We all play... (day 8)

You know, I realize I started off my last two posts expecting them to be easy outs; quick, small posts. They weren't. I suppose I should stop assuming where these memory lane strolls will take me... apparently it's easy to get lost in the moonlight there; the road gets longer as the shadows get deeper.

So, with no assumptions, I go today into the past and remember a child's playtime. Mine, in fact. :]

I mostly engaged in solo play as a child. I was an only child, as I've mentioned previously; no siblings to frolic with or to torment (Abi). :p I wasn't allowed to play with most of the neighborhood kids; just once or twice here or there. My parents would end up not liking the kids or their parents, thinking that they might be "leading me away from god" or that they "just weren't nice people."

The first, of course, is obsessive rhetoric. As for the second, I don't know how much truth lies therein; there's a lot lost in the subtlety department looking back that far. About half of them ended up not being so nice to me anyways, and I know one or two moved away, as well.

Ironically, one girl I played with until I wasn't allowed to play with her anymore had a younger child with her a couple of times... Who is now my mate. (in before: Law of Fives, Small World, There are No Coincidences)

So mostly I played with myself. :p

I would tie a towel around my neck and run circles in the yard, pretending to be Batman.

I'd jump endlessly around in the kitchen playing Spiderman, or a hero like Spiderman, killing all of his villains for him, since he never killed them in the stories and they just kept coming back to hurt him.

I liked superheroes.

Well, not Superman. He sucked.

I'd play with figures, like little cars or a light up tank (I still regret breaking that light up tank). I had ninja turtles and a sack full of x-men from department store sales. I had a box of cheap dinosaurs from even earlier when I loved dinosaurs. They would all interact and eat each other and stuff.

I'd take my grandpa's sliding rulers and use them as health bars and let toys fight it out. Or have my hands do kung-fu on each other and make up stories about it. I'd scratch designs into that table of my dad's and pretend the images were spaceships and such.

I eventually got Legos, and would endlessly build castles and then change them or destroy them. I loved medieval and high fantasy stuff. When I was able to convince them that fiction books were not inherently of the devil at base, I ate up those kinds of stories. I had a couple hundred of those types of books at one point. I eventually got a copy of Advanced AD&D (second edition) and loved the concept in it. I even got my mom to play once or twice. No idea how I managed that one, really. :] I played Hero Quest as much as I could. Never got to finish it, though.

When I hit my teens and was able to garner money, and especially once I found a few friends finally, I got into more video games, magic the gathering, and roleplaying. I was the first GM among my friends, and ran my first game.... a long time ago. We got into sword fighting and pseudo martial arts. We weren't bad sword fighters, some of us... I've seen some of my friends (or people I've taught) hold their own with semi professionals. I have personally held my own with a black belt; though he was like 15 years out of practice, lol.

I still do most of that stuff. Video games, running and playing pnp rpg's; I write occasionally, though I feel like my writing is shitacular. No more sword fighting or martial arts though... no one to do it with. I just don't have the drive to keep it up all by myself (though it would be awesome to pick it back up). I do various stuff with my daughter, as well. Those things are my play now.

I guess that's it. I hope it didn't come off more like dry autobiography than a set of memories.

:p