my future car

One of the greatest conversations I can remember having was between a handful of other sophomores at McCook Community College one fall evening in 1995. I was in Bryan and Nate's dorm room with a few others while we reminisced about the 1980s, specifically about cartoons from our childhood. The power of our brains to reconnect with a time over 10 years old and reproduce the emotions that went along with that time is truly spectacular. That night was one of the first times I had realized that I just found my new two best friends in college and that's what happened. We were pretty much bonded after that.

If you didn't experience childhood in the eighties, it probably seemed like a pretty shitty decade with Ronald Reagan and the onset of AIDS and more. However, all of that was background noise for me at the time, drown out by Intellivision, He-Man, Rubix Cubes, Sixteen Candles, Care Bears, Space Invaders, Girls Just Want to Have Fun (the movie which I can still recite line for line), Cyndi Lauper, Pac Man (both the game and the TV show), the Never-Ending Story, Burgertime, the Karate Kid, Nerds candies, and Revenge of the Nerds. My friend Teddy and I spent what seems like a lot of time in Ed's Drive, especially when we discovered Mario Bros (the original) and Q-Bert. I was a lot better at Mario Bros. It was Shangri-La but that's because it was an innocent time for us as people. Talk whatever smack you want about the politics, health care, fashion mistakes, or overly synthesized music but I loved the 1980s and I always will.

Dominic recommended a book to me over a month ago and I checked it out from the library last week. It's Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Once I started reading it, I realized that I didn't want to do anything else. It's set in the future but in a future preoccupied with the 1980s so it packed with wonderful references, both blatant and obscure. It's like reliving my childhood or at least that conversation I had back in September of 1995. My only problem with the book is that I'm going to finish it way too soon and then I'll be stuck looking for an adequate summer book to follow it. I'll probably just do what Dominic did and I'll read it again.

I went home for lunch around 3pm today and walked Dean so I didn't need to head home right after work. Since Ready Player One, I've been itching to spend some time dorking out on arcade games while eating mediocre pizza so I planned to go down to Ground Kontrol and kill some time there. Fortunately, I checked my twitter feed first and saw that Powells in Beaverton was hosting Ernest Cline tonight for the tour of the paperback version of Ready Player One. I biked downtown, bought a copy of the book to replace the library's copy I had been reading, grabbed some pizza at Sizzle Pie and jumped on the MAX.

I hadn't biked in Beaverton before and I was quite unprepared for the suburbs but it was going to be worth it. The Beaverton Powells is even in a mall which made even more 80s sense, although I loathe the mall. Ernest's presentation was great. Fortunately, he didn't give away the ending because I haven't finished it yet but he did talk about the work he had to do to get his screenplay Fanboys made and how he came to write Ready Player One. He also introduced me to his contest that he is doing in which he has mirrored his book by placing a hidden easter egg in the book that leads to a video game. The first person to solve all three riddles and games will win the DeLorean pictured above. I don't know if I'm going to compete but I might give it a shot. Really, it was just enough for me to sit in the DeLorean and then bike back the the MAX with a big grin on my face while listening to Huey Lewis sing about the Power of Love.