Second Negative

My View-Master smells like pot

There is a mediocre Italian chain near my work that used to hand out View-Masters with slides of the dessert menu. They eventually decided to copy the more upscale Italian chain across the street, and abandoned the classic toy, but I say, bring back the View-Masters! And while you’re at it, how about Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, He-Man, and Tonka trucks made with METAL. Metal? What’s that?

We were lucky enough growing up to have an entire room dedicated to toys. In true nightmare fashion, it had clown wallpaper. My father built shelving into the wall that went all the way to the ceiling on one side of the room. On those shelves were endless green plastic buckets filled with different sets of toys. The little Fisher Price people? Yep, we had ‘em. We also had enough He-Man action figures to launch a full scale invasion of the kitchen.

The room was often described as appearing to have been “hit by a tornado”. My mother (she of Nazi style organization) would appear on the scene towards the end of a long day of kids gone wild, and demand that everything be cleaned up and sorted into individual buckets within the hour. You see, she had labeled every bucket in the place with one of those raised letter labeling guns. It wasn’t enough to simply clean up. No, Man-at-Arms couldn’t be mixed in with the Fisher Price farmer and his wife. Unfortunately, we couldn’t clean up that room in an hour to save our life. So, as the deadline approached, the mother would re-appear and threaten to start dumping buckets out and adding to our mess. Looking back, it seems sort of like a judge fining a guy who couldn’t pay his original ticket, but the crown didn’t accept plea bargains.

By the time I was in high school, we didn’t use the playroom for much, and it had been mostly converted to an extra bedroom. My parents went out of town one weekend, and a couple of friends of mine came over to do some of the things you do when someone’s parents are out of town. So, we locked ourselves in the playroom and smoked enough pot to get an elephant high. Conveniently, we kept our View-Master and slides in a metal can that made a perfect ash collector. I think the clowns on the wall started to dance and mock me, but I can’t be sure. It’s possible that I walked into the kitchen and suddenly declared that my heart had stopped beating. Meanwhile, another friend of mine was busy raiding the leftover ravioli in our refrigerator, and making a trail along the tile floor back to the playroom. Once inside, he fell backwards onto one of the beds, scooped up a massive amount of ravioli, and abruptly jabbed the spoon into the side of his face. (Editors Note: the side of his face did not have a mouth.)

Don’t hurt yourself looking for a lot of meaning in this story. You shouldn’t expect much from a cedar fever suffering Benadryl addict strung out on NoDoz and Cherry Coke.