(Tangent #1: that strip mall across the bike path from our 'hood- with Tiger Play, Gold & Silver Exchange (baseball cards) and Scheels (sporting goods)....that was all we needed as kids. The Bergman brothers and I probably spent 60% of our free time and 98% of our allowances in that strip mall. Just fantastic. Tangent #2: the shenanigans I pulled on stores when I was a kid were ridiculous. I would trade in my Genesis for a SNES, get bored and switch back a few months later, then switch again a few months after that, rinse and repeat, etc. etc., never paying a cent. Same thing with basketball jerseys at Scheels. During the 6th grade school year, off the top of my head, I had all these jerseys at one point, each one for no more than a few weeks at a time: Jerry Stackhouse, Anfernee Hardaway, Patrick Ewing, Jalen Rose, Nick Van Exel, Chris Webber, Jason Kidd, Jamal Mashburn, Larry Johnson, and my personal favorite: a Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf Denver Nuggets jersey. I was like a girl who keeps the tag on a fancy dress so she can return it after her gala event. What can I say, it pays to keep your receipts. End tangents.)
And yes, on days where I would wear the Abdul-Rauf jersey, I would pull this little routine during the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning, until my teacher realized what I was doing and shut me down. I just thought it looked cool, and didn't really understand that he was insulting America. I was, um, easily influenced at that age.
All through high school Fundy and I would occasionally trade each other SNES for Genesis, and then we lived together all through college, so I always had an SNES at my disposal. But the other day I woke up and realized I hadn't played one in a couple years, and that I really missed Super MarioKart. 4 hours later that problem was taken care of, and I've been rocking MarioKart pretty steadily again. I was quickly reminded that it's probably the most re-playable video game in human history, and how MarioKart had a starring role in two events that were instrumental in shaping the Hammen you know today:
1. The summer after our junior year of high school, ADawg (a notorious perfectionist) and I were signed up to take the ACTs on the same day. It was ADawg's second go-round, since he wasn't happy with his score the first time. In a situation that couldn't be more indicative of our respective personalities, he spent the days leading up to the exam taking and re-taking practice tests and generally just freaking out, while I spent it golfing and rocking out on MarioKart time trials, trying to wipe out all of Fundy's times before I returned his SNES (dick move, I know.) The night before the test, ADawg called to admonish me for not taking the test seriously enough (I wasn't worried, UND had already offered me a full ride on an intramural basketball scholarship) and I basically told him not to worry about it, and if he would ever stop nagging me, I could break the 1:45 barrier on Bowser's Castle. I eventually stayed up until 5 in the morning doing time trials, grabbed a two-hour nap, and dragged myself to the test looking like death. ADawg, fresh as a daisy as he aligned his sharpened #2 pencils at the top of his desk, tsk-tsked me and told me I deserved exactly what I got.
What I got was a 30, and as a result, an actual scholarship to UND that took care of most of my tuition (I turned down the intramural basketball scholarship because it just feels better to earn it academically rather than athletically, you know?) Once again it played out exactly like our personalities: upon learning my score, he went absolutely ballistic and didn't talk to me for a few weeks, which was mostly because every time we talked, I told him I was going to make a self-help video called "How to Succeed on the ACTs" and it was just going to be hours and hours of footage of me eating logs of cookie dough and doing MarioKart time trials, and did he want dibs on the first copy? To this day, if I bring up the ACTs around ADawg, he'll get pissed. Love it.
2. The first time I ever puked from drinking (what guys have to do at some point before we can call ourselves men- I like to call it our beermitzvah) was due to MarioKart. It was shortly after we moved into the dorms freshman year, at a get-together at Ike & Jake's apartment. Warning sign #1 that it was going to be a rough night was my buyer decided to ignore my request for Bud Light and picked me up a 30-pack of Schmidt and pocketed the change for herself. Classic case of a smoking hot 23-year-old taking advantage of a wet behind the ears freshman. She knew I wouldn't stay mad at her cause she was hot. Oh you girls.
The brew that grew with the great Northwest. Does anyone else have goosebumps right now? Maybe it's just me.
The second warning was when my idiot friends and I invented Drinking MarioKart that night. As most things with my friends do, it started with arguing; MarioKart is one of those things that every dude on the planet thinks he's the best at (along with Flippy Cup, and badminton. In high school, our "I'm awesome at badminton" arguments used to get so heated that we had no other choice but to sneak into the gym during our free hour and settle it on the court.)
Pretty soon we were racing each other in a 150cc GP, and whoever finished in a better place at the end of a race would chug half a beer; the loser shotgunned a full one. Considering that each race was only about a minute and a half long, things got ugly quick. Yada yada yada, I ended up dropping my controller in the middle of Rainbow Road and sprinting to the front lawn because I was about to become a man RIGHT THAT MOMENT. After I was done puking and passing out right there on the lawn, I came back inside to the party like three hours later and nobody even realized I had been missing. My friends are dicks, but in their defense, there was a pretty intense Battle Mode tournament going on. Also, I ended up drinking Schmidt's religiously for about two years after that, and it was a small miracle that I ever hooked up with girls at parties. That stuff made my breath smell like the inside of a prosthetic leg.
I feel sorry for the kids who are growing up now, in the era of PS3 and XBox, and online Madden and headsets and Halo and Call of Duty and all that jazz. That stuff is all well and good, but they'll never enjoy the classics like we do.
Suck it, Yoshi. Chug your beer, you dinosaur bitch.
