Da da da DA da...da da da DA da...

(December 14, 2006)

If you spent as much time with your Nintendo as we did (hi Hub) then this is worth watching at least once. Mario Brothers! Legend of ever-loving motherfucking ZELDA. I LOVED that damn game.

I have a Zelda story.

When Hub and I first moved to the Massachusetts area we ended up in Reading. This was pure geographical economics -- I could walk to work and the rents were cheap. We only had one car, his sad little earwax-colored '88 Toyota Corolla. Just before it, um, went to a better place (the trade-in lot at 128 Auto) it started to expel so much exhaust into the passenger compartment that it's a wonder we didn't asphyxiate during our butt-crack-of-dawn paper route we did for extra money.

Retail jobs, beat-up ugly ass car, a basement hovel in Reading, Mass. Reading. Chosen home of auto parts distro outlets, sewing machine repair shops and nail salons. What a pit. We were just out of college. We had not passed Go, we had not collected two hundred dollars. We were sittin' on Baltic with crap, as Dane Cook would say.

We did have a TV, and TV stand. It was tiny. Well the stand was normal-sized. The TV was one of those little black-and-white jobbies that you tune like an AM/FM radio. The screen was about the size of a coaster.

The teeny TV, we put, because we were funny like that, right on the normal-sized TV stand.

We had no cable so my friend & boss, Rich. lent us an extra Nintendo. One night while I was at work Hub set it up.

If you've ever played The Legend of Zelda, you know that the game play is a grid and you, the fearless warrior, are traversing forests and lakes and underground caverns. So it's like an overview of a map. Meaning, your guy is kinda small. On a regular TV screen. So...can you imagine? On the coaster-sized screen? Well I came home from work one night to find Hub sitting on the floor with his nose just about pressed against the screen, concentrating super-duper hard to get to the fairy at the lake with the hearts so he could get extra lives and stay in the game.

I just about pee'd myself laughing, but he'd been so totally into the game that he didn't really see the situation for its ridiculousness until I totally lost my shit. Oh man.

Hooo! GOD that was funny.

You know, I can't remember if the only Zelda I played was Rich's borrowed one or if we bought it? Because if we bought it, then where is it now?

Christ, where is anything. Sometimes I go looking for my red salad spinner in the kitchen and it's two minutes of looking for it before I realize that was two boyfriends and four kitchens ago.

I liked that salad spinner.