Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Fuck you, eBay

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...for fueling my belief that I can buy back my childhood. It started out with a simple search to find this "toy" I vaguely remember playing with as a young lad. It was the Planet of the Apes (POTA) Colorforms set. Surely the pussiest of all POTA toys, but give a kid a break, I already had every POTA action figure and playset, so this was one of the missing straws in my Apes cap (no, that made sense). I remember really wanting it but not knowing why. Well, now that I've sufficiently got that feeling back, why not go all the way and buy the fucking thing, Right? But why? Why do I want this piece of shit?
After all, it was made of the absolute cheapest materials available at the time in Japan and I think I only played with it once or twice before it got lost underneath all the new things that interested me. Namely Penthouse, Playboy and Jugg Fucklers (Mr. Show ref. #201). Perhaps that's why I want it so bad. Because I never really got to play with it in the first place due to my increasing interests in naked women. I can regale you for hours with tales of my "formative" years, but I'll hold off for now. Let's go back to the innocent time in MSG's life. The time before Chinese Dentist boners and walking in on my parents fucking. A time when my toys ruled. Sure it was short-lived but it was an amazing time. So I guess it's no surprise that I want to buy that back, even though it's a totally ridiculous notion. I mean, even if I got a hold of a POTA Colorforms set, what would I do with it? It would just sit in my basement unappreciated like my recently unearthed beer can collection. Somehow this logic failed to reach my brain, however, as I scoured eBay for ever more toys and my hunger to buy back my youth continued unabated, though not un-masturbated as I jacked off seven times to the following images:


Those are some cool fucking toys, right? I had quite a collection back then. Let's break those down a bit, shall we? The Jaws game was a horrible fucking game that made no sense. I lost all of the pieces that you were supposed to extract from the shark's mouth so it then became just a giant shark to swallow G.I. Joes, which was even more awesome than the game, but eventually the jaw came unhinged and the shark was destined to be yet another toy I set fire to in the backyard.

You can't still be possibly reading this post, can you? Even I'm bored as fuck by it. You are still reading? Okay, I guess I'll continue then.

Anyway, so next on the list is the Kiss dolls. Yes, I was mightily into Kiss in the late '70's just like most adolescent boys (whom I was also into), so it really baffles me as to why, when I finally got all four "dolls" (actually, they were "action figures", a-hole!), I decided to build a fake stage, put them on it, and burn it to the ground, disfiguring them permanently. Well, my intentions were not quite so destructive at first. My primary goal was to stage a Kiss concert and film it on my Dad's Super 8 camera. However, my ambitions got the better of me and I decided that in order to make it a truly authentic Kiss show, I had to have fireworks. Lots of 'em. Of course, being a privileged white boy in the suburbs with two significantly older brothers and a father who couldn't have cared less what his boys were up to, we always had access to plenty of fireworks and other combustibles. On this particular Summer afternoon, I had bottle rockets, firecrackers and jumping jacks. If you are unfamiliar with those terms, go to page 75 in your "I am a fucking pussy" handbook. So anyway, I split the jumping jacks and put them on front of the stage to simulate flash bombs. Then I broke the sticks off the bottle rockets and turned them upside down all around and above the stage to simulate Kiss' famous spark waterfalls. Finally, I taped the firecrackers to each of the four members of Kiss' bodies to simulate...I have no fucking idea. At this point I threw out the idea of being authentic for being cool as fuck instead. Then, to top off all this fucking stupidity, I had no film for the Super 8 camera but I took it out and "filmed" it nonetheless. WHY???? It makes no sense. Well, as you can imagine, the fireworks eventually started a fire on stage and this was the most awesome turn of events ever so I took some lighter fluid (why was that always so accessible? My dad didn't even have a lighter) and turned it into a raging bonfire. Black, toxic smoke from Gene Simmons' burning hair filled my lungs and I didn't give a shit. I wasn't afraid of cancer. After all, I created this beautifully destructive fire, I was the God of Thunder! Then Paul Stanley started to melt. So I took him out of the fire and proceeded to drip his bubbling, liquid plastic all over some ant hills. Poor ants, what must they have thought? I imagined them screaming and running around while the molten plastic instantly cremated their hillmates one by one. I imagined that some of the lucky ones who escaped the burning death were wondering aloud "Oh cruel Gods, what hath we done to deserve the hot Paul Stanley plastic death?" And yes, I'm quite sure that ants speak in ye' old English. What do you think they sound like, Woody Allen? Please. Anyway, that's what happened to the Kiss figures. I'm not sure I want to buy them back. They're expensive. And they're gay.

You still here? What a loser.

Then there was the Stretch Armstrong foe Stretch Monster (not too clever of a name). That thing was cool....for the first day I had it. The novelty of being able to pull and bend this monster as much as you wanted and it would still revert back to it's original shape lasted literally about a day. After that, I was like "fuck you, monster. You think you're indestructible? We'll see about that" and I was off on a mission to destroy something else that once made me happy (not too much of a pattern in my life.) My brother who was 6 years older than me had a BB gun. How many awesome stories start off that way? The gun was a powerful little 10 pump bastard with a solid wood pump and stock, not that cheap plastic shit they make nowadays. This gun was a horrible object for a young boy with no regard for anything to have. Something I feel truly sickened by to this very day is how I caused a mass extinction of frogs in the pond across from my house one summer. I shot so many of the poor things that they could not repopulate. In the Spring of that year, the singing of the frogs was so loud you could hear it all the way down the street. By mid-Summer the singing was gone and has not been heard since. I really think if there's any justice in this world, a giant frog will shoot me in the head with a cannon some day. I deserve it. Anyway, I took my brothers BB gun and my stretch monster out to the stone wall behind my house for a proper execution. I pumped the standard 10 pumps and let him have it. The BBs smacked the soft monster body and sunk inside, but he didn't sustain much damage. The BB wounds just healed themselves. I was astounded. I shot it probably ten times and it never even fell over. "What are you made of, Monster", I shouted to the heavens (not too dramatic and actually untrue). Then I gave the rifle the dreaded 12 pumps. That's two more fucking pumps than necessary, asshole. Let's see you do more. I fired away and the same thing happened, of course. Physics were not my strong suit then or now. Apparently, common sense was something I severely lacked as well because when I squeezed one of the BB holes in the monster's skin a thick red jelly-like substance oozed out that smelled sweet so, naturally, I tasted it. God only knows what kind of weird chemicals I ingested that day.

Good Lord, why are you still reading this?

The last of the toys pictured above is the totally kick-ass Guns of Navarone playset. Even if you weren't into Army men, this was a cool item to have because you could use it for other action figures. I was definitely not a purist when it came to toys. I didn't keep the Star Wars figures separate from the Micronauts or the rubber Godzilla's away from the Barbies.....I mean GI Joes. GI JOES!!! Ha-ha. Honestly, I didn't even know what a "Barbie" was. I know it sounded gay though. Okay, okay, all brilliant comedic writing aside, of course I knew what a Barbie was back then. She was an object that all my action figures wanted to fuck, even though I had no idea what "fucking" was at the time. That changed a few year later when a wise old sage of a cousin told me what "fucking" was (that's a story I'll blog about some other day, but let me just say that if this kid is still fucking they way he told me fucking was meant to be, then he should be in fucking jail. Not to mention Fucking-Jail) So, to make an unbelievably long and boring story short, the Guns of Navarone playset ruled. I loved it on every level. It was a multi-tasker toy and it was cool as hell. Good thing my brother and his asshole friend took it out in the woods one day and lit it on fire. Dicks.

Okay, that's enough for now. If you made it this far, bless your heart. Someday, I will speak of more of the toys from my youth, the objects that made me so very happy and fulfilled. That is, until my dirty dick and balls (What? That's what we called puberty in my house.) entered the picture and rendered all toys completely useless.



4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dude, I had that same Guns of Navarone playset. That thing got a surprising amount of use in my house as well. I loved that thing. I could still play with it after I blew up all of the army men that came with it with firecrackers and M-80s. Or melted them with the flames that first shot out of smoke bombs or from a held jumping jack or ground bloom flower.

Jaws game sucked. After the fucking rubberband slipped off for the 1000th time we took that fucker out to the beach and lost him in the water.

KISS is gay.

Gleemonex said...

O to be young again, and set things on fire with the glorious workxx that were available to me in small-town Texass pretty much year-round ... my older brother and I destroyed an entire tree's worth of crab apples, a giant bag of potatoes, and several neglected toys one fine day with a box of M80s. And that was just one of many such fine days. Remember when you'd light a Roman candle and hold it and point it at stuff, like your grandmother's neighbor's car? Awesome.

Spanish Johnny said...

I, too, had that Navarone playset. And I'd be lying if I said it wasn't one of the greatest goddamn toys ever produced.

Fuck "Anonymous" for not being proud enough to reveal his true identity. Be a man -- like Spanish Johnny. (And fuck yeah, that's my real name.) Anyway, that Navarone set had a working elevator! Did you hear that? A WORKING FUCKING ELEVATOR!!! One of the greatest products I ever owned. How dare your asshole brothers set it afire. What the fuck is wrong with older brothers? Why were they always such dickwads?

Spanish Johnny said...

One more thing: If I could go back in time and change one thing, of all the possibilities -- see Springsteen at the Capital Theater in '78, invest in Microsoft, stop Hitler -- I have no doubt in my mind I would show up at that Kiss pyrotechnic "concert" in your backyard and hand you a roll of Super 8 film.

What I wouldn't give to watch that right now...