Miscellaneous

When I was a kid growing up on military bases I used to know some guys who had a lot of stuff. One guy had monster models. These weren’t like the little action figures they have now, but they were plastic models that you put together and painted and they were about 8 to 10 inches high and stood on little scenery stands. He had Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, the Werewolf, the Hunchback of Notre Dame and ones like that. The models stood around in his room like grotesque. silent sentinels.

Other guys had AMC 3-in-1 car models. These were neat because you could customize them all different ways and paint them and put on decals and things. They always had empty model boxes with paint, glue, decals, extra parts and stuff in them.

One guy built plastic model airplanes and military models like tanks, half-tracks, and jeeps and had them all around in his room. He even had planes hanging from the ceiling on strings in authentic attitudes of flight.

Another guy knew how to make gunpowder and he made homemade guns and miniature cannons that would shoot. One was a replica of a Napoleonic era cannon. We’d build dirt fortifications and put army men in them and shoot them with the cannons. This guy’s dad was a Marine and the guy was kind of like a Marine, too, and he really wasn’t one of those that had a lot of stuff but I thought I’d mention him anyway.

The guys that really had a lot of stuff would always have their own rooms and their rooms would be full of their stuff. A lot of them even had sort of a theme to their rooms and the stuff would be a part of the theme: you know, one guy with a monster theme, another with a car theme, another with planes. They usually had a lot of neat stuff in their drawers, too.

My brother and I didn’t really have a lot of stuff like that; not that we were poor or anything – we were military kids – but we just didn’t: usually a bed and somewhere to put our clothes and maybe an Ouija board and a Monopoly game. We didn’t decorate our room with themes.

Some of the guys back then had crystal radios and a few even had transistor sets. The crystal sets were neat because the transistors and crystal and wires and stuff were just on a board and you would try to tune a station and it would scratch and whistle and sometimes tune in to something that sounded like it was coming from outer space. Cool.

We were all military kids. That’s how we grew up. Some of the guys had been to Okinawa or somewhere in the Orient and had those silk looking jackets with dragons and stuff on them and their parents had a lot of Oriental stuff in their houses.

We played guns a lot: you know, army. Even with this some of the guys had all kinds of army stuff: web belts with canteens and ammo pouches, and those toy rifles that were replicas of the M1 and had wooden stocks and bolt actions and everything. My brother and I usually just shot with our fingers. I killed a lot of guys that way.

We used to play dieing: you know, see who could get shot and die the best. Once I got shot and died and fell out of a tree. The guys all thought I was a good die-er. My favorite was to charge a machine gun nest and get cut down.

But, anyway, back to stuff. Stuff is important. Most people have a lot of it. Some people will even kill or at least fight real hard to protect their stuff. I have a lot of stuff myself, now. Mostly books and stacks of paper. Sometimes I spend time organizing my books and moving and re-stacking my stacks of paper. When that’s done I sometimes feel that I’ve accomplished something. Once in a while I’ll go through the stacks and try to throw some stuff away, but most times I don’t.

Stuff can get in the way, too, such as when you’re dusting, vacuuming, or cutting the grass. It can be a problem as well, such as deciding what to take if you have to evacuate your home or something. But the guys on Wall Street, especially, are really into it, in-the-way or not. See, the more stuff we buy the higher the stocks go and the more stuff they (the guys on Wall Street) can buy. Stuff really makes the world go ’round.

It’s almost like everywhere you look is stuff. Everywhere. Especially in, say, a Wal Mart or something. There’s a lot of stuff in a Wal Mart. Sometimes it’s hard to see other things for all the stuff.

Yeah, a lot of the guys I knew when I was a kid had a lot of stuff; heck, they probably still do. Anyway, I didn’t have a lot of girl friends back then, but I would like to have seen what kind of stuff they had.