Anarchy Evolution by Olson Steve;Graffin Greg

Author:Olson, Steve;Graffin, Greg
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2010-09-28T04:00:00+00:00

From my earliest childhood, my parents encouraged and highly valued creativity. My dad’s favorite gifts around holidays and birthdays were oil paints, sable brushes, and plastic models of aircraft or hot rods. More often than not, I painted surreal pictures that involved ideas borrowed from my favorite music albums. I also spent time with my friends thinking of the most creative ways to dismantle the plastic models after they had stood on the display shelf long enough. This usually entailed skillful blasting with a BB gun at ten paces in the makeshift shooting gallery we had in Dad’s basement.

As very young kids, we were encouraged to use the dictionary to “try to figure it out for yourselves first.” This inevitably led to some nerdy games. My best friend, Wryebo, and I were rarely able to stump each other when we challenged each other to find obscure words in dictionaries. We were also shocked at some of the bad words we could find, and we liked to impress our friends with the anatomical or occupational definitions of such common slang. One time I challenged Wryebo to look up the word for the female equivalent of “penis.” He looked at me a bit confused. “Yes, I finally stumped you!” I exclaimed. “No you didn’t,” he said, “I’m just trying to think how to spell it.” At that point, I decided it should be a team effort to find the definition. “Penis” was easy to find, but the word for female genitals was much more elusive. After about ten minutes without success, we both decided it was time to bring this puzzle to the attention of Wryebo’s mother, an academic who was rarely nonplussed. Wryebo handed her the dictionary and said, “Mom, we found ‘penis’ but we can’t find the word for the ladies’ one. How come?” “Well, boys, maybe you weren’t spelling it correctly…here it is.” She read to us, “A canal leading from the vulva to the cervix of the uterus in women and most female mammals.” Through our snickers and giggles, we still were puzzled. Wryebo asked, “But, Mom, how did you find the definition way near the back of the dictionary for a word that starts with B?” “What word did you boys think you were looking for?” We responded in unison: “Bajina!”

Wryebo and I spent most of our grade-school years inventing competitive games out of whatever artifacts or unused implements we could find around our houses. Hallway broom-handle hockey, aluminum-foilball, footskit (a hybrid of football and basketball), and flip-the-creamer were just a few of the games we played. This last game was played with the one-ounce plastic cream containers our parents kept in the fridge and served with coffee. (My family still plays the game at diners when we order coffee and the cream is served in those one-ounce cups. The conical shape of the cream containers makes them relatively stable when turned upside-down on the table. The game consists of seeing how many times you can flip the creamer 360 degrees in the air from its resting position to the same position.

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