Day Sixty-seven - Far from any road

I'm going to go back in time a bit now, to address something I neglected to mention  in my previous writings. I had to do some mental backtracking to figure out exactly when this took place, but the only year it could have been in was in 1991, because by September 1992 my brother would already have been arrested, and as such he didn't spend that christmas with us already. And that year wasn't one of the bad ones, not yet. I have many fond memories of that year, such as my mother getting a used car fof her birthday from my grandmother, and sometimes on weekends we'd go for a car ride somewhere, and, especially during the summer, we'd pull the top down and feel that warm summer breeze flowing past us. My mother, I think, was still working for the TV station then, and one of her friends there lent us a second VCR, and I used up a lot of my free money going to video rental store and bringing stuff home that I could record for myself. I forced myself through a lot of bad movies that were the cheapest to rent.

Things would get tougher from '92 onwards, and one of the ways we felt that was on birthdays or christmases - we couldn't afford any kind of luxury whatsoever, and that was something that you just got used to. But in christmas '91, I managed to convince my mother to get us a Nintendo Entertainment System - the fabled NES - for christmas. It was actually my grand mother who bought it for us, but my rationale behind the reason for us getting was that since three games were packed with the system, then it would be a christmas present not only for me, but for my brother and sister. Super Mario Bros. would 'my' game, Tetris would be my sister's, and Nintendo World Cup would be my brother's. But the truth of the matter was that I hoarded the NES almost all for myself... and that would spawn an ongoing love story with me and videogames. Oh, as a kid we'd had a ZX Spectrum computer, where I'd played my first few games, but I always found it far too clunky, and I rarely managed to get much enjoyment from those games. But the NES changed everything... from my first adventures with Mario, and then Link and Zelda, I knew that these were the games I'd been anxious to be able to play at home. In the summer of '92, just before my brother got arrested, I worked for my dad during the summer, and with the money I pooled together from working those months I bought myself a Sega MegaDrive, which though I cherished a great deal, I'll confess to never having been a huge Sega fan, so much so that a year or so later I'd be selling it to S., who was more than happy to take it off my hands. And with the money I made from that, I went and picked up the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Now things were heating up!