My love for games started very young with a board game called Candyland.  This was largely due to my mother changing things within the game and making up “new rules” so that I would win every time.  I can’t really remember that far back, but I must have been fucking fragile if she thought I needed to win that badly.  So, after retiring as champion for life at age 6, I moved on to other games.  Rock the Boat, Connect Four, Battleship, Lite Brite (when you’re 6, you can make anything a game)… I loved every single one of them, even if I could rarely get my older brothers to play them with me.  My favorite was “Dark Tower” which had a little electric castle tower that lit up…  the only thing I remember now is that I learned the word “brigands” from that game.  As I got older and nerdier, I moved on to Risk…  but I sucked at it, so I never asked for one of my own (a friend owned it).  I don’t often play things I suck at…  which is probably due to the fact that I was the reining, undefeated champion of Candyland for 18 6 years against my mom.

Then, one day, the Atari 2600 came into my life.  It bleeped and blooped, and board games were set aside to make way for the future.  Fast forwarding many, many years; I now play games on the computer, my Wii, an Xbox 360 (fuck Sony), and my Nintendo DS Lite…  but a few years ago, my girlfriend re-stirred my love of board games.  Granted, I was really hoping that “Scattegories” involved tossing each other’s shit around the room (don’t try making it now…  I’m going to fucking patent it!), but other than that, I’ve been pretty happy rediscovering board games.  Just for the record: We played Candyland, and I kicked her fucking ass!!!  We played Trivial Pursuit, and we were pretty even at that one.  Then, we bought the 80’s and 90’s editions…  I believe I really won due to her being bored to tears after a long session of the game.  It seems I could get to the end fairly quickly, and then I could never land on that fucking center spot.  Eventually, seeing her boredom, I ask her if she would like to forfeit.  A forfeit is a win, and I have recently retired from playing Trivial Pursuit.  As the all-time fucking champion!

Once in awhile, a little mash-up of old and new comes around like Uno for the Xbox, or “Scene It?” (a DVD trivia game).  My girlfriend and I played her family a few Christmases to go.  No joke is needed here to deliver the punch line, which involved my girlfriend jumping up and screaming at the top of her lungs “Fucking Nightmare on Fucking Elm Street, motherfucker!”.  This would be embarrassing, certainly, if I hadn’t already farted in front of them all while playing “Dance Dance Revolution” 8 hours after meeting them for the first time.

My current favorite board game, though, is called “Cranium”.  If you haven’t played it before, then we, the people of Earth, welcome you… our new overlords!  At any rate, it’s a board game that combines making things out of clay, acting things out, singing, and trivia/spelling questions.  Basically, there is something absolutely humiliating for everyone.  I mean… you still feel like an awkward douche bag while you’re playing… but so does everyone else.  Oh… and just for the record? I’m the all-time, grand-motherfucking-champion. At least… against my mother.

I love horror movies.  I don’t mean the gory slasher flicks… I mean the stuff that creeps you the hell out before scaring the ever-loving shit out of you.  This wasn’t always the case, though.  In my youth, everything scared me.  I had some completely irrational fears (I learned Braille when I was 11 in case I ever went blind, taught myself to use my left hand when I was about 8 in case my right arm was ever severed violently from my body, and learned sign language in my early teens in case I was ever struck deaf), and I still have a few fears that I haven’t quite conquered yet at age 35.  If I am in your home, for instance, and I use your bathroom, you can be absolutely positive that I will look behind your shower curtain before pulling out my dick.  The bathtub is not a good place for you to hide any dead bodies that may be lying around, because I will find them.  If you are an axe murderer, I will find you.  Granted, you still have a giant axe and the element of surprise, so I will most likely end up dead and lying in a bathtub… but I am certainly not the only person that checks behind the curtain, and I will surely be found soon enough if you leave me there.  Essentially, the message I’m trying to convey is this: don’t kill me and/or place my dead body/other dead bodies in your bathtub.  It would be awkward for everyone involved.  When I was about 7 or 8 years old, I was up late watching TV.  My brother and I shared a bedroom for the better (well… larger) portion of our childhood (he was finally moved into the basement behind an old out-of-tune piano like a pariah when he was 16 or 17, solidifying my position as the ‘favorite’ as well as concreting the paradigm of the middle child).  Finally, I was sent to bed, and walked up the stairs to the hallway that led to my bedroom.  The lights were off in my room, and as the lights were likewise off in the hallway, it was pitch black.  I reached up, and flipped the light switch.  Nothing.  Still, I remained completely shrouded in the eerie nighttime darkness.  Luckily, my bed was only 3 feet away from the door, so I just crawled into bed (I already had my pajamas on.  I never had the ass-flap PJs, but I did have the built-in duck feet.  In the ‘70s, it was still A-OK to cover a child’s feet with a material more slick than greased glass.  I am fairly certain my disdain for the naked foot came from a complete unfamiliarity with my own).  My mother was in her bedroom, and my father and two brothers were downstairs still watching television.  So it’s fairly understandable that I was paralyzed with fear as I heard a voice coming from underneath my bed.  The voice was vaguely familiar; with a thick, stereotypical TV-Transylvanian accent.  “I’m coming to get you, Todd”.  I needed Mommy.  Fast.  I ran into my mother’s room as fast as my floppy little duck feet could take me and explained in a hurried breath what had happened.  Dracula was under my bed and apparently had made plans to end my life; but if she hurried, we may still be able to “get him” before he fled or caught me.  That’s right about the time I realized that my mother was laughing.  She was laughing hard.  My brother was now behind me… also laughing.  Laughing, and holding the tape recorder he had placed under my bed earlier, before unscrewing the light bulb from my lamp.  Years later, I accidentally electrocuted my brother while he was working on his car.  Any time I watch a vampire movie where the head vampire is writhing on the ground burning up, I think back to that day and giggle.  In the early 1980s, a “haunted house” became quite popular near my New Jersey hometown (until it burnt to the ground in 1987).  It was called Brigantine Castle.  There were two “castles”, one scarier than the other… or so I’m told. I went once, and upon seeing the first monster (Dracula.  MotherFUCKER!)… I suddenly became very “tired”, and feigned sleeping on my father’s shoulder.  I doubt he fell for it, as I kept mumbling to myself little bits of reassurance.  Like “Daddy will protect me”, and “Please don’t kill me and sodomize my squished little lifeless body!”  The second time we went, I went shopping with my mother at a nearby store instead.  I believe I said something about just wanting to spend time with Mommy.  I spent the first chunk of my life learning how to not shit in my pants, thankyouverymuch, and I had built up a pretty good track record.  At least, until I turned 25; but that’s a story we’ve already covered here.  During the summer of 1981, my parents took us to see the next “big thing” from the creator of Star Wars.  Raiders of the Lost Ark had me riveted within seconds.  I was in love with this movie.  I wanted to be Indiana Jones… I decided right there that I wanted to be an Archeologolopolologist… or whatever the fuck he was.  I wanted to steal ancient treasures using sandbags, whips, and a super-awesome fedora.  The movie started to draw to its dramatic close, and I was on the edge of my seat.  The Ark was opened!  Then, everyone’s faces started fucking melting off.  I was suddenly tired, and immediately went to sleep in the bosom of my adoring mother.  I was becoming a very well-rested little narcoleptic.  In 1982, the world was abuzz with Michael Jackson’s upcoming new video “Thriller”.  We didn’t have MTV at my house, but it was going to be aired… in it’s entirety… on regular television.  I was finally going to see what everyone in school was talking about! My family gathered around the TV, and we waited for the magic to happen.  As it turns out, the magic scared the fucking shit out of me.  I feigned being tired (this was fast becoming my go-to act), and went to bed with the images of rotting zombies burned into my brain.  I didn’t watch Thriller all the way through until I was in my 20s.  It fucking sucked.  Except for Vincent Price, of course… Vincent Price happens to be awesome.  In Thriller’s defense, though… I recently watched my favorite TV show from when I was a kid… Speed Racer. That show sucked, too, so in hindsight, maybe I would have really, really liked Thriller at age 10… if I could have watched it without pissing my pants.  I didn’t give the horror genre another go until my parents rented (on Betamax!) a movie for us all to watch in 1985.  They brought home “A Nightmare on Elm Street”.  I was just about to pull out the old “I sure am tired” card and head off to bed, but as my mouth was forming the words, Johnny Depp was pulled into the mattress and brutally slaughtered on the screen as he slept.  My go-to excuse was just taken away from me by a walking sausage with knives for fingers.  I have been wide awake for the last 20+ years.

I don’t dream. Well, according to scientists, everyone dreams, so I should probably say that I don’t remember any of my dreams, or at least the bulk of them. There have really only been about 25 dreams over the course of my life that I remembered upon waking up, and out of them, only two that I still remember to this day. The earliest dream I remember was about some kind of weird zombie-puppet witch. She would chase me around my parent’s house, but luckily for me, she had to stay behind couches and chairs. It’s a major drawback that stems from being part puppet, I suppose. It’s also probably (subconsciously) the reason I never jerked one out using a sock. The other dream I still remember is rather boring. I dreamt I had chicken pox, but I just scratched lightly at them, and they all fell off. With two dreams in my life, you would think an entire article would be difficult to write for me. Except that I have had girlfriends… and women, as we all know… are fucking crazy.

I was living with my girlfriend, and went to give her a good morning kiss, when I noticed she pulled away. I chalked it up to morning breath, and we started our day… but I noticed that she was being standoffish and cold to me. I quickly ran through all of the fucked up things I may have said to her in the past 24 hours, and nothing out of the ordinary glared out from my memory. Finally, I asked her what her problem was. “You are my problem!” Fair enough. I had to admit, she had a point… until she followed it up with her explanation. Apparently, in her dream the night before, we were on a bus together, and there was a girl on the bus that was my ‘type’, and she knew that I would have checking her out if I was there… in her dream. I was now in trouble for something that I didn’t even do to someone that did not exist. We were renting a house in Delaware at the time, and one day, I had noticed that there was a giant hole in the fence in the back yard. I noticed because our dog had run through it, and once I chased her down, we started to take the dog out on the leash. One morning, my girlfriend told me that a brand-new fence was now in the back yard, so it would be safe to let the dog out again. Luckily, I checked first… apparently, that morning she had a dream that the fence had been put up. Women. Are. Crazy.

More recently, I was sound asleep when suddenly, I was awoken to pain. My current girlfriend had hurled off, and punched me in the face. Although I would typically assume I had deserved this, I thought I would go ahead and check first. I (very gently) nudged her and (softly) inquired, “What the fuck?!?” Her response was “The cats are all over me and I’m trying to use the internet!” Insert the sound of crickets and snoring. I am in constant fear for my life from this woman, and if I suddenly vanish from the face of the earth, you can be fairly certain that it had something to do with a dream, the internet, and those motherfucking cats.