Sometimes memories from my teenage years come back with more clarity then is expected. Out of the blue a rather innocuous building, sound, or even a smell will trigger a flood of memories that had been out of my conscious mind for years. This phenomenon has been happening fairly often lately, usually with memories from the ages of sixteen to eighteen. It just so happens that almost all of these memories are associated in one way or another with Ultima Online™.
The other day I was driving through Kent, I’m not sure where exactly. Just some random generic business/commercial area. Something filled with your usual assortment of nondescript office buildings. The single floor type, with glass fronts over all the units. Each unit resembling one of those highway motels, identical front window after identical front window. As I looked out at the passing buildings I was flooded with memories of my life at age eighteen.
I was in Denver, in the passenger seat of Ken Kemp my friend and Guild master’s mid-eighties Mustang. Ken was a role model of sorts, he was older, wiser, and dated a really hot exotic dancer (if my memory serves me correctly). I had been in Denver for a few days, bouncing around from place to place visiting friends. At the moment we were headed to the workplace of fellow guild mate April/Sapphire Dragon. I remember being nervous, and excited at the same time. As I recall, April worked at some sort of system builder/solution provider. I remember seeing a lot of Macintosh systems, and the whole thing looked very… upper class. Wide open retail space, clean wiring, and large full length windows. Not that I was really paying attention to any of these details, my mind was racing and my stomach was churning over so fast I thought there was a butterfly family reunion going on inside it. At that point in my life I had only met maybe a handful of the people I interacted with online, and all of them had been males. In my mind all the women I knew online must be as sexy and seductive as they made themselves out to be.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that April was a normal person, and wasn’t in fact this overly flirtatious buxom babe who had virtuous heroes and evil villains falling over themselves just to get in her good graces. Even with this amazing discovery, I still remember avoiding eye contact and looking at the floor. Thinking back on it now I’m honestly not sure why I wasn’t able to immediately come out of my shell so to speak. Maybe my fears were instantly transferred from being intimidated by my mental image of April to worrying I somehow wasn’t who she expected me to be?
We didn’t stick around long, April had to work and Ken had to go pickup his copy of Tribes 2™. Everything after that is a blur of base invasions and flying bomber/jets.
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