I’m in the mood to tell you a story, a story that once happened to me; it might not be a gripping story, but a story nonetheless. And it lets me practice using words to describe a story that makes the reader feel like he or she is there. One morning I was bored, so I was re-reading my own blog and I came to two different conclusions: When I’m typing something for awhile I’m bound to make an error in spelling and/or grammar, which sucks. And my stories, some of them are kind of entertaining, I hope; I was there, you weren’t…so your perspective is not the same as mine.
As most of you know by now a video came came out, Fallout 4…I like to play it, and spend a lot of time doing so, So much that I have yet to beat it or even take advantage of the DLC’s. I’ve downloaded Nuka-Cola the day it came out, have I played it yet? No. Why? Because I’m too worried about making sure all my settlements are built up.
I more or less spend too much time doing all the extra shit, not playing the main story line.
Anyhow this game has a system of scraping junk that you can turn into building material. One of the many things that you can scrap is a board game, a board game called Blast Radius. And this is where the idea of this story came from.
This actually happened to me, just because the video game reminded me of it, didn’t mean I’m making it up.
At the time in my life, if you read my other posts you might know some of this already, if you haven’t…Matt Hasselbeck was still a quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks and I lived in a town called Puyallup. My friend Marcus lived with me, he had a girlfriend; the two of them were popular and liked parties, because of this it was not uncommon to walk into my apartment and see twenty people walking around talking to one another even though two people lived there.
Marcus was…I don’t know if you would call him Mexican, because he wasn’t. He was born in America with a mom who has German roots and a father who he never met…from what I was told he was a guy from Mexico. This gave Marcus that dark skin look as he stood around five feet six inches and was about two hundred pounds. He had six piecing in his face, more often then not those holes were taken up by alternative looking jewelry. Something that you could buy at Hot Topic, seven to eight years ago before the store became all “preppy hippsterish”
Two in each ear, the one in back being a larger gage then the one in the front. One in his tongue and one in that spot above your chin but under you mouth, he often liked to wear a curved piece of sliver jewelry in that piecing. Something that came out of his face and came to a point as it made a U shape as it ended under his chin.
He would often rock a mohawk too…which was not that often in all reality, but when he did his hair was dyed some unnatural color, such as blue and the mohawk was held up a foot over his hear with Elmer’s glue as it was separated into several spikes that were all perpendicular from the top of his head.
His girlfriend on the other hand, his girlfriend at the time was pretty cute. She was bigger then most girls that Marcus went after in the past. Which shocked me. She was not fat by any means, at least not according to most people. One day we were having a conversation and I said, “You got to love them, who cares if they look like they were in Playboy; you’re not trying to make other men look at her and be jealous of you, you’re trying to be happy.” Marcus somehow got into the idea that a chick standing at five foot three and weighting 150 pounds was fat. “Who cares if she has a stomach, all girls do; you shouldn’t be asking yourself if he thinks she is hot, you should be asking yourself if she makes you happy.”
She was about five foot two and came in at about one hundred and forty pounds with blond hair and blue eyes, which I found super attractive until she started trying to change the rules in my house and…Marcus was “pussy-whipped,” so anything she said was how it was. I just moved out shorty after.
My best friend Eric still lived in the same house around the block from my parents, but I was now in an apartment with a roommate. He hung out at our house a lot of the time.
Eric was your typical white boy with a drinking problem. Eric stood around five foot eight and at the time weighted about one hundred and thirty pounds. There was nothing too special about him, just picture a white dude with brown hair and blue eyes.
My other friend, from pretty much the entire time that I lived in Washington, was this guy named Dmitry. Dmitry worked out a lot and was the typical strong dude that all the women wanted to sleep with, and according to what I’ve heard from a few women he is not that tiny either. Dmitry moved to America from Lithuania, USSR at the time, in the early 90’s. His first English word(s) were, “Shut up,” which I find funny when he told me he started school and the teacher would be telling him to do something and all he did was say, “Shut up.”
He even thought me how to say, “Bitch ass,” in Russian, which was great when you’re a kid in ninth grade.
Dmitry is about five foot eleven and one hundred eighty pounds with enough arm muscles that you would assume he can pull a car with a rope. He has blue eyes and blond hair, but now a days shaves it all off making him bald. Every now and then rocking a goatee, which is weird because it comes out red. He is also that one friend, that one friend that smokes pot every two hours on the hour.
Which I feel bad for…the second time I smoked pot was his first time smoking pot, which is another different story if I remember to write it. A year later you came to find out that he would smoke the same about of pot in 30 days ad it took me to smoke is 365 days.
My apartment manager, Marilyn, lived right next to me, she had a grand-son named Ryan who also hung out at out apartment more often then not. Ryan was the youngest of us, he was super skinny at one hundred and fifteen pounds with long brown hair, down to his shoulders. He loved rock music for the eighties and at the same time loved music that was in the same genre as Slipknot, Mudvayne, or Trivum.
He often looked like he was in a mid 90’s grunge music video. Which to be honest didn’t fall too far out of reality when you stop and think that Seattle was just a 50 mile drive north of us.
It was a rainy night, like most nights in Western Washington. I had the downstairs apartment. There were four apartments per building, and these apartment were built in the early sixties so the kitchen was practically the same size as the family room. If you went into the family room you would get to the back door. This door went out onto a massive patio that was more or less blocked off from anything.
The patio was a good twelve feet long and thirty feet wide, this is where we had a pool table and a ton of plastic chairs for all the smokers, which was 90% of most parties we had. When you went outside at looked straight you saw a hill, you were on the bottom of that hill, so that was blockage. There was also a wooden fence separating my backyard from Marilyn’s backyard, the fence went from the apartment to the hill, witch was only about twenty-five feet. Opposite of that, on the other side of the lawn was another wooden fence, this one only went from the side of the apartment to the end of the patio before getting to another hill that dropped about five feet into the parking lot.
Because of the fact that I was one the first floor the balcony of the apart above me, that was the same size, covered my entire patio. So even if it was raining, we were not it in.
That night we had about seven people in the family room smoking pot or drinking beer, seven people outside playing pool, smoking cigarettes, and drinking beer. Emily on the computer being a YouTube/music DJ. Ryan, Dmitry, Eric, and I were sitting on the kitchen floor drinking beer and passing around a glass bong because Eric got the ingenious idea to play quarters.
Dmitry is one of my only friends that like Heineken, I’ll drink it and all; but like most of my friends I stuck with PBR, Rainier, MGD, Budwiser, Blue Moon, or even Icehouse.
We’re sitting there bouncing quarters against the kitchen floor trying to get it to land in the glass cup of beer. Rap music is being played, rap music from the early 2000’s, every now and then being switched to heavy metal upon Ryan’s request or country upon Eric’s request, but no one at the party was happy when country came on. Every now and then Donavin would run inside to play some Flogging Molly.
I was exhaling pot smoke, Eric was drinking his beer, and Ryan was talking about ghosts as Dmitry stood up to go get another beer. As he stood up he and took a short walk to the refrigerator he also bent down to grab his empty beer bottle that he sat on the edge of the counter.
After grabbing a new beer Marcus pops in to yell, “Hey Dema grab me a beer.” As he swung around with a beer in each hand he also hits the empty beer bottle with his arm which sends it flying towards the middle of the kitchen, where no one was sitting.
Because of the material that was tiled on the bottom of my kitchen floor there was almost no traction if you were to slide a glass bottle from side to side.
At this point in the night I was feeling pretty good, and say weird shit; it gets my point across, but…it still sounds weird because I either start talking and forget what I’m talking about as I turn it into a short story about Rainbows being different colors or I can’t find the word I’m looking for so I substitute it with something else.
I’m was now blowing smoke out as I’m watching this empty beer bottle fly thought the air in slow motion as the music being played is going at regular speed.
The bottle speeds up and crashes into the ground and upon impact shards of green glass slide each way and some of them even slide out direction. To someone else it just looked like a glass breaking and sliding all over the floor.
I’m sitting there as all my friends stand up and look like a major catastrophic event just took place and they all look at me, still sitting on the floor looking at the wall like I just made some type of profound scientific discovery. As I say “Woah man, did you see that fucking blast radius.”
And of course they laughed at me before Eric sad, “I love you man.”
The 253 to the 402 and over to the 503 