There it was, shattered as if by a falling tree branch, except there were no trees nearby to do the shattering. Someone had pulled into my driveway to turn around and hit the corner post of my fence. They hit it so hard that they dislodged the concrete mooring and the force shattered the top crossbar, splaying the pickets out like pick-up sticks. Then they drove off. It was the middle of the afternoon.
I have a confession to make. I voted for George W. Bush. But not in 2004 – when the tragic, unnecessary debacle of the war in Iraq was still ratcheting up in scope and bloodshed. This was 2000, the year I turned 18. It’s not that I look back on that decision with regret. I really just didn’t know any better. Having been raised in a Christian household, my understanding of presidential politics boiled down to one all-important moral issue. Either you cast your ballot for the God-fearing Republican or you condoned the killing of babies. It was really that
The following is the latest in a series of journal entries chronicling the author’s descent into next-gen gaming degeneracy and assorted geekery – from getting his first television in years to trying to figure out why the @$@$&@@ you need two goddamn directional pads just to walk down an effing hallway.
In last week’s episode of The Walking Dead, a zombie ripped someone’s throat out and then that guy got up and ripped someone’s stomach open and before you know it a bunch of zombies were attacking a bunch of people until the humans came in and busted the zombies’ heads open with pipes and knives and I thought “Meh, that doesn’t seem that bad.”
I don’t scare easily. I can get as startled as the next guy, and the typical realms of death and gore usually manage to shake me, but getting a good honest scare out of me through a movie is tough. It may be because I didn’t really grow up with any of the classics – I saw The Blair Witch Project as a youngster and was frightened for a whole week afterwards, but I didn’t see Halloween, The Exorcist, Nightmare on Elm Street or any of the other classics until high school, when I started looking at them with a
I’ve been knock-kneed certain that I was about to die on exactly two occasions. The first time, I was on my back, in full football gear, ready for the Oklahoma Drill to start. The drill has many variants, but all of them involve hitting. Two players line up opposite one another, perhaps five yards apart – enough to start a charge but not enough for even the fastest players to really get up to speed. Our version of the drill had the coach holding a football at about stomach level in between the two players. At his whistle, we’d scramble
Ever since I could remember sleeping in my own bed, I can remember how hard it was to go to sleep. I was always up tossing and turning, trying desperately to pass out for the night. After awhile, I got a TV in the room, and it eventually helped me with this problem. It took quite some time, but it did work and normally I was able to fall asleep around 3 am throughout middle school. At this point, I didn’t care what I was watching. I had nearly memorized the Ron Popeil infomercials (and yes, I am still convinced
I’ve been a fan of the Halloween movie franchise for a long time. The first flick in the series that I saw was Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. I was at a friend’s house for a birthday party sometime in the fall of 1989. We watched the last half of the movie before my parents picked me up. See, I wasn’t allowed to watch most R-Rated movies until I was 11 (unless they were on broadcast TV). So I got my fill of gory ’80s horror while visiting friends’ houses or sneaking peaks at Fangoria at 7-Eleven.
