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Showing posts with the label back in the days

True Story©… Carry Out Tradition

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       I will be 42 in about 3½ months… I look back to things I did twenty years ago and shake my head so hard that my neck hurts.   It was legitimately NOTHING to get off work at 11 (or 1am), bolt home and wash the day off my ass and head back out until 4am, then reemerge at 7:30 in time for class to turn and do it all again.   Day of the week bedamned.   If it was a “thong contest” ( ß yes, those were a thing in REGULAR clubs) on a Tuesday, me and the squad were there.   Party promoter needed someone he knew would get the place moving on a random-ass Thursday?   He would call one of us. Needless to say, EVERY day between Tuesday and Saturday could easily become a party night until people started shooting INSIDE of clubs around 2003/04.      The only thing I miss about those days is the stamina it took to go to class from 8a-1:20p, work from 2-11 (or 4-1, or 2-3:30 and THEN 4-1 when overtime was cracking) and T...

Speaking of football... in the street

You know, the things we did in the course of our childhood would in current times be considered damned stupid at best, and get our parents locked away for neglect/abuse at worst. The topic of today is Street Football. As kids, we would stake out a long stretch of road in the neighborhood, generally one long block or two tied together, totally what we estimated as several (50ish-75 yards long) and picked teams, usually 5-on-5, to play football. The rules, as the 32 year-old me remembers back on 20-25 years ago remembers, changed VERY wildly based upon our imaginations. This was not terribly dissimilar to Calvinball . How goes it? I will start by explaining the basics… 5 players on each side (more if the street was pretty wide or if people just HAD to play)* A player would be considered “downed” if he was touched with 2 hands – but more on this in a few* 4 downs to score or get a first down 2 completed passes equals a first down No “punting,” you scored or first down, or give the ball aw...

Remembering when...

Down here in NC, we had a couple of the smaller mom-and-pops record stores in my city, both like 2 miles apart, named School Kids and The Record Exchange... I went to high school right in between them, and would go to one every Tuesday after school, which one depended on whether I had to go to work or home. Soon after high school ended, School Kids moved about 3 blocks down, Record Exchange moved to their place. Within 18ish months, School Kids was closed (there is a bar on one side and an H&R Block on the other where they were now)... The Record Exchange, living in School Kids' old spot, would stick it out for about 5-6ish more years, but there is now a Walgreens situated where that building and the aforementioned H&R Block were known for having been. Now, as someone who has lived and gone to school in the city that he was born in all his life, I have seen plenty of the world outside of my home city/state/country, but it had not at the time dawned on me that those were not...