I have an overwhelming urge to be silly.
Something changed after I published my last article (much as I loved it), and now I have this incredible need to undo it all, to step away from the big, serious topics and to embrace the deep end of stupid -- to leave the "thinking hat" by the door and instead put on a clown wig, to climb on the rooftops and start yelling dad jokes until someone calls the cops on me. I want to forget about the poetry and flourish that have become the "trademark" of my every work and instead follow Sol LeWitt's advise to Eva Hesse: I want to be dumb, unthinking and empty, to practice --and master-- being stupid just to escape the clutches to this dark cloud, this darkness-enhanced rut that has been hovering over my head ever-since I published my last piece. And what better way to do it than by unearthing what was probably the crowning achievement of my friendship with a dude I still call my best friend to this day?
It all started the only way it could have: by me getting an excited phone call from my friend.
He told me that he had great news, that I should come to his house ASAP. And I was more than ready to oblige, because I was experiencing the kind of lazy Saturday that breaks the scared "Children's Law", wasting away on my room, not doing anything as the Sun moved across the sky, almost mocking my attempts at finding some sort of enjoyment or fulfillment while also reminding me that time was running out as the natural lights dimmed and the artificial ones grew brighter in the horizon. That simply couldn't stand. I wasn't cool with the idea of leaving my only day of freedom slip away like that, not after having spent the first half of my Friday listening to teachers drone on and on about the most inconsequential of topics, and specially not after dreading the endless homework marathons of Sunday. I was SO ready to make this one count that I almost forgot to feed my pet hamster, "Chere", as I fished my shoes somewhere near his little glass cage, a place of such intense beauty that I called it "The Glass Mansion" (I'm sure he didn't think much of it, though, given that he mostly exercised on his wheel like an inmate getting all beefy while waiting to get out).
My friend's previous computer may have been trashy and outdated, but played Commander Keen like an absolute charm.
I basically blazed through the door after muttering something to my mom, telling her about going out and maybe coming home late, making sure to escape before she could object to it.
I spent the next fifteen minutes blindly navigating the streets that separated my home from my friend's, being so utterly used to the road as to travel it in "auto-pilot", only waking up enough to pay attention to the traffic as I zigzagged around alleys and storefronts to shield myself from a Sun that was starting to grow in both intensity and heat as the Summer drew near.
When I finally got to my friend's house, he opened the door in the typical way: one hand on the frame, the other holding his dog back, because she loved me and always made sure to jump me just so I could pet her for fifteen minutes straight -- God, I loved that dog. When the animal was finally satisfied and we had exchanged enough pleasantries to pretend to have at least some refinement, my friend told me the good news: his family had just acquired a brand new Pentium IV, equipped with the latest GPU and an honestly impressive 40 GBs HDD... and while I had absolutely no idea what a "Radeon" was, I was super onboard with the idea of playing games on that juggernaut, especially because my own machine had a 3 GB hard drive and integrated graphics that were completely obsolete just a few months after buying the damn thing, banning me from playing almost every game released after 1999.
I remember being pretty pissed because I could never make my cool joystick work on my friend's computer.
My friend proudly game the "tour", showcasing Windows XP in all its Fisher-Pricey glory, telling me how much RAM the devise had, and marveling at how quickly everything loaded... we really were a pair of 12-year-old nerds, but that's why our relationship worked so well, really. We had settled for a rhythm in which we got fulfillment out of being ourselves, unapologetically doing what we wanted to do without a care in the world. It should be the simplest thing in the world, so normal as to result unremarkable... but it truly wasn't, and that's something that always bothered; the way in which there seemed to be some sort of unwritten rules or societal expectations about what was "acceptable" to enjoy and what wasn't. But that didn't bother us. We had endless jokes and a huge supply of nerdy references to throw both at each other and the world.
And because we were so nerdy, we didn't take long to discover that his new PC had an option to output video right into his bedroom TV, resulting on the (honestly mind-blowing) spectacle of me witnessing him play "Sudden Strike: Resource War" from across the room while he controlled his troops and vehicles from the other side. It was like watching "Nivel X" or "Top Kids", seeing raw gameplay footage with commentary on top without every approaching the computer itself. It was so great that we even took to making custom maps for the game, going back-and-forth between the computer and the TV just to surprise each other with our wacky inventions, being (literally) kids with new toys.
At one point we managed to figure out how to summon bombers from the map editor and created an entire lore based one single dude living in a rundown, tiny shack out the outskirts of town and whose property was being carpet bombed over and over by "the government" because he didn't fill his taxes properly or whatever... it was a thing of madness, and it was great having a single soldier in that place (representing our hero) as the bombs turned everything around him into a burnt wasteland from which nothing could ever escape. And, really, that should have been the whole story... and the fact that this is only secondary fills me with a tingling sensation and pure, unaltered joy.
Ah, heck yeah! The fact that we could run something so detailed felt like night and day for us.
Because, you see, my friend used to have another computer before getting this one: a beautiful 486 in which we played Commander Keen 4 and a bunch of shovelware titles. A really neat-looking machine that taught us valuable life lessons (like the fact that the "Turbo" button had been designed by complete psychopaths), but that had grown critically outdated by the time we decided to move past edutaiment titles and simple DOS applications. The PC itself seemed to have acknowledged that by collapsing on itself and refusing to boot up again, getting forever locked on an orchestra of indecipherable motherboard beeps and cryptic error messages that signaled its own doom.
I don't really remember how this came about, but my friend and I suddenly decided that this machine deserved a proper sendoff, a "Viking Funeral" of sorts... and so, in typical 12-yeard-old fashion, we began preparing for it, the Pentium IV and all its amazing features quickly forgotten as we walked to his grandpa's workshop and began retrieving tools to finally satisfy that ancient curiosity of ours: we were gonna see the innards of a computer for the first time, and we couldn't be more excited about it.
We undid the screws holding the case together quite easily, but getting into the components themselves was another matter entirely.
Wires, wires and more wires...
I guess we weren't expecting computers to be that intricate, but it was quite the wake-up call seeing all those wires running across the endless orange surface of the motherboard, with little red and black wires going from and to the aforementioned board and into the power supply and both the floppy drive and the hard drive. With "snakes" (that's what we called ribbon cables) being crushed under the limited space of the busy tower, folding on themselves just to give us barely enough space to maneuver around that crammed techno hell. And with lots and lots of shiny things for us to marvel at and remove.
At one point we took out the little fans on top of the processor and made them into a "portable AC" by powering them on with a D battery, and then began planning to put them on our caps to fend off the scorching Summer heat (but thankfully we never got around to doing that). We also took some of the most, uh, interesting-looking wires and the processor itself, proceeding to smash and trash everything else just for the hell of it. But as we were hoisting more red flags than a May Day parade in Moscow with that hammer-powered display of anti-social destruction, my friend had an amazing idea: What if instead of trashing the entire thing and throw it out, we made it look pristine and dandy and set it up against a tree just to watch people's reactions to it? It was a genius idea.
For this ruse to work, we first had to mask the damage we had already inflicted to the computer itself, so we went around the house grabbing everything that looked even remotely helpful: we packed the interior of the case with old newspapers to prevent rattling of the destroyed interiors. We got a bunch of random trash and threw it in to simulate the weight it should have had. Then we... once again displayed our age by emptying his trashcan inside the thing, filling it to the brim with junk, rotten food and (I later learned) some of his dog's droppings. We then put on rubber gloves and took the thing outside, propping it up against a tree and hiding in a room near the back of his house, the only one which had an unobstructed vantage point of the area whilst also providing heavy curtains we could hide behind in case someone wasn't particularly amused by our prank. We also fixed ourselves a couple of bowls of cereal to witness the mayhem because reasons.
We at least made sure to leave the back of the case looking somewhat intact to attract people.
I had no idea what a "social experiment" was back then (and I'm not even sure that the term even existed at that point in time), but I'm pretty sure this was one... and it was just strangely interesting seeing all those people go out of their way to inspect this machine, believing over and over again that they had won some sort of prize by watching this --seemingly-- spotless machine sitting there and ready for the taking, no questions asked.
We saw quite a few people get near the trick PC, but only three of them ever seriously considered taking it home... and they were hilarious:
One dude circled around it three times whilst crouching near it, trying to look through the little opening between the power supply and the rest of the case, probably suspecting foul play but being completely unable to prove it.
Another one grabbed the machine and shook it like he knew what this was all about, then put it back down and walked off, never even bothering to look around.
And the third person who came to inspect it angrily kicked it after giving it a quick look, probably either smelling its fake contents or realizing that he was being played. He kicked it so hard that one of the side panels actually dented, and at that point we just closed the window and went back inside to keep playing with the new machine instead, our prank no longer looking all that fun.
Whatever ended up happening to that computer, I cannot say. It was no longer there by the time I left my friend's house, so your guess is as good as mine. Maybe someone fell for it and took it home, only realizing the magnitude of our joke later on, as they tried to inspect the interior in hopes of finding any usable parts. Or maybe it ended up being picked up by the garbage truck, kissing the crusher like many other gadgets before and after it. Whatever the case, it made for a pretty memorable story and I like to think that it got its last hurrah.
If anything, it turned a pretty dull Saturday into yet another adventure, and I can't think of a better note for it to end on.
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