What childhood dreams
are you glad never
came true?
We all had weird dreams as kids, but in retrospect it’s definitely for the best that our childish fantasies never came true. I say this because my dominant dream from my youth was pretty frickin’ dark and involved all of you no longer existing.
I was a solitary kid. Frequently bullied, I learned to prefer my own company. Movies were my passion and video stores were my church. But I lacked the resources to rent movies as much as I wanted and I was too bashful to rent the movies I REALLY wanted to see (namely the ones whose covers promised the presence of naked people). This is explains why I frequently went to bed at night imagining a world where everyone in Edmonton had disappeared Night of the Comet/The Omega Man/I Am Legend/That Burgess Meredith Episode of The Twilight Zone style and I had the whole city and–most importantly–ALL OF THE VIDEO STORES to myself. I could watch whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted–including School Spirit, whose video cover featured a ghostly frat asshole helping a co-ed out of her towel in the ladies locker room.
I knew that electricity would probably be an issue, but I had some dim idea that involved “generators” even though I only barely knew what they were and had no idea how they actually operate. I didn’t like canned food, so I figured I’d take over a large restaurant and freeze as much food as I could to keep it from going bad. I also loved the idea of having the entire city’s supply of Coca-Cola to myself–since it by that point had come to be something of an addiction. I worried that it would eventually grow flat and hoped that freezing it might be a solution as well.
Fast forward to today and I am not the last person on Earth–for which I suspect you are grateful–but I do live in an era where it is exponentially easier to see people naked, which I think is even better than what I dreamed. Also, I still have no idea how to operate a generator and when I eventually saw School Spirit over 20 years later, I found out it REALLY sucked.