{"id":55,"date":"2008-04-04T08:30:53","date_gmt":"2008-04-04T13:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=55"},"modified":"2018-10-31T15:18:39","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T19:18:39","slug":"lego-maniac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=55","title":{"rendered":"Lego Maniac"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just to confirm that I\u2019m a loser, I\u2019ve been doing this thing for the last four years that I call \u201cSci-Fi Saturday.\u201d I wake up early, brew up a huge pot of good coffee, make Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls (which have been a Saturday breakfast tradition since I was ten), and then settle in for sci-fi wankery.<\/p>\n


\nThe cornerstone has been Battlestar Galactica<\/em>, but there\u2019s also Stargate<\/em> and the previous week\u2019s Doctor Who<\/em>. <\/span>If there\u2019s a period where none of those shows are airing, then I marathon any number of old shows which I have sitting around on disc. <\/span>No matter what, I have to watch at least an hour of sci-fi on Saturday morning. <\/span>\n<\/p>\n

Then, if my weekend job doesn\u2019t demand otherwise, I lounge around in my stinking pajama bottoms and threadbare robe and start drinking around noon. <\/span>Which leads to me going to bed around 9pm Saturday night and having weird sci-fi dreams. <\/span><\/p>\n

I want to confess this to the Internet-At-Large, because I\u2019m quite concerned about my plans to set up all my old Legos. <\/span>As if Sci Fi Saturday\u2019s weren\u2019t bad enough, now I want to recapture my childhood and build a huge Lego town in my bedroom. <\/span><\/p>\n

As my storage cleanout progresses, a carload at a time, I\u2019m working through all the phases of my life. <\/span>From when I left home in 1992, to when I moved out of my <\/st1>Bethesda<\/st1> apartment and into my grandparents back rooms in 1998, to when my mom died in 1999 and I stuffed her entire two bedroom townhouse into the storage units, to when my grandparents sold their house in 2006. <\/span><\/p>\n

The storage units aren\u2019t quite in that same order, though. <\/span>I have two units hidden in a vast sea of warehouses out in <\/st1>Germantown<\/st1>, Maryland<\/st1>, and my goal is to eliminate one or both of them. <\/span>Though I\u2019ve already filled up my apartment with books and furniture, so it looks like all I\u2019ll be able to do is consolidate.<\/p>\n

One thing I\u2019ve greatly enjoyed is throwing stuff away. <\/span>Five boxes of mom\u2019s estate shit (which was a 15 month ordeal) are, now, trash. <\/span>I\u2019ve been cheerfully shredding page after page. <\/span>There\u2019s a mountain of paper to go through, but it\u2019s powerfully satisfying as each page of my mother\u2019s life turns into Office Depot\u2019s Level Three Security confetti.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve also done away with the bulk of my colossal VHS collection \u2013 now mostly replaced, thanks to seven years of Netflix and compulsive Amazon shopping when drunk. <\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve found only one box of Legos so far. <\/span>I know there are many more. <\/span>Once recovered and back at my C-Level Housing<\/a>, I plan to put together the old Town System, circa mid 1980\u2019s when Legos were cool. <\/span>Maybe I\u2019ll get a webcam and film wild Lego police chases through the packed streets. <\/span>Vrooooom! <\/span>Just like when I was a kid. <\/span>Except, I suppose, I\u2019ll be well drunk. <\/span>Which will be a necessary state of mind if I actually do film myself playing with Legos.<\/p>\n

Reassembling my old Lego town sounds tiring, really. <\/span>I also hauled all of my mom\u2019s records out of the storage unit and, to firmly lock myself down as an over-educated 30-something with little ambition, now spend much of my time playing records and drinking in front of a dusty Panasonic stereo. <\/span><\/p>\n

Pulling myself together enough to rebuild <\/st1>Lego<\/st1> Town<\/st1> might not be within my grasp, but I do want to try. <\/span>When I was a kid, I had a table that was about six foot by twelve foot, covered with a well laid-out town system. <\/span>Parks, services, houses, dump. <\/span>This was before Lego started to look more like Duplo and released mega-sets like the airport and so on. <\/span>It was rare for a set to be larger than one square.<\/p>\n

My town had a superhero. <\/span>I\u2019ve forgotten his name, sadly, but it doesn\u2019t really matter. <\/span>He ran the gas station by day and, at night, he\u2019d go out and run over criminals with his death car. <\/span>He didn\u2019t have any super powers. <\/span>Just driving around and slamming into people.<\/p>\n

The cops hated him, so they\u2019d all pile into their old school European-style police cars (Lego has since become more Americanized) and would chase him all over the town. <\/span>Usually the chases would end in the death of countless innocent citizens and a colossal, building-shattering crash. Our hero would always escape, to rebuild his death car behind his gas station and let the dust settle.<\/p>\n

Once, the bad guys all teamed up and destroyed his gas station. <\/span>His dramatic escape was followed by a depressive stay in the trash pile out behind the hospital for several days until he figured out who the ringleaders were and, one by one, stalked and brutally murdered them, leaving their dismembered corpses on the street outside the police station.<\/p>\n

I was a pretty cool ten year old, eh?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just to confirm that I\u2019m a loser, I\u2019ve been doing this thing for the last four years that I call \u201cSci-Fi Saturday.\u201d I wake up early, brew up a huge pot of good coffee, make Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls (which have …<\/p>\n

Lego Maniac<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[125,403,239,112],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","tag-childhood","tag-cult-culture","tag-legos","tag-nostalgia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1198,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions\/1198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}