To: Lady_Shallot (ladyshallot14guardianhearts, com)
From: Fisher_King (fisherking33guardianhearts,com)
Subject: boredom
My job is the kind of job where you're either running your ass off, or sitting around waiting to run your ass off. I'm busy doing the latter, so you're getting treated to his e-mail. I've learned you can only play so much Minesweeper before you want to hunt down the asshole that programmed the mine locations and break his neck.
With this kind of communication medium, I've decided that we should operate on a kind of barter system, a kind of tit-for-tat (I can guess the former, but what the hell is tat, anyway?), quid pro quo deal wherein we exchange information like teenagers swap spit.
But remember the rules: no specifics- we wouldn't actually want to know who we're talking to, would we?
I'll go first.
When I was a kid, I'm almost ashamed to say I believed in magic. Not the kind of thing you dredge up from the ground, the kind of thing you'd find in fairy tales- the kind that makes dragons and knights and enchanted swords, and princesses that sleep for a thousand years. I had great hopes for my career, as a kid- I was going be a dragon slayer, live in a castle, crap fire and marry a hot narcoleptic princess.
And then I grew up of course, and realized that magic, real magic, was the sort of thing you used to kill people and fuel empires, that it was dangerous and controlled under legislative limitations…and that if you misfired it, you blew your veins open. It was worse for me, I think, than finding out the Solstice King is just a figment of rampant commercialism. Imagine my disappointment when I found out that I would never be in possession of a really magical sword, or rescue a fair damsel from a dark and winding tower. In fact, to even use magic in the first place, I would have to submit to a background check complete with paperwork to obtain a wielder's permit.
I felt like my dog died.
I think this is probably what everybody loses growing up, (or an indication of how much of a moron I was when I was a kid, whichever) I think it's probably the second thing, as I once fell out of a walnut tree and nearly speared my kidney on my enchanted (wood+duct tape enhanced) sword. Had I been charged with dispatching an actual dragon, I'm pretty sure I would've gouged my own spleen out instead. It should have been a warning sign. But like an idiot, I re-taped my sword, climbed tree with a sturdier upper-branch system, and looked for more towers.
Now, of course, I'm a regular, boring adult. I have my own bank account, and hell, I even receive the Sunday paper even though the kid that delivers it is a little asshole that I'm pretty sure is trying to break all of my windows, one at a time.
I know now that electricity is powered by the conversion of kinetic energy via magnetic forces or some scientific crap, and not fairies or rogue wizards, that there are no monsters under my bed waiting to eat my entrails, and that you should never climb a walnut tree one-armed while holding a pointy stick, lest you make a shishkabob of your internal organs.
Sometimes, though, I kind of miss believing.
What's your earliest memory?
