The same kid who talked me into trading him my Death Star for a landspeeder and five bucks also had ColecoVision. And not just ColecoVision, but ColecoVision with every game, and all the accessories. He had his own little TV, set up on a coffee table, just for his ColecoVision. It was on top of two phone books, so he could see it over the steering wheel for Turbo.

Weird sidebar real quick: holy shit this kid’s parents must have been fucking LOADED for him to have had all that stuff in 1980. I’ve told the trade story a million times, but I never remembered or realized that this kid was spoiled to death. His parents’ wealth also explains why my parents wanted to be friends with them, and probably why they disappeared from our lives around 1984.

But I do remember how envious I was of his personal ColecoVision setup. I could tell a great story about him being a dick about it, making me sing Buffalo Gals Won’t You Come Out Tonight or My Dingaling before he let me play, but I remember that he was actually really chill about it. He shared way better than Henry up the block who would make you watch him play all 20 minutes of Pitfall before you got one turn in Cosmic Ark.

Fucking Henry I swear to god. This is why we never want to come play games at your house, dude.

ANYWAY.

I can close my eyes and see my little hands at the end of my skinny arms, holding that steering wheel while I played Turbo. I can feel the little plastic accelerator beneath my bare foot, because we’ve just gotten out of the pool and are playing video games while his mom makes us grilled cheese for lunch. I remember this kid being legitimately impressed by how good I was at that game.

I was really good at Turbo, because I had been in a movie we shot in 1982 called The Buddy System, part of which was filmed in an arcade (Castle Fun Park on Sepulveda, shoutout to all my fellow 818ers!), the art department had two actual arcade machines on the stage: Kangaroo, and Turbo. I loved Turbo. It was Varsity to Monaco GP’s JV squad, a marathon to Pole Position’s 100 meter dash.. I got to play it for free, until I was bored, because that was the summer Dreyfuss flipped his car while blasted out of his mind on cocaine, right before he got sober; there were entire days I went to 20th Century Fox, got into makeup and wardrobe, and never worked, because he didn’t show up. I remember this scary tension everywhere that nobody would talk to me about (it was very familiar to what I experienced at home), and trying to get out of it by playing these two games as much as they’d let me (childhood by disassociation for the sad win). Kangaroo was inscrutable to me, but Turbo was familiar, so I basically mastered it as well as a little kid can.

But I am not here to write about Turbo or Kangaroo (though ColecoVision will come back later).

No, today I am here to write about Congo Bongo, a game I don’t remember playing, but remember watching the Landspeeder Hustler play an awful lot.

A couple years ago, I gave myself this challenge to post something new to my blog every day in the month of December. I liked the alliteration of Daily December and I needed to practice the discipline of creating and posting something new every day.

At the time, I hoped it would sort of revitalize my blog, which had taken a back seat (in a vehicle that was parked in a garage across town) to social media and the like. I hoped I would be inspired to keep writing in the new year, maybe get that vehicle out of storage and drive it around town.

But I felt like all the effort was for nothing. I wasn’t creating to satisfy myself; I was posting to create content. Eww. Gross. And the numbers on my blog didn’t move at all. Hardly anyone commented, I didn’t see an influx of returning or new readers, and when January rolled around, I remember thinking, “well, thank god that humiliating waste of time is over.”

Until just recently, I didn’t see any value in the exercise. Like I said, the goal was to generate interest by posting new content every day. And I didn’t hit that goal, because generic content isn’t what people came to my blog to read (and it isn’t what I like to write). I wasn’t all that interested in what I posted (though I love the Blades of Steel post I did, and still laugh when I think of calling my team “The Los Angeles Los Angeleses” as they played the “Vancouver Vancouvers”) and the old adage “When you are interested, you are interesting,” has an equal and opposite adage “When you aren’t interested, you’re labored, or trying too hard.”

You can see — I can see, rather — the very meaningful difference between the two. And with the benefit of hindsight and experience, I get why I didn’t achieve what I wanted. I went about it in a way that was unlikely to deliver what I was looking for. Lesson learned.

Yesterday, I saw that my friend John gave himself a Daily December last month, where he wrote about a different comfort movie every day. He said it was to get that daily writing muscle stretched out and warmed up, because he has two novels due this year.

I don’t have anything due, at least not right now, but I do have some things I want to finish and release this year, and the muscles and discipline I need to use them have been neglected while I’ve been focused on mental health therapy and complex trauma recovery for much of the last year.

I’m not ready to commit to daily posts. I’m going to do daily writing (I’ve written this over the last six days), but I don’t know for sure that I’ll have something to publish every day. I’m not going to pressure myself with expectations. I’m going to start out with weekly posts from a list of topics that interest me, in the hopes that I will be interesting when I write about them, as well as looking forward to the creative process involved.

Inspired by a lifetime of RPGs, I made a table featuring all the different topics that are interesting to me. I’m going to roll on the table, and use the result as my prompt.

Today, my rolls landed on Classic Arcade Games: Bagman.

Okay, here we go.