed to use the mornings on Saturday to get the grocery shopping done, so, and I can specially remember Chris M, doing this a lot, she would get home and make us all carry the bags in. Someone would have to put George in the backyard so he wouldn’t run out the front door, and then we would march the bags of food in the house. Usually then, being woken up, we would take to the living room TV and some games. Mom would put away the groceries and then sometimes would feel the need to make treats.

I would watch Chris M. say, as for a specific example, go back and play through Zelda 2. Being a one player game only one of us could sit on the floor and play, but it could be an event as we muddle back through the game and mom makes brownies, and George acts like he wants them until he gives up and just hangs out with us too.

And here I was at the end of the trip still going to the Senior High School regardless of all the mistakes. DHS would change how I felt about school pretty quickly, but that wasn’t the next part of my story, since I had a whole summer to attend too.

The summer after this year was the summer of 1993, it kicked off with going to see Jurassic Park after the last day of school. Dinosaurs launched the BBS summer.

Coming out of Ninth grade was an interesting time in my life. I am still old enough that near the end of the ninth-grade year we had a whole to do about signing up for our tenth-grade classes. Unlike today’s computer-based signup system, back then we had to take a half day and travel from our respective junior highs to the big central senior high school in town. There we would get in lines for the teachers we wanted and get cards from them securing our spot in whatever class they had a card for. Then deliver those cards to the scheduling czars table and you then knew what next year was going to be.

The day of Chris M. and I managed to get through the event with little to no sweat and just stayed on campus and played basketball on some outside courts behind the gymnasium. Memorable mainly because of the amount of NBA Jam style half court shots Chris M. made that afternoon. NBA Jam being popular in the arcades during this time.

Interestingly the summer itself was kicked off by going to see Jurassic Park. And not with friends, but with Mom and Dad. Even though by now we had “internet”, the internet of 1993 was a different thing and somehow what Jurassic Park didn’t get spoiled to me. Thus, it was a lot more interesting to watch the first time not knowing what it was going to be about.

The BBSs in question for this summer mayhem were Purgatory and TCR, in other words the ones that had multiple phone lines and large active chat rooms. These would lead to a wider variety of meetups than the teenagers that had been using my single line BBS at home. Also at this time I was between my one line BBS and the next birth of it. I am sure I tried to figure this out, but I don’t know why I stopped maintaining Imperial City BBS, but for this brief time there was no L street house BBS, oddly during the summer of the BBS.

It was a strange couple months to be sure. My junior high year had been drawing, my band and avoiding a lot of school. Somehow at the tail end of the year I really started to up my time on the local chat BBSs. Coupled with this I started using my personal phone line, which had been for running a BBS to chit-chat with Kim from art class quite a bit. Another possible culprit for why I wasn’t keeping that line open for modems.

While chilling in art class she had become quite fond of asking me about music, which at that point in my life I was rather big on “fixing” people’s musical tastes. Which is an immature thing kids like me would do. That stemmed into other weird conversations, including a strange one about conquering the school I remember rather vividly, no really we had plans drawn up and everything. Suffice to say on that one, in the world that was to come those plans in the wrong hands would have got us in so much trouble. So, as we tapered off the school year she wanted to stay in touch. She did this with the phone and during her family vacation with the post office.

Another change was there was no summer family trip. The year before we had gone on one to the Midwest to visit Cindy, but this year much like between 7th and 8th we had nothing planned. And look 1991 was a plentiful summer were other than scout camp I was able to do a lot of Ryan-centric activities, so I planned for the same. So, with Chris H. out of the picture who would I do this with?

This was the summer Chris K. would overstay his welcome with my parents, which is an interesting feat. While Chris M. would still come and hang out like normal, I started spending a lot more time with kids and others from the BBS chat scene. Well and Jake. YSS will never die!

Tom who I mentioned earlier, when this was a different kind of file, introduced me to photoshop that summer. Tom would be my initial catalyst for doing things with others we would see online that summer. Since he had a car, we were able to roam around the area and meet up with people, something that at fifteen was pretty new to me. He also was into playing frisbee golf, which there were two local courses for and so quite frequently we would find some people to do that activity with.

Yup, Mr. too cool for school started his summer off with Jurassic Park, online chat and frisbee golf. Party time. One time I thought it would be cool to invite Kim along on a disc golf excursion. Since Tom had a car, what seemed at the time like a long distance away, where Kim lived on the other side of town, was easy to traverse with an automobile. I don’t remember the golfing though to be honest from that day, nope, I remember Tom’s friend, Beau, a weird caricature of a cartoon human, pulling off Kim’s shoe from the front seat randomly. As I said it was a strange summer and well yeah. This is the point where maybe I wonder if it’s weird these 20-year-olds are hanging out with us, but back then it seemed cool. Tom was a good guy no doubt, the other guy, a teenage girl’s shoe?

As always, I learn more and more about it all. I don’t remember there being a build up to inviting young Kim along for frisbee golf in my old man brain, but it seems I was selling her on the idea. I do remember that during and after having that Art class with her we started talking away from class and on the phone a lot. And I do remember the following, which is that she wrote me letters while on summer vacation that year, but I was pleasantly surprised to find them still saved in my files in storage.

Now her handwriting is very small. Which makes even the scans hard to read, but a long with all these other items, I started to notice she knew of the frisbee game before she left on the trip and wanted to play. So, seems I worked on getting her to come to golf and lose her shoe before the event ever happened.

There is more to unpack in these than I remembered. I knew we had gotten closer post art class, but I always assumed I was just a teenage boy and reacting to any female attention as something to savor. Turns out there seems to be more to that time in my life when I was talking to here than I remember. Sadly I don’t remember for the life of me that she was telling me about family fiscal issues and wanting baked goods, Maybe the way our time split was so much more of a trauma on my puberty driving mind that I blacked out all the normal stuff from before hand.

I guess since she got her self involved with me, and Marty and even apparently called Karl up the one time we ever know of her coming back to Davis after High School. I’ve always just painted this picture of some weird bad boy ideal chasing overachiever and forgot there was some substance to her before all of that went down. Or maybe I am old and foolish now, but the letters seem genuine so maybe my teenager memories should cut her some slack. To add to this, I forgot that she drew me pictures.

Yeah, go figure that one. Oh, and hey look, Operation Ivy. Even beyond that these reminded me that she drew me a picture of rabbits wearing glasses in reference to a track of a Tool album. I remember now I sold her on Primus as well as these bands and Bad Religion if I recall correctly. There was a lot of invested time into this I guess.

It also shows how much the band from ninth grade shaped who I was for a while. I think I even mentioned the idea that teenagers in a band represent music in a sort of one dimensional, this is good and that is garbage manner. I think I might have been over selling my tastes and shaping those of Kim during this time. Interestingly I think she used a compass to draw the circle on the Operation Ivy cover, now after being in a file folder and storage for decades the circle shines through the back of the drawing with a metallic green and blue, from what I am assuming is metallic residue that got in the paper from feverish compass work.

Tom had another friend, whose name I can’t remember, but he lived in Woodland and had a significant mullet. He and Tom were childhood friends if I recall. He was also into girls around my age, which was 15 or 16 years old. Thus, I spent a lot of time being an auto included wingman to make some of the weird age hang outs not seem as weird. It still seems weird now that I am older, at the time though I got introduced to a lot of girls I would know in the coming school year at the senior high school and just reveled in it and like with Kim in the car didn’t think much of it.

I remember one summer night the three of us had gone to this one older, for me, girls house whose parents were out of town. We stayed until the wee hours of the morning, which was a steady thing that summer. I remember sitting on this giant lookout platform the girl’s father had built on their roof. It was around two in the morning and from it I could see directly to Karl’s house which was the next street over. I remember telling her how weird it was to know he was there just asleep while I was out having fun that summer.

Seems like an odd thing to remember, but I had known Karl since he came to town, we played Gauntlet together during spring break as kids. Our parents knew each other, but here we were, the same age and it felt like he was still living that past life and I was somewhere new and exciting. It was pretty reflective to notice.

Then there was hanging out with Doug. Doug was a year behind me in school but was into the BBSs that summer too. He stood up for me once in Algebra, so I decided he was a solid kid. He was particularly fond of a girl from the BBS scene named Alyssa and so when I would hang out with Alyssa he would come on those adventures. He was also quite fond of Chris M. too, which at the time we thought a joke, but armed with later knowledge it made more sense.

Doug and I got into a superficial rating system for young ladies that revolved around the amount of money you would be willing to spend on them. It was mean spirited and amused us for months. He would also stay over sometimes at the L street house, sometimes on the nights Chris M. would. A bunch of teen boys in a bedroom, playing video games and going on BBSs.

But I remember the night we crashed the High School’s server. This I think was about a month into school that year, but it tapers on the coattails of that summer. Doug logged into UC Berkeley’s free FTP file server and then just copied the contents from there to our little dinky server the high school just got and boom. In the morning when we tried to log on, nothing, simple effective and pointless.

This was when he had that party with the fruit loops and other breakfast cereals being thrown around the TV room. Yeah, we were older now and so Mom and Dad started going on their own trips. A weekend here a weekend there. So, even though I made a joke about it not being Party time, it was sometime and here was my turn to host.

There were two big ones, but the first weekend was the cereal party. From like Friday night through Sunday morning we just got on the BBS and brought people to the house. The computer in my room was fire up so people could log in, and somehow we managed to get a lot of people over. Being teenager’s though it wasn’t a well-planned event, so for snacks one of the things I busted out was the cereal boxes.

That went how it sounds. It was the summer to boot, so we had some fans running in the little TV room to keep it cool while everyone crowded around a 19 inch tv. Thus someone fond out it was funny to drop handfuls of the cereal into the fan and watch it fly all over the place. We made a mess of the house. God only knows what George was thinking during this time. Assuredly I think he hid most of the time under the pool deck in the backyard wondering why he wasn’t getting all the attention.

Sunday morning the house was a stye. With most people gone it was Chris M., myself and one of the sysOps from another small BBS that took to cleaning up ground zero. And we did a really good job, disposed of all evidence that the house that weekend was a destination. When the folks got home it was just me and Chris M. playing some games with George happily being a good dog. Mom commented that the house was nicer than how they left it and we forever cemented trust to be left home alone.

Now Mom had to have known we only cleaned up the house to hide the truth. But, look at it from her perspective. They get home, the house is spotless, the kids and dog are just relaxing and nothing seems to be on fire, the police didn’t leave a message on the machine to come pick up her children in juvenile hall. Play along with it and weekend getaways mean a clean house when you get home, win/win.

With this trust build up, Mom and Dad would leave us boys to our own devices another time. And Marty ordered the Spice Adult Television channel. He did this under the guise that the cable bill would only call it a Pay-per view event and we could claim we ordered a boxing match or some such nonsense. Which is a prime example of how when you’re that age your friends that present things like that to you, even when they tend to be somewhat pathological. You’ll go for it at face value. So with plans being shaped I said, “Sure!”. Later would come the fun filled few months of my dad getting on Marty to pay him back the money for that debacle.

But this isn’t the Adult TV weekend. Well, it was for some, I guess. This weekend though was more memorable from my end due to the fact that Jake and I got bored of the adult shows considerably earlier than the rest of the teen boys over at the house Friday night. Which I think were Marty, Joe T. and Chris K. and left on quite an evening to early morning of adventuring around town on foot. While Marty would eventually swap out at the house with Chris M. the others stayed, which just needs to be added there real fast.

Anyway what I remember is when Jake and I returned that next day we found both Chris K. and Joe sitting in the T.V. room with blankets draped on them still watching the dirty movies. Those two must have had one weird 24-hour porn watching marathon. There also was a thing with Marty, Chris M. and liquid in a broken whiffle ball bat that made for some laughs. It was gross teenage boy stuff I guess.

But for the adventure. Jake and I as I said quickly deemed the Spice channel boring. Admittedly, from a teenage boy’s perspective it could have gone either way. The censorship was heavy and by the summer of 1993 we had much more interesting stuff through the jungle of newsgroups on the internet and the 18 and over file sections on the local BBS scene. It wasn’t the shock and awe it might have bene for others I guess. So we snatched up some of the pizza money left to us for dinners and walked down the street to Rico’s Pizza. Man I miss that place.

The walk is a short one, but on the way we ran into a girl we went to school with heading to the same location. So we all had dinner and it is from here that all the nights comings and goings get blurry. I am almost one hundred percent sure Jake and I spent a small amount of time at some house party in the neighborhood. One of those far too many kids jammed into small living rooms, that are so loud it triggers agoraphobia. We for sure went downtown too.

But it’s not until later at night that my memory starts remembering things. And that was that we met up with Alyssa somewhere and got it in our minds to go get the ingredients needed to make rice crispy treats. Yeah after a adventurous night, my mind focuses on food. There is a reason for this though. Walking back to Alyssa’s apartment we got spotted by a gentlemen in a car asking if we had seen a drunk man walking around in a trench coach, and I kid you not, a giant dong. Too which he moved his town hands like a foot apart.

We are, 14, 15 and 16 and some old dude just rolled up on us and asked us if we saw a flasher’s penis. So yeah, I remember walking home with the grocery bag. That was random enough to stick. It also helped that we were young and dumb and made the treats unsupervised an somehow used a frosting spatula to smooth out the treats while they were cooking, melting some of the rubber/plastic into the marshmallow. It gave the treats a distinctive flavor that I will never forget as well.

It was armed with those rice crispy treats that we got home and found our debaucherous brothers the next day. While not a full-blown event like last time. Once everyone had left, once again Chris M. and I cleaned up two days’ worth of stupidity in time to get a gold star when the folks got back.

I would also start to see my first real LAN (local area [computer]network) parties. In these cases, another one of the smaller local BBSs called BBB, run by the sysOp that helped clean up the House house party. Would have college parties but with a nerdy crowd. These were focused around using the computers in the house to play the game called Doom which was all the rage at the time. It was a weird mix of older kids drinking and playing video games, with a couple of us local high school aged kids amidst this Tom Foolery.

This summer would introduce to us Alyssa and Christine, who went by Cy.  Alyssa has already now been a big part of the summer. Cy, her returning from like a long summer trip was her best friend at the time and had her own automobile. More wheels, for more fun.

Sponsored by the TCR BBS I think was a weekly softball game that summer too. Being of fit age this was a BBS get together I would hit up just about every week with Tom. Competing with computer-oriented college kids gave me a slight upper hand and I remember the feeling one gets when people are in awe of your age and being able to hit the ball into the play structure at Chestnut Park. The simpler things in life are not always bad.

So, it was by random chance one day at one of these softball games that I ran into Cy for the first time. I remember the surprise of finding out this girl at the softball game was Alyssa’s famed Christine. Like I said I had only heard over her and suddenly before me the legend in real life. After the game I took off with her to go see Alyssa thus starting an adventure. But I can’t remember the adventure. Seriously I can remember that we took off for that very reason and I can remember the feelings but not what actually took place. The brain is a strange storage device.

Initially during the summer, I was mainly just using Purgatory BBS. Considering it cost money to stay online and do the chats, one had to kind of pick and chose which groups of friends they would stay on to waste time with. TCR having like twice as many available modems to call into ended up being more conversations to track and thus I liked Purgatory’s chat room more because of the efficiency, well and also because Tom was friends with the System Operator (SysOp) Zack, along with Alyssa whose mother was dating Zack. But one would jump over and dabble.

The summer would then just stay at that sort of a pace. The parties like I threw at the L street house would also start being decently regular at other places. The house where TCR was, well, a house that would have parties at it. Which was strange in some regards. But there was a room with a million modems, some of the guys that ran it living there and fridge full of beverages. So yeah, I guess party at TCR. These I would go to with Tom. Then intertwined I would do just regular nights at the L street house, as I said a lot of the time now with Doug and Chris M.

Doug as well was a programmer kid. I believe he just inherited the knowledge from his father, who if I recall had a rather extensive resume at the time. Doug wanted to program a BBS door game for our smaller kid run BBSs that was like the popular one on Purgatory BBS that we all played. This was necessitated by the fact that Purgatory BBS was run on an Amiga with a whole set of software none of us PC users could use.

As projects like this would go, I was asked to make the graphics for this. Now in Doug’s age group I wasn’t the only artist, they had a perfectly good one in their grade named Joe, but for some reason I was the go-to. I always felt kind of bad for Joe in that respect, I think he even talked to me once about how Chris K. had just flat out said “No, Ryan’s the better artist” to him and their friends once during some discussion. If only he understood I didn’t care. Oh well back to Doug.

Hanging out with Doug at his house, was a lot of doing stuff on the computer, versus when we went out and rated girls in the wilds on our bicycles. However, there was a scam we ran one afternoon. As I keep saying this was the summer Chris K. just started to work his way into everyone’s nerves. It was during this time that we had to start screening Chris K.’s early morning phone calls so he wouldn’t just come over at 8am and plant himself in front of the my PC all day and night. In a way that wasn’t any different for him, Chris K. was kind of a Chris K.’s need first kind of guy. So maybe it was the rest of us that were changing. I guess there is some argument he doubled down on who he was versus changing with the times.

However, it wasn’t meshing with us. He really wasn’t taking to the larger scale BBS hangouts, or the ones with our own age kids. Then there was the time he called, told me he was coming over. Got there, I was still asleep, planted himself on the magic pixel box and then just played by himself all weekend. A few days later, I think maybe me, Jake and Chris M. or Doug, some combination of the troop came home from galivanting and Mom met us at the door. She told me I had to force Chris K. to get up and take a shower because he was starting to emanate across the house.

I think that was the unspoken last straw though. It went from trying to screen the calls to just avoiding the phone all together in the morning. An 8am call was only going to be on person and in a house were the boundaries were pretty boundless it seemed like Chris K. had found the invisible wall. This is not like Chris H. though were he just disappears from the narrative, but the L street house regulars basically dropped another member at this point.

Chris K. then would then become the target of this scam that Doug and I hatched one day over at Doug’s house while “working” on that door game. As explained BBS time was purchased with real world money. I don’t remember the ratio, but let’s say for examples sake, one dollar was 30 minutes of online time. Purgatory which was a chat BBS with a very popular door game (BBS video game) called Hack n’ Slash (The one Doug is trying to emulate), that required daily upkeep. One would usually pay so much money every month or so to keep their time bank nice and full, so they could chat and slash.

Chris K. although being cut off from the access to my computer still had a computer at home and was not about to go without door games in his life. I mean let’s be real his need for computer games got him semi-blacklisted from the most open door policy in town. Now I don’t remember if you could check on another user’s available time or not, but somehow Doug and I knew he had quite a bit of time banked on his account. So, then we pulled one of oldest tricks in the book, we called him up and pretended to be someone associated with the BSS. I guess Doug did technically since I would be easily recognizable. How this worked exactly escapes my memory. Chris K. should have been able to pick out Doug’s voiced over the phone in all honesty. Some part of my brain thinks we might have had Alyssa do the phone end of the scam, so maybe that’s how we go through the recognition phase. But I feel like I undoubtedly have this picture in my mind of Doug being on the line.

Either way, it was the simple, “Hey we are from the BBS, we’ve been having issues with the account system can you verify your password for us.” Which he did. Then Doug quickly logged into his account, and we transferred his time all over the place. Being at least deceitful enough to know to not just give it to our accounts. Instead, we probably gave small bits of time to a couple dozen different users. Now is when the story gets weird.

I think Chris. K. being embarrassed when he realized what happened didn’t say anything. There are a couple reasons this is silly. One we stole real money from him by doing this, two Purgatory was run by one guy, he was a nice guy and most of us knew him. The BBS more than likely kept a call log, and he would have been able to match up Doug’s modem line number with a little bit of work. By not saying anything he just let us get away with minor theft.

The second thing he did that was odd was to not change his password. So, this led to more issues. The first big one I remember was that someone got the idea, I want to say either Marty or Chris M. to try his Purgatory password on TCR. Which worked their too, and so a second mass distribution of his time was given out to another large pool of users. Second was that it gave a lot of teenage boy’s access to his game accounts, which back then you had one of that was tied to your verified account for the BBS. I know this would have bugged him, but he never brought it up.

However, I have a feeling this started his walk down another path he would go during senior high school. The sad thing is that the Chris K. password scam was so ingrained to a large group that I can still remember his password thirty years later and not my own.

The last hurrah of the summer of 1993 wasn’t really a hurrah, I just like using extra language. The senior high school had a morning, I think just about exactly a week before school was to start. Were students of the sophomore level and if I recall juniors as well had to get up at the crack of dawn to go get their student I.D. photos and a couple other inconsequential items. Yearbook photo might have been another one.

Now by this time in a normal teenager’s life, a summer schedule meant late nights and sleeping in. A sudden unwanted interruption wasn’t terribly welcome. As it would happen, the night before this event I stayed up late on Purgatory BBS in the chat room discussing nonsense. I did ask Alyssa who was logged on about what the point of the early morning was and became more disappointed with the idea of getting up for the event. But when morning came Mother woke me up and groggily, I got on my bike and pedaled to North Davis.

It was a giant waste of time. Other than a funny student ID photo nothing much was of consequence. I did happen to get in line with Jim, who at this point I hadn’t seen since the fifth grade, but after that I just walked around to see if anyone else had shown up. The only reason I remember that detail was because Marty had been online for a while the night before too and where Chris M. I think made it we never saw Marty, who then just got a footnote for having no school picture in the yearbook.

If I learned anything from that day, it was that I wasn’t ready for mornings as a wakeup time versus a go to bedtime. Having a first period for the first time in my life was going to be interesting. The summer’s legacy would linger on, Alyssa now is someone I will hang out with. In fact, I met a bunch of student age kids that I will interact with to some level in the upcoming year.

The weird part is that things on the other end will taper. Probably due to the fact the older BBS goers had university to attend to, and so in an area were months seem like a long time, people stop hanging out. Tom and I tried to do a Monday night football night at the Graduate, our same little sports bar that used to be next to Sam’s house by the mall. But that didn’t last terribly long. Disappointing yes, However with all that’s happened, my rose tinted glasses are going to remember 1994 as the BIG year.

Google can be wrong, trust memories more?

So, what were some of these games that caused a kerfuffle on the side during all this other stuff. Number one, this is still the SNES era and we have some new SNES, or a SNES mini franchise that needs to be covered (more than it has).

The main section of my personal history goes over people and pe’s to know when going through all these years. In it I tell a small tale of George, the family dog, and his first witnessed seizure. This is George’s story, even though he is a dog, so I told it. Now I have to add the stuff around it. And that is Super Empire Strikes Back.

Always linked to George’s bad day, this game also currently lends for a memory puzzle that I might need to try and research harder. Let’s get this moving though. The research in some ways was interesting to me so here it goes.

The SNES, which I have gone over, was, even with the amazing utility of the PC, a primary source of well all things pixels back then. If you read about years gone by of the BBS history of the house, the first of the Super Star Wars games became not only a fun game we all remember, but its manual lead to fictitious company name that we rode for years. If not secretly forever, with me still branding it jokingly on things to this day.

Super Star Wars was a Christmas gift that year, clearly in 1992, that’s when the game came out, it was out for the holidays, and as a young nerd during an era of not much Star Wars that was probably one of the highest priorities for Christmas, and I even remember helping my folks find a copy to wrap up for the tree.

And here is where things get messy. My adult brain decades later always remembers these games as being a mainstay the next few years as my Christmas gifts. Every Christmas meant a new game in the trilogy. But the internet says no, Super Empire came out in June, or 1993, not Christmas. Now there is some idea that I could have been down with the Christmas thing and just waited six months for.. No there is no way I could wait six months to play a new Star Wars game.

Thus, something doesn’t check out here. Too add to this is the presence of our childhood friend Doug at George’s attack. Doug for a while hung out a lot. Mainly though during that summer of 1993 where he was completely down the BBS social network. Spark one point for the summer.

When George was having his seizure, I know specifically it was during the long Darth Vader fights at the end of the game. Thanks to George I really remember the fights by in part to him looking up at me while I was playing with that confused dog look of “what happening to me?”. So perhaps in the summer of 1993 I really did play the game, but then why do I remember getting these games for Christmas?

The added confusion is that I have this recollection that the day this all happened it was overcast and cold outside. So, I dig in.

Wikipedia:
LINK HERE,
claims June 1st, 1993. However, Wookiepedia:
LINK HERE,
November 1993. Well look here the internet has two different dates if I dive into things. Before I go on, this makes me think the date Google and Wikipedia give you of June 3rd is just flat wrong, but let’s dive. Super Nintendo fandom calls it an October 1993 release. Interesting that one game and the first three articles on its release date are different, so after a little while digging through other websites, I think the date that comes up as its release date when googling or Wikipediaing it has just been entered wrong and no one has fixed it for years.

That get’s even more conformation when I started loading up old floppy disks that I had in storage. One disk was loaded with my sophomore Turbo Pascal projects. Thanks to programming notes fifteen/sixteen-year-old me was able to literally speak to me from the past, reminding me that Doug and his Door game hung on at least until early 1994, making it very plausible he had come over during Christmas break and wasn’t just a summer hanger on.

That is nice because it fits within my memories without causing a headache, I remember those being the caps to Christmas, Star Wars, then Empire, and in 1994 Return of the Jedi. So as of 2023, some information on the internet isn’t right! It seems almost all other websites have it wrong, however since Google pulls from Wikipedia, and it’s wrong, most default lookups will be incorrect, Funny world that has become 30 years later.

Sadly, it would be greater if I could remember where we bought the games, but I think after Super Star Wars, Mom and Dad just knew it was one of the titles to get and could have purchased them anywhere. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t reserve copies at the game store in Woodland Mall each holiday.

To hopefully not tread old water, I did end up beating Super Empire that day after we took care of George. Surprisingly once George completes his seizures he goes back to normal. What makes George’s story then here during Christmas of 1993, is we have another SNES story from the TV room to go with Chris M’s FF4 experience meltdown. Also it’s the second seizure story of 1993.

Yeah, there is a BBS summer story I held onto. BSS get togethers. They were a thing, I talked about the TCR softball games and house parties. Well Purgatory had some smaller events. There was one BBQ at one of the parks I vaguely recall, and stuff like that.

One of these shindigs was held at Tom’s. Tom lived with his father in a duplex just down the street from Holmes, which means just down the street from me. We all knew each other, and Tom wanted to host a Purgatory meet up, to which I think the plan was, food, drink and Monty Phyton and the Holy Grail. Might have been The Princess Bridge. It was some such Fantasy that was big the decade before.

Nothing outlandish or crazy. But it was maybe the first one Purgatory had that summer. Now I am not going to remember everyone’s names all this time later. But the turn out wasn’t bad. And we got to meet some of the newer users on the BBS. There was a small group of Woodlanders that had started logging in. At the time they seemed old to me, but probably know in the future they wouldn’t!

I don’t know how they got alerted to the BBS and modem thing, but they had, they were drastically different to us, but somehow it all worked. Oddly enough they lived in the same trailer park that Steve and Jill had started their whole family in not that long ago. But it was one guy who we all liked and hung out with that summer that went by the BBS handle Sabretooth and his buddy that went by the handle Kestrel that those that attended this little event won’t forget.

Tom was excited about hosting, and I remember getting over there early to help setup. Everyone surprisingly should up near to the expected time, which is a feat in Davis. And we were able to start the movie up with a pretty decent sized group. Then we had to pause. Sabretooth’s friend suddenly fell back in his chair. To the absolute stun of the rest of us.

It was Saber’s reaction that then really got things moving. Nonchalantly he got up and said something like “Fucker is having seizure again.” It was this cavalier attitude to the seizure that kind of through everyone else trying to figure out how to snap into emergency mode off course a bit. Luckily Saber was seemingly so used to this it didn’t matter, he got Tom to call the paramedics went over, braided his friend a bit and did what I guess is normal procedure when this happened.

It was a surreal few minutes while he did that and then an ambulance showed up to take this friend away. Shock still in those of us not from this small community in Woodland, who explained to us that this was something that happened regularly if their friend started drinking, which he had a little bit of. Seemed they were slightly embarrassed they hadn’t stopped him before he could ruin the festivities from their point of view, and that it was nothing to worry about.

Eventually things got back on taste. And Saber and his other friends were guys we hung out with a fair amount that summer. But the rest of us at that particular event, no matter how much we were told not to worry about it were never going to forget the crazy seizure, or the reaction from Sabretooth to it.

Okay I might move this next part to my BBS section eventually, but for now here we go. 1993 game number 2.

Hack and Slash on Purgatory BBS. So here is a curveball to your SNES titles that are getting every cooler and like Super Star Wars filled with action. Then one of the dominate PC games right now is X-Wing, which is this cool, seemingly cutting edge space flight simulator. And the second game I highlight is a text-based game.

But this game was it for a small window. It was a BBS door game. Which meant it was a game you played on a BBS you were logged into and played with others that had accounts on the BBS. To keep people coming back everyday there was a set number of tasks you could do per day and this was 1993’s World of Warcraft in Davis.

While a very simple.. hack and slash role playing game, the character interaction over the modem in an era, like I said with SF2, was just not prevalent. There was no arcade equivalent, there wasn’t online features like that for PC yet, this was it and although simple it was fun.

The regular daily tasks were so routine once you started playing that you knew all the hotkeys and could get your daily grind done with pretty quick. The intrigue came from the player versus player part of the game, where you could log in one day and see that someone ruined your work.

This was exacerbated by having gangs you could join and then pick on others. Now you see why Chris K. giving up his log in to Doug could have other issues. It gave us not only access to online time but we could make him make bad game decisions in Hack and Slash.

As I said the games popularity was so large Doug decided we needed a DOS based version that we could run on the renegade BBSs in town. Which at that point were BBB and our friend Graham’s, Black Horizons. Like all the programming endeavors it seemed though, it never was finished. It was probably more than Doug could manage being a junior high school kid and Doug also was going to turn my word perfect document role playing game that I had been trying to program in basic into a, I want to Pascal game instead, maybe it was C. either way None of those ever got much traction beyond a little bit of code and some images. I did get some ANSI art done.

It's weird looking at old screen shots to think how much time was invested, and money, into this Hack and Slash though. I remember it being so much fun though that I would be willing to try it again. I have read that there is sort of a door game online emulation thing going on, but It would be fun to somehow have the old command prompt dial in with your friends experience back.

Playing a game like that with friends will always seem like a good idea. During Spring Break of 1993, Chris K. and I went up to visit his mother, this was of course while I.D.S. was still a thing. Now I feel like I wrote this story down somewhere already, so the key point for now until I figure that out was that for lack of sightseeing, we started playing my homemade game a lot during that week. There was a heavy underlying need to play these games with friends so much that we did it on a vacation to Portland. I just need to keep jamming this point home for later.

This is also the point when the internet is slowly creeping in. Using the modem for the BBS is the main stay, but now with more college aged friends we have more log ins. Then DHS is getting a internet server from UCD at the beginning of the new school year. We have our own log ins. From there we can access more files and information to move to the BBSs around town. The BBSs are nicer looking, easier to manage and the interaction is with people you know so they will still be the main use for the modem, but at the beginning of the 93-94 school year the internet exists in many ways as much as it will in the future. In honesty it had before, but for our timeline here 1993.