The big green sketchbook.

                Senior year would kick off with me doing the same routine as junior year. King High, morning session. This year with Chris M. So, and hopefully I’ll sort this all out and get it all in the right places, but what must have been right before fourth quarter there were some sweeping changes to the 1994 norm landscape. Deathrow BBS would have found it’s drama moment, which I don’t know how much I have covered, but I do have a paper, route obviously this new school year about some of it that should be in the BBS section of the website.

                That drama on a personal level involved both Marty and Kim, second year running on Kim I believe. It was also around that time that Jake, striking with the evil of having parents in the house, moved out of the L street house for the punk rock house with Mike G. Then oddly enough considering the paper Chris M. wrote to finish our that school year, Chris M. after a year of being in the afternoon session must have switched for quarter four.

                This creates a weird couple months at the end of 1994 that are sort of a meld of what I think would be senior year and what is still junior year. I’ll dive deeper. Marty I think now more obsessed than ever with becoming a police officer, somehow switches to wanting to take the High School equivalency test to test out of school. This is hard to totally keep track of, because Jake, tired of independent study decides to go for his G.E.D. and test out of school as well. While not at the same exact time, it was all sort of in this 1995 bubble so I don’t remember the details as well as I should.

                But as I was saying, those last two months we trade our Marty for Chris, Alyssa is still at King, now gearing up to graduate in June. This means these two months, mainly April and May, are where I house some memories that for years don’t seem to fit anywhere properly.

                So, for three thirds of the year, it was me and Marty, Alyssa would transfer to King, we would do the travel to DHS, hang out with Karl and the boys, do the afternoon thing, run the BBS, and indulge Jake. Then for a two month window we have Chris, Alyssa and Kristy.

                I might have been Kristi (I don’t know why the i instead of y came into my brain while writing that, I am not sure), anyway here is someone that will come into the story for a bit, and I am going to try real hard to remember the backstory. Here is the basics, she was at King High in the morning session, somehow Alyssa and I both started taking to her at school, I started walking home with her since she essentially just lived down the street from me. Then I came to find out through talking to her that she knew both Chris and Marty because her foster Mom where she lived was their aunt.

                I think I remembered that all correctly. Now this was mind blowing to me at the time because I had never heard either of the two boys mention having an aunt living in town. However, I knew there was some relative in town that needed help watching another girl around our age that would be occasionally at their apartment when we all travelled back and forth. I want to say her name was Jenaveve but I might be wrong.

                The reason that is so hard for me to remember is that it never really was discussed either. Both Marty and Chris spent a lot of time at the L street house, by now they called Justin and the other nieces and nephews by their unflattering nickname “the things”, they had integrated, but here by random chance the girl I was walking home with was outside family to the boys and I didn’t know it before hand.

                That being just the backstory, the reason I currently have this in my senior year information is, even though it was junior year my brain has it separated as part of this year. But of course Alyssa will graduate in June, the summer is what the summer was, and even though the summer had both Chris and Marty in it, the extended family dynamic never seemed to continue on, and so I feel like this new year really started as just me and Chris having morning session and Kristi’s involvement seems to have tapered. But that is not to say she wasn’t around. Because:

There she is at graduation. Not to spoil things but I am a few seats over to the right. So she didn’t disappear from the face of the earth this year and perhaps there was some hang over from quarter four. We never stop being friends, I ran into her after High School and all and it was all good, I remember that, which is why I get to this, I thought all those walks and stuff were from senior year and not junior. But Alyssa and Chris writing that paper about Gay’s sanity have shown me that wasn’t the fall of this year but spring.

                So, that takes us to the first thing from this year I have a date I can follow on. My green sketch book. I had this obnoxious habit of updating my art during these years just to mess with people. I never realized then, the only person I was really messing with was myself. However, luckily I have dates on the back of some art revealing when I turned it in for school credit, and thus we have the big green sketch book.

                The book, I believe I obtained from it being in one of Gay’s many “scratch” paper areas in the art room became for daily sketch pad for a time. It was oversized and I would sit at one of the round tables at school and draw away silly things like:

It seems about October 25th I turned in the first batch of drawings I wanted credit for. I make a note that for some reason, the Karl drawings above aren’t part of that batch, even though in the sketch pad they come first and I already started working on them in the computer by then.

And working on those scans in the computer is something I have hit upon in both the art section:

                And in the Goldfish BBS section. I have done this became not only is this a memorable sketch pad where I am doing a lot of preserved art from this time, but because Justin “Booboo” also managed to convince me he could take my homemade RPG and turn it into a VGA graphics PC game. Thus I have tons of these multiangle drawings like the one of Karl that were to be scan, colored and animated for this game.

                This marks October then as the beginning of the rumblings that would form Goldfish BBS. Deathrow would have faltered it looks like around April, thus I assume for the summer the old summer of 1993 BBSs keep everyone in that scene in contact. It seems according to a paper I wrote for school this school year that rumblings for it started in August. However we are almost at Halloween and it’s just be making graphics for Booboo. That was what led to me giving up, as I say, on Marty and Graham running a new BBS out of my house and Booboo stepping in.

                I have always assumed it took a while for all this to happen. In this mess I get a new computer. My first new computer to replace the 386 I got three years before. I have always thought of that new computer being bought during the summer of 1995, but as I go through this timeline it seems I did all that setup for Windows 95 on my 386 and then just left it out in the front room:

There is Chris K., somehow once again on it, even after he became a lesser figure at the house. But this is that time period, Fall 1995. I can see what was going to become Goldfish BBS, but in these photos we took there is only the 386 still. It’s not until later pictures in the summer of 1996:

That I see the mess that was Goldfish. So it seems not that Goldfish started on that 386 in the living room and that more than likely the new fancy Pentium was bought either Christmas Break 1995 or for my Birthday, both I would think I would remember. However!

In that same green sketch book I drew up a Christmas floor plan. And what do we have at the bottom, Two computers, one is a P100 listed to have windows 95/Civ Net and BBS.

So this “summer” memory of getting the new computer at T&D with Mom and Chris had to have been in November. Which means Goldfish stared up real early, either by Halloween or shortly thereafter. So, the football games I talk about in the Goldfish BBS section would also be early November in their beginnings. The High School season ends usually I think right at the end of October. So the first time we had a get together on Saturday to play a game, which was a two-hand touch game and featured I think just me, Booboo, Chris, someone else I cant think of and Kim. This game was played on just a third of the field, since the middle was corded off due to the turf being eating up and needing to be fixed. The first couple weeks we played that was the case, then as the games got bigger we had access to more of the field.

Oh and, wait who was at that first game. Kim. Where the hell did that come from? Kim’s story now, which it’s origins are from the ninth grade, has no fallen out of favor with me, then I made up with before Halloween the year before, then fell out again with the Deathrow, Me, her Marty drama at some point before April of 1995. Then presumably from what I have written Marty and I got over it and were dying playing basketball in the summer heat.

It feels like given what I remember of the feelings for the time that what does Kim have to do with this era of the L street house. I am not sure. One of two scenarios must have happened here. For some crazy reason I called her up during the fall, at this point given everything else I remember from the time, why would I have? But I am 17, I am weird, so this could be. Why she would take the call adds to the absurdity of this theory though to me. The other option is she came back through the BBS, and then I called her and then got her to come play football.

This seems more plausible since it’s an intermediary and keeps both of us from being lunatics and still calling like its nothing. But I can’t rule it out, because the legacy in my memories feelings is that at some point Kim got weird. But here she is back again. Now I also, as I said was cool with Marty, tried to get him and Graham to run the BBS that became the Goldfish, this though contrasts with the fact that once Goldfish get’s started I am introduced to Marty as Duncan, and starts the Duncan arc of Marty, in which my mind has separated him as a separate character almost.

It's very strange than that as he is becoming Duncan, Kim pops back up. This somehow hits a head with the story of one of the Goldfish C&C Lan parties, to which Kim attended, I pretended to be her online, she pretended to be me, or maybe it was Chris she pretended to be, either way, there is a whole story about messing with Marty when he was logged in leading to Chris getting grounded and having to leave the Lan party.

Meaning probably around my birthday is when this happened, after the holidays, in which Marty would have just been Marty in my mind for a couple weeks. In fact it is highly likely that he got real into doing things with us on the BBS during this time, only to have normal patterns and people start logging on again, them alienating him with the Duncan persona and his lingering trust issues with Kim causing that perfect storm of issues that got Chris in trouble that night.

And then something weird happens, in my memories Kim just walks away from it all. I remember being upset with Marty about Chris getting punished. I remember everyone else, including Kim finding Marty’s going to his mother to rectify his anger over the idea that Kim would be in love with Chris, which is what I recall the joke was, was horribly childlike. And then Kim just vanishes from the timeline. We are looking at March/April and May mainly as all that is left in my High School life, and other than seeing Kim playing cards on grad night in June I feel like she became a non-factor.

But that is because somewhere here, the story of Goldfish BBS passes way.

It seems here I need to go back to drawing in the sketch book at one of the round tables at school. I can remember drawing some of those big green sketch book images at that table with Chris, a girl named Brooke and another blonde girl I can’t remember the name of. At some point, a boy named Josh was sitting at this same table before SSR.

If I have things right, as Goldfish fades away for the next couple months before the end of the school year, Chris and I start hanging out with Josh and his crazy auction acquired 1980s red Volvo.. tank.

                It also just so happened that Josh’s father was on my Dad’s Mormon visitation list. His dad was a non-attending member, so the church would assign active people in the local church to have visit these non-attendees and make sure their lives were okay. Josh also had an automobile, something Chris M. and I did not. Josh became our ride places. He was more reliable than J.F. and I think Marty was abusing the J.F. bus system at this time anyway. He had this old Volvo that was more a tank than a car. His father had got it on the cheap from a police auction to which Josh had discovered over time all the places the prior owners had dug out to stash contraband in.

                Luckily said car was a tank, because some of the other finer points of being an automobile it wasn’t the best on at, like having decent brakes. One thing that happened a few times in that car were near misses, or actual hits in the case of my experience once. Where the passenger in the car was rewarded with a lap full of their beverage coming out of a parking lot. Chris M. memorably, during a near miss, ended up with Oreo shake all over his lap coming out of the Jack-in-the-Box drive thru, and of course I got some soggy pants from a large Mountain Dew that exploded when we exited the Chevron station on Chiles and t-boned into a green pickup.

                Josh avoided any issue on the t-bone incident since his car didn’t feel pain and the couple driving the green pickup seemed to have no insurance, or license or even their child strapped down to anything in the car. I wouldn’t be as lucky.

                One afternoon we were playing, well, we were about to play some basketball in Josh’s driveway. To do so we had to move his tank out of the driveway so we could shoot proper hoops. The details leading up to the event are shotty, I have no idea why when it came time to move the tank, I was the one behind the wheel. All I know is we wanted to play basketball in the driveway and Josh wasn’t about to move his own car for some reason. What happened when I backed the car up though will.

                Remember that part about the brakes not being at one hundred percent. Yeah, this is where that pay off comes. I went down the driveway and back up the street, slowly, but with no control over the vehicle’s decisions. I hear Josh telling me to hit the brakes, but let’s just say that had already been tried. The car stopped and laid to rest on the opposite side of the street against a neighbor’s car. Josh ran over, jumped in, started the car up and parked it. His behemoth of a car showed no signs of making contact with the other car it was rested against, however the other car seemed to have lost its fight to hold up Josh’s.

Josh worriedly filled out a little note and put it on the damaged automobile and he told me not to worry much, the brakes had been going in and out on his car. Down the road worry came, the neighbor, who had been gone for days final came home and saw the note and her car. She managed to contact my parents at some point, but it wasn’t a very fruitful conversation because they just directed her to Josh’s home number. Then things kind of disappeared for a while until I got a summons for a phone trail over the mess.

. My parent’s assumption was that Josh, and his father probably never answered the phone or told the young woman with the car to contact us. Either way I had to get on the phone and stand trial on the whole ordeal.

                The trial while nerve racking was almost what you would expect given what I just said. Josh and his father who owned the car where surprises to the presiding judge on the case. I basically told, with better details due to my proximity to the event, the judge what I just retold here. The engine wasn’t on, and the brakes failed, and the car laid to rest on hers. The damage while there was some. Was minimal due to it all being cause by the strain of holding the weight of his car. The judge agreed, and said I wasn’t liable for any of the damages, but I was behind the wheel of a vehicle with no license, so that non-existent license had to be suspended. While weird, I was happy to not have any other legal responsibility with the whole mess and moved on. For now, the license was supposedly suspended for a year and what I assumed it meant was I couldn’t apply to get my license during that time, but that is only half of what it meant. The rest though won’t come up for a little while.

YSS

Me performing the Y.S.S. original song "Martin Reads Guns n' Ammo" (1996)

Oh yeah, let us go back to 1993 and remember that Jake and I had a band.

Jake and I always had a lot of fun with Y.S.S. even though it never stepped out of being a rehearsal band. Over the years since the I.D.S. break up we spent some time on Sundays in Karl’s garage as a trio with no bass. Other times when we were doing it as a trio, we would play in my mom’s studio when the folks were out at church on Sundays. Point is the band kept going.

Since Chris K. only picked up the drums to be part of that band I.D.S., he never really came to collect them after that band died. So, Jake and I started using them for the Y.S.S. drum set. For use by whoever we could get to play them at the time. Karl would do that for a while with them, then another gentleman named John played them for a while.

The real story of Y.S.S. is that drum set. Chris K. never reclaimed it and for years Karl and I would pass it around for banging on. One time when moving it from L street house to Karl’s house one of the symbols tried to get away from us U.F.O. style. Escaping from the bed of the Karl’s truck while we drove down one of the busier boulevards in town, there it went soaring away behind us. You know how kids can get lucky with projectiles that should be dangerous being benign? This was one of those cases. It spun off its base, flew out the back of the bed while those of us sitting there watched, saw it hit the road, and then skip off the road into the gutter, where we simply backed around and easily retrieved it. No harm no foul. The damage to the symbol certainly gave it its own sound too.

Some of the fun we had with the Y.S.S. band was writing songs about Marty being in love with guns to the determent of all other relationships. This creation came during class when I think Marty was in fact reading an issue of Guns and Ammo magazine near his eighteenth birthday. Jake made a creepy song about being a stalker or sexual predator, maybe it was about poop, and Karl rapping about coming in someone’s house, with a gun. An odd focus on firearms. One junior high talent shows worth of rep allowed us to push T-shirts on the small masses that remembered it. It was fun, I made the shirts with my friend Alyssa’s airbrush kit. And then again later with spray cans in my bedroom. I wore those shirts until they feel apart for years later.

Y.S.S. would go through one last transformation before the end of senior year. Jake and I would get two friends that were heavily tied into Goldfish B.B.S. to play with us. Guess we can’t escape stories from this time without it completely.

As time marched on and the school years wane. When we approached the summer of 1995, I think Jake decided he liked what freedom he had tasted with some of our older friends and bailed on living in the L street house to move into the punk rock crash pad down the road. As a teenage boy the semi anarchist lifestyle of that house was probably a draw but, considering the stories that would come out of there, probably not a terribly great place to live at long term. He would eventually wind up at another friend’s later on, probably because one can only take the degeneracy so long.

After his stint in the punk rock house, which housed Mike and some other people we knew, Jake and I would continue with Y.S.S. with the Joe and John from the Goldfish BBS crew. It was this time where we shot a video for Joe’s film project at school, the same film class I had back in sophomore year. But once Jake had committed to the Navy, Y.S.S. had seen its last days. Jake and the music we made would rather unceremoniously pack up and leave Davis. So, this final school year would be the last of the band and the last we would see of Jake. We talked afterwards but I never saw his face again.

Once Y.S.S. was packed up and done that was pretty much the end of my music “career”. Joe around a year later asked if I wanted to front a band, he was going to create but nothing ever seemed to come of that. Probably because as times changed his focus left trying to form a band too enjoying the idea of an adult life after high school. And I was okay with that, after pursuing some weird punk rock dream since freshman year, closing the band out at the end of high school was a good ending point. Joe’s film project was a good cap on the whole band as well, forever immortalized is the song I wrote about Marty and his guns during class while Marty was reading a real copy of Guns and Ammo. Performed as dirty as we could make it, and then ten minutes of teenage boys saying things that really can’t be said in mixed company anymore.

A perfect send off for a high school garage band.

image 90 a clip of two winners from Joe's Y.S.S. film project for DSHS filmed by Aubrey (1996)

As an added extra here is a song Jake was writing for Y.S.S. during this time, I like this copy of the Jake is a stalker song because you can see the art on the backside of the notebook paper which is:

I had this image drawn by Joe up on my personal website from 1996 until around 2005. I initially used it as a link to the KDVS website. This picture ended up having a much longer life of it’s own away from the song Jake was writing. So much so that when I found this draft of this writing and saw the original artwork on the back I was amazed. It’s interesting to see where things go.

The little drawing itself was just Joe poking fun at our friend Aubrey’s dad, which I don’t even remember why he was doing, but it delivers in a very teenage message that you still see decades later, which is the idea that anyone over the age of like 18 is old and any non-parental behavior is mockable.

Well like IDS, YSS had some poster ideas and images. Here are a couple I found from the late into 1996 times. The first one is obviously a Star Wars styled poster, complete with Justin (BooBoo) and Graham as the villains to our heroes in the band. Me as Luke, Jake as Han, Joe as Chewie and John as Princess Leia. I think the best part is that Yoda is just Yoda, and JF and Chris M. are C3P0 and R2D2.

The second picture seems to be some sort of Zombie version of the band. It is very hard to make out the band name and I seem to have torn off Jake’s head. Also, John seems to be using a drum machine instead of a drum set. I am not entirely sure what the point to this drawing was or what inspired it. But I found it! So, there it is!

                After the incident with Josh’s car I feel like Chris and I started hanging out with him less. I don’t know if the Mormon angle with his Dad trying to visit his also played into this at all, but as May was winding down I can’t think of much, if anything going on anymore. Graduation was coming and it was just the cruise to the finish line era.

                I in fact found out the week before graduation that I had already graduated do to some weird issue with a passing Algebra grade I got back in Ninth grade from Mrs. King that never transferred its credits. I am guessing that there must be someway for schools to hold back credits towards passing a class, that is the only state math requirement mind you, to graduate if they want to make you take it again, even though you passed.

                Either way I had completed Algebra again, I think junior year, after the debacle I had with it sophomore year and it would turn out that because of all of that I actually should have been done with school a little earlier than I thought. So, I got the last week of school off.

                I don’t remember much from this week, other than there is this, I was 18, and adult, and got an extra vacation with no responsibility since I have proud parents that I had finished school. I probably stayed up late, slept in and ate a lot of mom’s food and was general carefree. You know, those times you wish still happened when you get older.

                All I had to do after school was over was attend graduation..s. I think my small one was first, I don’t know why I sat at the end row, probably because after a week away from school I didn’t care to be back. The King High graduation is a small affair, where those of us that actually completed the thing get to sit in a small room, have the teachers that worked with getting us back on track go over our time there, hand out some awards and let parents go up and share their feelings about their student. That will come back next year when Chris graduates.

                Mine was a simple affair. Dave E. whom Marty and I, and then Chris and I had harassed about owing us money, as well as letting us dissect his computer over and over again gave me my diploma and a little speech. Karl came and took pictures and beyond that there wasn’t much fanfare.

                The next day, big graduation, I brought my camera and maybe got the most majestic shot of Karl, I think standing on his chair while we sat out at Toomey field. When that long ordeal of pomp and circumstance was over, our school district had a school sponsored grad night we were encouraged, thanks to our parent’s spending money on it, to attend.

                This was of course to stop us from going to house parties, drinking, driving and then ending our college careers before they happened. Karl would be my ride for that event, and him, I, Nate, and I think maybe two others met at Karl’s parents before travelling. We just hung out in one of Karl’s rooms, his mother I assume, gave us some champagne, which knowing Karl’s dad must have been an interesting discussion, and then we drove to Emerson Junior High to be locked into school for the night, you know the thing we just graduated out of.

I have this odd picture I took while leaving Karl’s that night, I have no idea why I did this, but it does help me see that Nik drove to grad night from Karl’s too.

Grad Night is weird. They tell us we must stay up all night and party at a school, with school sponsored activities. It is a strange, strange thing. One of the big highlights of the night was gathering everyone in the school gymnasium for a hypnotism act. By that point I was hanging out with Jake’s ex-girlfriend Liz. Which as I state oddly made sense, because Jake completed his GED around this time and broke up with both of us for the Navy around this time.

Then it was just little things here and there. Kelly ushered me to do some Karaoke, which by the time we selected our song and got in line they closed on us. Karl somehow hid out in the movie room, I think with some red-headed girl he fancied, but I would have to find out from him the details, as I said, by that late in the night I was just chilling with Liz. Our friend Jim, who got held back a year, snuck in and the only other thing that really sticks out was the Casino room.

I know I said earlier this was the last time I ever saw Kim, and it was at that point that it felt like sighting bigfoot, even though just a few months before she was scamming Marty with me and so on. But I remember blackjack more because our friend Brendan’s dad was volunteering as one of the dealers. Which a lot of parents did, but it wasn’t long after that he passed away so I ended up just having this sort of lasting memory of the casino being this place I said goodbye to people forever.

The night ended up with a sappy video about the graduating class. Liz, tired sat on the floor of the MPR, which I now know they call the IDC, and wept a bit, she was pretty tired. Then I waited around, found Karl, and walked with him and Jim to this truck parked out on the street, Jim laid down in the bed of the truck and we left public schooling never to go back for sure.

Studio

During the summer of 1996 there was some change. Mom expanded her business. Back in the summer of 1991 she converted the garage into a music studio. As I have talked about, we also did some traveling back in the early 90s for her Kindermusik start up. Well, this summer was when she decided to have a dedicated Kindermusik studio separate of the piano lessons.

To accomplish this, she rented out a small business space downtown. This summer then would then have a lot of trips to the new studio to, look at it, help paint, and most memorably the day Chris and I stayed out at the studio and put together what seemed like an endless amount of three high white shelves.

I know that in late August, the 23rd to be precise, Mom got her sign put up, because I missed it to watch the pre-season game between the Niners and Seahawks. Chris went with Steve and Mom and Dad, but I had seen the place several times over the course of that month, so I didn’t see the big point. Of course in retro spec it would have been nice to go and take pictures, which no one thought too it seems.

Mom having a studio downtown and most of my courses being at an extension downtown meant that some of that semester I can remember going to class then riding my cruiser to mom’s studio and hanging out before going home. It was kind of a neat time, I was just starting college, and other than my course in Sacramento which just became a hassle, the others were moving along. And I remember going to Geography class then hanging out and working on the big Topographical Map project at a table in the studio before heading home and vegetating.

The world seemed pretty good, I was only my college plan, Mom expanded her business, finally it seemed the late 90s were going to be good. Now this is actually true, although Mom dropped the studio about a year later or so, and I moved off the college plan, but the second half of 1996 did seem to have a tonal change in life as a whole, and honestly the next 3 and a half years will be nice.

But there is more. So I mentioned, hopefully before this about football and throwing one out in front of the house at the L street house. More so the time JF yelled out the current mayor of Davis. Well this major was something else, which is what warranted JF’s ire I the first place. And mom’s studio would find itself tied into this.

The studio was on 3rd street, there was a street that has no name along the east side of it. It was a little nicer than an alley and connected all the business along that route and honestly is a neat little short cut if you have to do any uber or door dashing in Davis, but anyway there was this street, and at the time it was not getting upkept by the city, probably because of its weird status.

Some of the business along it were lobbying to get the pot holes, which had became quite large, to get filled in by the city so people wouldn’t complain so much when parking at the businesses. Our major, part being crazy and part the cities inevitable greed to not give money to fix infrastructure over using those funds to tear it down in the name of social progress, gave them this tidbit. Those pot holes couldn’t be filled in, because they were historical landmarks to the town.

This along with a few other terrible statements that the city should have been embarrassed about made national news. However they just ran with the quote and never did finish up the story, which is the part I liked the best. Since Mom had a business along that street obviously we had some first hand experience with it all. Well after no progress with the stubborn council, in the dark of the night someone, we assumed one of the automotive repair shops, filled in the holes and ended the debate over the historical relevancy of pot holes on that street. Like that it was over, the city got what it wanted, the money to spend on frivolous things elsewhere, and the business got what they wanted, a street without holes.

After high school I had a plan, given that my family was a normal middleclass, and I was underachieving most of my high school career I would do the standard two years of community college and go on to transfer to university thus saving a ton of money in the meantime. To this end, in the summer of 1996, since I had a suspended driver’s license, I learned the bus schedule from Davis to Sacramento City College in the city of the same name. A fun little jaunt through some of the finer parts of west capitol boulevard in West Sacramento and beyond. That is to say, through some less-than-ideal neighborhoods.

That initial summer trip I did with Chris M. in order to learn the route. After arriving there we decided to use Mom’s free zoo pass and spent a summer day in the heat at the zoo, before realizing we would be better served to call home to get a ride once we got out. Thank goodness for payphones, right? Whatever those are. With time the adventure of the bus route turned to tedium, and since it was just one class I had to bus all the way out there to take (all the others were offered in town at the City College extension) I quickly dropped the hassle and had to come back to that class in later years.

The trip with Chris M. though was the highlight of learning all of that. Even more so was that there was a time in my life when I could go to a zoo, give my mom’s information and be let in without having to pay admission. This is however the sort of height of adventure for this summer. I don’t think there was much going out. One now, we are a little older, two Chris M. spent a lot of 1995 on suspension from this sort of in house Tom Foolery, I don’t think he cared to go galivanting and hope J.F. was visionless. So we stayed home on those weekends a lot.

image 53 The PSX along with a shot from a full motion video from FF7.

June 1996. I have now graduated from High School. The lead up to graduation being complete was just strange. I had after all had an extra week off before graduation weekend thanks to the clerical error that caused me to repeat Algebra over and over again for a couple years. So after that whole weekend with King High Graduation, Then DSHS graduation and grad night, Life was just life. That summer being a high school graduate and Chris M. being off his overnight restrictions and a summer to waste before doing his last high school year we had time to make up. Chris and I would then spend a lot of time at the house for the foreseeable future.

But there was a saving grace from it just being the same thing as the summer before. That was the Playstation (PSX). Up until now, our gaming at the house was the SNES, PC and sometimes “retro” play by hooking up the NES and playing an “older” title. Now being who I am I may bring this up again and not remember, but my NES I bought with the money from my paper route back in the 80s. the SNES I bought with my savings, which came from the paper route I had in the 80s. later consoles I would buy with money I had earned as well. So this PSX was to be the only time I in my life was ever gifted a console.

Oh yeah, graduation present was a PSX. Although as with me it wasn’t as straightforward as Mom and Dad bought it and gave it to me. Nope this was a weird one in some ways. After graduation for some reason I think Dad and I rented a PSX for a celebratory couple of days of doing something new and exciting. And for whatever reason in the early summer of 1996 a PSX looked new and exciting. Nik, who already had one of these machines brought over a small selection of games. In which Destruction Derby became the highlight of the next couple days.

Such a hit was this, that Dad and I returned the borrowed one and went to Kay-Bee Toys in the Woodland Mall and bought a brand new one. Now we have our next gaming era, June 1996 to Winter of 2000, the PSX era. Four years of playing games not defined by Nintendo for the first time, well since Donkey Kong on the Ti/99, wait a second, well in a very long time. This marks a shift in Nintendo’s power, very much so at the time and with me. The Sony made PSX is not just one of the big boys for standardizing 3D in the late 90s. It also was the new king. Back to the rest of the shopping trip though.

Oddly even though the Derby was the highlight we didn’t buy our own copy. Hilariously the thinking was well lets keep borrowing it from Nik and try some other games. Those three games, which I would own in the old Long box style packaging until I bought and made generic jewel cases for them would be Sony’s own NHL Center Ice for obvious reasons, in other words let’s see what Next Gen hockey has to offer. Loaded a top down cooperative shooter, that honestly was a lot of fun and was the other option instead of Destruction Derby for two player fun and then Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV : Wall of Fire(ROTK), which took a title we loved on the SNES to a new level and would be the most played of the three “launch” titles.

Destruction Derby and the Longbox art for NHL Center Ice

I will say in retrospect getting Derby instead of the NHL game would have been the better plan, back then in June 1996 the hockey title seemed almost as solid a choice though as ROTK, but EA would come along with a better looking Hockey game in less than a year, and Dad would have kept crashing the cars for months, missed opportunity since Nik did eventually take Destruction Derby back.

But with the outlook of a mundane stay at home summer mainly with Chris M. a new console paved the way for a lot of lost time and jumbled memories we probably don’t know to put at this time. Chris M. still remembers ROTK, so I have a feeling we both must have played a lot of it, I know I was still going hard with it into 1997 along with other aspects of it, so a lot of summer nights must have been wasted “restoring” the Han Dynasty.

Sadly I think more of this PSX legacy will start hitting hard in 1997. However there is a reason for that, we only had a few titles for the start of generation here. So, the first non-long box game I got for the system was a copy of John Madden Football 97 purchased while either Thanksgiving or Christmas shopping in Woodland that year. This was the first 3d era Madden I had and may have been the first really nice season or franchise long experience the series would offer. I played a lot of it for a time. I remember setting up the next years 49ers team on it too, which quickly got usurped since week two of the 1997 football season was when Final Fantasy VII came out.

It was fun, memorable, but it was Madden, just with newer graphics and some more options, the next madden would add the franchise mode which would become the only way I played from then on, so this was a nice little lay over. I just remember being a happy little 18-year-old with my new game and the always silly title of having the next years year on it. But it’s Christmas itself when we get the first real, PSX made title that changes everything.

Loaded character select screen, Madden 97 cover art, Tomb Raider one, possibly enchanced game play from PC.

The original Tomb Raider was something Mom and I got me for Christmas in 1996. This was the first Christmas out of public school and started the trend of me just picking three items for Christmas and then us going and procuring them from whatever store may have them. That year was all PSX titles, I had just got the system back in June, and this was the first real boot up of new titles since then.

Here is where internet history in the current era (2020s) and actual history sort of become personal opinion. That fall the Nintendo jumped out of its SNES era, which was very good, and started to push the N64. At this point the PSX had been out, it was popular and cheap. Nintendo instead was pricier, still on cartridges and acting like making more than one Nintendo at a time would cause the plant to shut down. I had only one friend that even bothered getting one anywhere near this year. Likewise, Mario 64 was a game no one was playing. In fact, I wouldn’t touch it until 1998 and by then the “3D Platformer” wasn’t some Mario and Nintendo revolution, we had already played the better version of a polygon-based jump puzzle game, and it was on the PSX and it was Tomb Raider.

It’s hard to get through all the other press about the protagonist of the Tomb Raider games and get to the meat of the game. But what the original game was a more sophisticated cooler take on the 3D jumping game. A genre that Mario or any of the games marketed for younger children would play up as theirs. But here on the PSX lesser hardware mind you was the first real wow game of the genre. Had Tomb Raider not been maligned as peddling flesh to teen boys, and maybe not had so many quick sequels, I don’t think it’s release would be as overshadowed as it is now. Christmas of 1996, if one had to choose at that time, Lara Crofts archeological adventure was way more engaging and exciting to jump through than Mario’s race to collect stars.

And so it was that Christmas 1996 there I was after everyone went home playing the game out in Mom’s studio while she watched. The game while having action sequences, and Lara being armed, was still mainly puzzle and jump puzzle based. With her arsenal of gymnastic moves for traversing the scenery it was engaging enough to get my mother to sit and watch.

Over the next few years, a sequel and then a third title would come out for the series. Those would end up being Christmas games as well. This would all be completed by Christmas 1998 though. As I said the titles started coming out quickly, and thus level design by the third one wasn’t as cool as the original. The game also started losing some luster with the rabid fan boy culture that grew up around Lara Croft’s, the games protagonist, boobs.

Luckily Jim liked the series and revived playing Tomb Raider III mid-1999, and we would then with him at the helm navigate some of the more interesting titles through the PlayStation 2 era before the great reboots and loss of what the original game was, to marketing on the main character and her appeal.

We need to roll back to early 1997 though and the original game. Because beyond just playing the games, it has a legacy in the L street house that wasn’t intended. Chris M. ended up getting a year behind in school, so while the 96 – 97 school year was me stumbling my way through college schedules and finding out I could drop classes and being able to schedule free time, Chris M. was stuck in his senior year of High School.

However, this meant that almost every Friday, he could head straight over from school and know that we were home, and he could just stay indefinitely. So, he did this a lot during his senior year. For some reason as we got into 1997, Mom ended up having Steve’s three kids over a lot, Justin, Krystle, and Meghan. They would have seemed young to us at the time, but I think Justin and Krystle where around fourteen, and Meghan was like eleven at the time. So, they weren’t the itty-bitty kids we act like they were when we talk about those times.

Initially over the years, Chris K. who had interacted with my family a lot, and even came on a family trip to Chicago at one point, had dubbed Steve’s kids, “Ryan’s Things”. Before Justin and Krystle started getting old enough to seem like people, we just viewed them all as an annoyance. They famously had their TV room sing along to Nirvana a few years prior, which included some very child friendly lyric replacement, including “Come let’s play now at the Playground” and a chorus of “Oreo, Oreo.” We thought them beneath us.

One particular weekend Chris M. and I were working on some game, Romance of the Three Kingdoms maybe, I don’t know, it’s unimportant. What happened was somewhere along the day, Chris M. had decided he could tolerate Justin being in the room with us if he stayed quiet and watched us play. Which he did happily. What this did however though was open up a can of Meghan wondering why she couldn’t belong as well.

Beyond that, somewhere along the line from Christmas to this weekend she had seen Tomb Raider get played and somehow had just been drawn in by Lara Croft as a hero. Thus began a tantrum, we initially let her in to watch like Justin, Chris M. even pointed out at one point how much better Justin was behaving in my room and not asking to play Tomb Raider incessantly.

But that only motivated her more. So, we eventually threw her out of the room. I didn’t have a lock on my door, so Chris M. took my baby chair and then sat on it with his back to the door to keep it from being opened from the hall. This is the point where Meghan’s Tomb Raider tantrum became legend. She didn’t stop when she couldn’t gain reentry and instead began kicking the door screaming about her need to play the game.

She was ignored, this just caused her yelling and kicking to escalate until parental intervention was required. Meghan got banned from reentry at that point. Chris M. then back in the room began a monologue about why Meghan couldn’t behave better like, well he meant Justin, but he said, “your other things, I can’t remember their names.”, which he could. Eventually this turned into Chris M. going on about only being able to remember Meghan’s name after that tantrum we just went through, so he started calling Justin bigger Meghan and louted his silence.

That’s when I stepped in and said Justin wasn’t the biggest, Krystle was taller and then was the big Meghan. Justin was the middle sized one. Chris M. didn’t believe me, so we marched Justin out to the front room and had him and Krystle stand back-to-back to prove who was bigger. Krystle won, her prize, she became known henceforth as “Big Meghan” and Justin would be dubbed as the “Medium Meghan”, leaving Meghan herself to just be “little”.

The naming convention stuck, for years. There was Christmas that year, Chris M., me, and Krystle were playing some aggressive Monopoly. Chris M. continued to call Krystle Big at every opportunity, she lashed out at him for it, he continued in. Justin, who we would see more and more of over the next few years with his semi-troubled teenage years and grandma’s house being a sanctuary, took into the name. We would save just about anything that said medium on it and laugh and laugh.

In 1998 when Chris M. would ship off to the Air Force, Steve even called Justin Medium in Chris’s honor. To this day I’ll joke with Justin about the nickname, and I know both Marty and Chirs M. would quickly remember the nicknames over all else. It’s amazing what a little Lara Croft lust in a young girl can create, it changed the landscape of family naming for around four years.

Family Deathmatch

That was all from one Christmas present in 1996 for a new console, the holidays in 1996 are going to be the heat up of a lot of traditions and is as good as a place as anywhere to start telling those histories. If one notices, I mentioned aggressive monopoly there about an interaction with Chris M. and Krystle. If you bring your mind back to the early 90s, you’ll remember our friend Sam, and tabletop games. Illuminati being the one that really helped fuel the idea of destroying competitors with some dice and fake money. These ideals would move on to more classic tabletop games.

Anyway, we need to start somewhere so let’s go back to the 80s for a second.

When I was a tiny little man, my parents bought a game in a big blue box that they would play at dinner parties with their friends. It seemed like an old persons game, you just rolled diced and then got asked questions about, in a lot of cases, things they didn’t cover in elementary school. Now from time to time a geography question would come up, and a little man would beam because he knew the answer, but a lot of the questions seemed well, trivial.

Early on when this boy was little, the older folk would make it a fun little competition to play this game though, letting some of the kids maybe read questions, but making sure there was a line between kids came and the adults battling it each for mental superiority.

image 94 A friendly game of family Trivial pursuit, featuring Julie, Bob, Dad, Krystle, Back of Dom's Head, Randy's back, Steve, Jill and Dorothy.

Somewhere in this timeline a boys versus girls team up challenge became the official recognized way to play. Possibly due to Dad’s obscure knowledge over long forgotten TV shows too even out with Mom’s general knowledge. Overtime as well the holidays became a focal point at which say after a large thanksgiving meal, everyone could sit, recuperate, and do something.

As I got older involvement in trivia became more fun. As I grew into my teens the questions didn’t seem as “trivial” or random as they did before and of course, we had the Chris M. and Marty during the holidays now. Now I don’t say things that may sound mean to be mean, but sometimes when describing things it may sound that way, but those brothers and knowing it all, there was some ego there. So, as they started to spend the holidays, they found the Trivial Pursuit niche a thing to get into as well as we moved into being High School aged boys.

And so began the reign of terror. Once those years of groundwork had been laid down, all these three teenage boys needed to do was win. And now with Bob another over thinker and Dad and his knowledge of lost television media that came up on the brown questions, a dominance on thanksgiving night began.

The cause of the motivation to buy the current version of Trivial Pursuit a couple years later can be hotly debated. Was Mom fine with modernizing the questions so Dad couldn’t dominate the questions about TV characters that time has forgotten? Did us boys bully mom into having accurate geography questions so we didn’t have to always remind ourselves that the questions on some issues came from decades past? Either way it happened and with the new genus we weren’t about to drop our mantle of Trivial Champions, so we studied.

This was a time when our egos were insatiable and much to our delight on the other side Mom would blurt out the correct answer only to let her other teammates talk her out of it. Never have you seen so many teenage boys keep poker faces as a team argues themselves from and easy answer into something else. This was out time. From the mid-90s until 97, a Trivial Pursuit dynasty.

The culmination was Chris M.’s last family game with all of us there and a grotesquely unsportsmanlike victory march around the house with the completed pie from the game held aloft like He-Man’s magic sword. Parading around like jackasses victory was ours. Chris M.’s march to the Air Force was really the last hurrah for that generation of Family games after thanksgiving. However, like a cockroach, Trivial Pursuit would live on.

Into the 00s and enter Jim. Jim would be right at home with the other boys in Trivial Pursuit ego. So, the stories of games gone by were handy inspiration. And so, the game picked itself back up and reared its head at random night play. During this time, Justin V. put his stamp on competitive friendly play by letting us know that, between the choice of a question and a roll again, that the roll again was automatic. Now when a near seven-foot-tall man says it automatic, over and over again, one doesn’t forget the phrase. Which means down the road, other things become funny when they are, automatic.

Finally in 2004 a nighttime holiday game found its way to the light of Jim’s mother’s house and maybe the most memorable teams of all time. Jim, paired with Jackie’s grandmother, Drea paired with Jackie’s Mother Sharon, and me with Jim’s mother Liisa. Now Drea is a new figure, she was my girlfriend during Christmas of 2004, now we know her. Jackie who by 2004 had been seeing Jim since around 1994 was away at school, so this hauppauge of teams came together in the only time and place it could ever have done so. And it was a game for the ages. Jim spent the early game scolding grandma for answering Drea and Sharon’s questions. Liisa and I just quietly walked about the board mounting our pie slices, until Jim noticed we only had the dreaded pink question to go. It took us a couple attempts but we got there and so the game came down to Jim pushing for us to have to answer another pink question to take the game when we landed in the center square.

Thus, one of the only specific questions to win a game I will ever remember came up. “What musical groups fans refer to themselves as blockheads?”. Now the answer is not something anyone there would really have the designed knowledge to know, if not for the tremendously obvious hint written into the card. Which means I heard Jim make one of the biggest sighs then complaints ever about the ease of which we were about to win the game. And then that was that, and Trivial Pursuit once again wandered off to some rock to go hibernate for another ten years or so.

Back in our teen years another classic board game came into the competitive family play sphere. Always friendly Monopoly. As mentioned there as a Christmas where Chris M. went to straight intimidation and denial of respect to keep Krystle down during a game. What Krystle didn’t know that for a while in the mid to late 90s, this psychological warfare within a game of Monopoly was par for the course and an offshoot of years of Illuminati. In a similar play style Monopoly was just a version we would play with the plebeians.

The games where cutthroat, and no one wanted to be the fourth player in a game with me Chris M. and Marty if they knew what was coming. But people think Monopoly relies too much on the random dice roll, nah it’s a game of mind manipulation and we got good at it.

Now of course other stories from them arose from the games, most horrific, but we did catch Chris K. once just ignoramus-ly calling Kentucky Avenue, Ken-fucky Avenue, too the horror of my mother. So, like automatic in Trivial Pursuit, that line stuck around. But the legacy of that time was knowing how to play Monopoly properly. Which would come back around in San Diego.

Jen would start wanting to play the Monopoly with friends, I believe this was due to a Star Wars version of the game she had received as a gift. I would win. One day, Jen decided we just needed to play heads up games. Which is not a very normal way of engaging with the board but erased a lot of the trades and alliances that Jen thought was souring her chances of winning the game. So, we played.

And we played.

And then we got hours deep and were starting our fourth game in a row. That’s when the little manipulator said we weren’t leaving until she won a game. That was also when her paranoia that I was letting her win kicked in. I was. I didn’t admit it, but she won, and I was happy to be able to go to bed. And she spent the next bit of time being angry still. The game got retired from heads up competitive play in San Diego after that.

Trivial Pursuit, the original Blue Box this all started on, Genus IV, the version used in the great parade of victory in 1997 and then Genus 6 which would be the version of the future.

November/December 1996

Our first holidays devoid of public school. Chris of course was still at King for his extra year, but the rest of us were now… adults? I would have just finished up round one of Community College too, looks to my stories about next year to go over the only real thing I remember about that semester. Hint it has to do with a video game.

Through high school the holidays became more fun. It honestly started in 1993 when Chris stayed over Christmas Eve and then Christmas day. I’ve recently talked with Chris about the awkwardness that caused for my parents, but all that aside it worked. And Chris’s end of Christmas night Final Fantasy 4 story was oddly the highlight for me. What did I get that year? Who knows, some SNES games, maybe the promise of the new computer, nope Chris running away from 1.4 million experience when sort of show boating, that was the best present.

It was then the next year, with Jake living in that same room, and then having Chris, Jake and Marty all over for the Holidays in general that business picked up. And so it was somewhere along this line that getting festive and decorating for Christmas became so much more fun. Well and added that one of those years when us boys helped my Mom made the foolish comment of saying she didn’t want the house to look like a beer sign with too many flashing lights. That faux-paw would last her years of flashing light displays all over the place.

So it was, I like that line, that probably in 1995, but maybe it wasn’t until 1996 that the idea of bring my computer out of my bedroom and hooking it up to mom’s nice stack stereo system came about. It was probably 1996, since the year before all of my computer’s would have been strewn about the living room for the BBS, of course by now Goldfish was dead, so I would have probably moved my belongings back into my room by then.

I do know 1996 was a year I moved things out into the dining room and studio for the holidays though, because that Christmas present, Tomb Raider, I played out in the studio for the next couple of days while Mom watched and was actually impressed with the game. In one of those weird curve balls, the game that conservative parents were upset with over boobs, my mom watched and thought it was clever and liked the archaeological setting. Funny seeing the game explains the game, unfortunately marketing the game and the actual content are different beasts in the United States, and so boobs where Tomb Raider’s talking points even though the game itself was actually good, and that is what actually drove sales.

Speaking of drives. 1996 was pivotal in football too. A years’ worth of Madden games and hype after the 1995 season, led to now a years worth of throwing the old pigskin around on the street. Earlier in the year while doing this JF yelled at our cities major as she biked down the way. We played a lot. So at Thanksgiving, going back in time a second, we wanted to play. This was a hard sell, if I recall the weather that day wasn’t ideal, so just us boys walked down to Holmes to play in the fields. Its hard to make teams when its five of us, Justin being in Junior High was considered a liability, and Steve who came along was an unknown.

But everyone gave maximum effort. Which is remembered because Steve, who was getting older at the time was wiped after doing so. Turns out when you hit your 30s and the little brothers are all 18, you may be smarter than them, but they all can run for days without getting gassed. Steve got gassed, but we cheered his attempts on.

Obviously some Trivial Pursuit went on this year, but now were deep into the win streak, or probably 2 years. But the streak is there. Playing on the old Blue version of the game, this would undoubtedly be Dad’s last year to shine with his knowledge of the briar patch and other obscure pop culture references from days gone by that littered that version. Next year the changes made to the competition will turn those into questions about Seinfeld, which might have a big year in 97 anyway.

All in all this was probably the year that the holidays were the most “normal” for that time, its smack dab in the middle of changing from the early 90s and before everyone grew up by the end of the 90s, and while 1997 might end up being the most important one, 1996 is probably when all of us think of cozy holidays, that’s the year that those ideals manifested in our neurons.