Aromageddon

Essays were my favourite new thing in school. My classmates would write about how they spent a week in summer at their grandmother's. I wrote ridiculous stories about how all the vegetables in our garden came to life, ate my family and I had to fight them off with only a whip. I acted out the whole thing in front of the class, humming the theme from Indiana Jones and everything. It was completely stupid and they loved it. This is how I learned that you have to be brave enough to try crazy nonsense. Or as Weird Al would say, "Dare to be stupid." Break the rules, ignore the assignment, do the exact opposite and for as long as you're having fun and everyone is entertained, they'll let you get away with it.

Of course none of that helped me with classes, which didn't encourage creativity. Maths, anything sciency, shit where you have to follow the rules. I just can't do it. I always got the trick questions and bonus questions right. Name 12 male characters who live in Asterix' village. An electric train is going from one place to another, at this and that speed, the wind speed is suchandsuch and blows in this and that direction. Which way does the smoke go? Nowhere, obviously, since it was an electric train. I couldn't tell you what X, was, or what one Werner Karl Heisenberg's greatest achievement was. It had nothing to do with methamphetamine, though!

I was juuuuuuust smart enough to pass all of the science crap. I wasn't great at it, but I was a language genius and I wrote killer essays, so that was more than enough to get me through school. I never studied for any exams, I just winged it. I put in zero effort and always managed to do just well enough to pass. My tutor called me the human three liter engine. As in, put three liters in the tank and keep going for a hundred miles.

I was finally starting to build up some confidence. I had friends! We started hanging out after school, doing stuff, normal kids do. My life was normal and I liked it. The one thing I absolutely couldn't handle, though, was the ladies.
I was hopelessly crushing on Anke. She had developed a lot faster than the other girls in class and had some serious boobies. Not tiny little bumps like my sister, but actual knockers. I saw her in her swimwear in PE and ho-lee fawk, dem tetays! I know, that's no way to talk about a lady, but I was a horny teenager and to me, she was the most beautiful thing I had seen in my life! I had never been so much in love before!
Naturally, she ignored the crap outta me. All the girls did. We didn't have any actual couples in class, back then. Everyone was still a bit young. I was a year older than most of them and naturally horny, so that didn't help. It also didn't help when I released the fart of dooom (yes, triple-o) in class one day. Girls don't like that.

Now, before you judge me - you've been in that situation, right? You don't really want to, but you could totally do a really good one and you figure if you're being sneaky then nobody will hear it and then it'll smell bad for a moment, but nobody is gonna say anything and if anyone does, then you'll deflect everything and point at the guy next to you. I can't be the only one, because people fart in elevators, on the bus and just about everywhere all the fucking time. That day was my day, I couldn't hold it in, I figured I'd be sneaky about it and, well, that was that.

The guy next to me started laughing uncontrollably. Everyone looked at him, trying to figure out what the fuck... and then they smelled it. The most rancid, rotten, disgusting eggy fart in the history of buttholes. All the boys laughed. At that point it was too awesome not to take credit. It was so bad, the teacher opened all windows and evacuated the classroom. We literally left the room for five minutes and waited for my fart to go away. If Anke didn't hate me before, she definitely did now. But to the boys I was a legend. My ass was legendary.

My best buddy back then was a Japanese kid called Timo Ernst. He had the most German name you could think of. His dad was German and one fine day he went to Japan, boned a Japanese lady and that was the beginning of Timo's story. His mother just ironed clothes and watched soap operas whenever I came to their house. Didn't speak or understand a word of German. Timo would sent her miles into town to bring us kebabs. He treated her like personnel, but not like his mother. Weirdest shit I had ever seen.

Timo had a business sense similar to my brother's. Just on a much more modern scale. Timo had the power of the internet. And he had a CD writer. Be burned all the internet porn he could find on CDs and sold them in school. When I finally had my first modem, all I managed to find was a bunch of horny old men on AOL. I used to hang around in some weird chatroom for teenagers and every so often I'd get private messages popping up, usually older guys asking for dick pix. They told me stories about how that's perfectly normal and so not gay and how they all whip it out in front of their friends to see who's got the biggest one and all sorts of weird shit I don't remember doing with any of my friends. It was creepy as fuck! And that was in the nineties! I dread to think what kind of crap my kid has to deal with when he goes online. I doubt he's telling me everything. I know I wouldn't talk about these things to my parents. "My day? Oh, nothing special. Played some Half-Life, spent 38 minutes downloading a 5 MB update for Diablo and some sixty year old guy asked to see my cock. Pass the potatoes?"

Our old Mega Drive didn't really get any new games at that time, the Sega CD, 32X and Saturn all sucked. I had a PC now and got into computer games. My brother got himself a PlayStation. That's when I felt PC master race superiority for the first time, because PSX games were a blocky, pixellated mess and most of the games he had on there I could also play on my PC. Tomb Raider, Need for Speed... we did kill the shit out of each other on Soul Edge (or Soul Blade, depending on where you are), but for the most part, I was done with consoles. I started reading pc gaming magazines and started hanging out in pc gaming chatrooms. Little did I know that I was chatting with some of my future colleagues and employers back then. Or my future girlfriend.

All I knew is that my parents were horny and wanted the kids out of the house, so they sent us to bible camp in France, of all things. And I didn't believe in god, I didn't believe in camp and I sure as fuck didn't believe in going to France! Meanwhile, my parents believed in getting rid of us and running around the house naked. So before I knew it I was on a coach to France with my stepsister and two dozen strange kids. No internet, no computer, net cafés weren't a thing back then and portable devices like a Game Boy weren't allowed. Welcome to hell!