{"id":24018,"date":"2014-08-24T09:52:13","date_gmt":"2014-08-24T14:52:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24018"},"modified":"2017-05-01T11:59:47","modified_gmt":"2017-05-01T15:59:47","slug":"ding-43","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24018","title":{"rendered":"Ding 43!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today is my birthday. Good day so far. My wife got me a Canon EOS M digital camera. She’s been gently hinting that I should do some video content, and I think this gift is her way of hinting even harder. On one hand, I’m really uncomfortable doing any video content where you can see me. I’d prefer to just talk and hide my face behind images and game footage. I’m not young or photogenic, so maybe I should leave the camera work to those sorts of people. On the other hand, I watch plenty of videos from creators who do not have faces for television, as it wereAlthough I really dislike videos of ONLY talking into a camera. I think a mix of head-shots and footage is a good balance between production costs and production values. And sometimes you can do things with facial expressions that are harder to convey with just vocal inflections.<\/span>. <\/p>\n

So if you want to weigh in on the debate, this might be a good time to do so. Would you like to see me do something along the lines of SuperBunnyHop<\/a>, where you mix a talking head with game footage? I don’t feel strongly either way. I really like doing videos, but they take so damn long that they devour the time I spend writing prose. Using self-footage might make it easier to make videos without making sacrifices elsewhere. I don’t know. Tell me what you think.<\/p>\n

It’s become an accidental tradition to write autobiographical things<\/a> at this time of year. Well, either that or depressing calculations regarding how long I’ve been alive and how much time I’m likely to remain so. That’s no fun. So let’s tell a story…<\/p>\n

It’s the summer of 1982. It’s the dark year<\/a> in my life. My brother and I have become part of the tribe of middle-school boys that forage for amusement in this pre-internet wasteland. <\/p>\n

There are very, very few pictures of this period of my life. That’s my brother Patrick on the left, me on the right. I’ve been told that Cthulhu has that same wallpaper in his dining-room.<\/td><\/tr>
There are very, very few pictures of this period of my life. That’s my brother Patrick on the left, me on the right. I’ve been told that Cthulhu has that same wallpaper in his dining-room.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

The town where we live has fallen on bad times. The economy here is based on two businesses: Pullman<\/a> makes railcars and Armco<\/a> makes specialty steel. Pullman closed down last year and put half the town out of work. Crime is up. Poverty is up. Drug use is up. While history will record that this is when the country began crawling out of the horrible depression of the 1970’s, we don’t know that yet and so people have no reason to believe that things will ever get better and every reason to think they will continue to get worse. <\/p>\n

As an 11 year old kid, all of this is opaque to me. I just know that people are monumentally unhappy everywhere we go, and as far as I can tell grim nihilism is normal for adults.<\/p>\n

Which means we’re very keen to stay away from adults and find something interesting to do. There is only so much time you can put into the same five Atari games, so this means going outside. Our tribe has decided that climbing on rooves is a good source of entertainment. As entertainment goes, trespassing for its own sake is pretty lame, but we do our best to make it interesting. We climb up fire escapes, over fences, up trees, and out of windows to reach places we shouldn’t. Then we sit around and talk tough about stuff we pretend to understand (fighting, cars, girls) while some of the older kids smoke. <\/p>\n

It’s a stupid waste of time and a great way to get chased around by the police. <\/p>\n

Today we’re on the roof of a little apartment building. I hate this place because it’s right next door to where I live. I prefer to be a bit further from home for our roof-climbing. It kind of kills all sensation of adventure and exploring to scale stuff in your own neighborhood. But the other kids want to climb this thing and so that’s what we’re doing.<\/p>\n

We lived in the lime green house. (It was white in 1982.) We were climbing on the roof of the building in the middle of the picture. I realize it looks sort of small now, but when I was 11 it felt like scaling the Chrysler building.<\/td><\/tr>
We lived in the lime green house. (It was white in 1982.) We were climbing on the roof of the building in the middle of the picture. I realize it looks sort of small now, but when I was 11 it felt like scaling the Chrysler building.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

The houses have all merged together here, turning half the block into one big roof. We can get there by going into a little alley, climbing a wooden staircase, and then using a pile of wobbly buckets to boost us up to where we can pull ourselves up using a window sill. <\/p>\n

Like all climbing projects, this one is boring the instant it’s over. We’re ambling around on the roof and there aren’t any challenges left. The fun was in getting here, not being<\/em> here.<\/p>\n

There’s another apartment building that’s not part of this multi-structure roof. It’s a story taller, so this roof is even with the third-floor balcony on the opposite building In the image above, this other apartment is directly behind the red-brick building, so you can’t see it from this vantage point. Trust me, it’s there.<\/span>. The gap between them is only about six feet. It’s probably close enough to jump, if you’re feeling like risking your life for no reason. If you miss, it’s a three-story drop straight down to concrete. <\/p>\n

The other kids find a wooden plank long enough to span the distance, and we lay it down between this roof and the opposing balcony. The two heights don’t perfectly match, and the grade of this roof means the board is a little wobbly on the near side. You can reach the other side by taking a single step onto the board and then hopping to the balcony. The boys put a brick down on one side of the board and a paint can on the other, in a hilariously superstitious gesture intended to hold it still. The objects look like tripping hazards to me, and I seriously doubt either one is heavy enough to keep the board from rolling out from under you if you take a bad step. <\/p>\n

The kids all cross, leaving me alone on the roof where we started. They’re messing around on the balcony and looking for interesting things to do. There’s a door that leads into the third-floor unit, but it’s locked. The apartment is uninhabited right now. We can see it’s empty inside. Everyone looks at me, expecting me to hop over.<\/p>\n

See, while I’m deeply dysfunctional on many levels, the one thing I do have going for me is a well-developed ability to appraise risk vs. reward. In school, I rate gold stars and letter grades for what they are: Things with absolutely no intrinsic value. Adults act like I’m supposed to want good grades and approval, but I see no value in any of that<\/a>. So I don’t see the point in doing work for a worthless reward. Likewise, I notice this wooden plank represents a massive risk (death) for zero reward. If it was the only way onto the balcony, then it might be worth considering. But I could get to where the other boys are by simply returning to ground level and climbing a different staircase. There’s no reason to take this risk.<\/p>\n

Also I’m nearly immune to peer pressure. The other kids are acting like I’m being a sissy for not wanting to hop across the board, but I don’t care to risk my entire life to win their approval. So I announce that I’m going back down to the ground floor and I’ll come up the long way. Everyone rolls their eyes.<\/p>\n

As I’m climbing down from the roof, to the window sill, to the buckets, I lose my footing. The buckets – which are all empty and insubstantial – fall out from under me. I try to recover by putting more weight on the window sill and my leg goes right through. I fall on my back in a shower of glass. I end up with half my body hanging in this empty apartment. One piece of glass digs deep into the back of my leg. <\/p>\n

There is really a lot of blood now. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much blood at once. I screamed as I feel, and the other boys have come running. They extricate me from the pile of glass and we escape the scene as quickly as possible. <\/p>\n

This is a whole new level of pain for my 11-year-old self. Blood has filled my shoe, and comes oozing out when I put my foot down. I’m leaving a trail of bloody footprints as I go. I stop at the corner to lean against the mailbox and wait for my head to stop spinning. I move on when the size of the growing blood puddle begins to freak me out. <\/p>\n

I get home and mom takes me to the hospital. It only takes a few stitches to pull the wound closed. The gash is deep, not long. <\/p>\n

The next day I notice the right side of my right foot is completely numb. I didn’t notice this at the time of the accident because of all the pain. After the trip to the hospital I figured the numbness was a result of the local anesthetic they gave me before they sewed me up. But now it’s clear that this is the result of the accident. Everything on the right side of my foot – from the ball of the heel up to the ankle, has lost all sensation. I keep poking it, waiting for sensation to return. I tell the doctor about it the next time I visit, and he doesn’t know what to make of it. He says the nerves are all towards the front of the leg and that he’s not sure how I could have gotten nerve damage based on the position of my injury. <\/p>\n

I hobble around the house for a few days. Mom finds the owner of the apartment building and arranges for me to pay for the window. It’s $30, which is about a year’s worth of birthday and Christmas money to me. <\/p>\n

So I’m going to miss out on a year’s worth of money. I ruined a bunch of my clothes. I spent a couple of weeks in pain. And I sustained some level of permanent nerve damage. Even thirty-two years later, I can poke that spot on my heel and it’s still not quite right. It tingles, like when a limb has fallen asleep. <\/p>\n

It’s not a horrible thing to have happen. It’s about par for the course, as childhoods go in those days. But I’ve always been bitter that I’m the one who got hurt when I was the only one who refused to stupidly risk his life on that plank. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is my birthday. Good day so far. My wife got me a Canon EOS M digital camera. She’s been gently hinting that I should do some video content, and I think this gift is her way of hinting even harder. On one hand, I’m really uncomfortable doing any video content where you can see […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[610],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-landmarks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}