This is excerpted from something that was written eight years ago, almost to the day. In addition to being a story that still makes me smile, it provides context and back story for Friday's post that newer readers may not have.

Even though I'm a much stronger and more confident writer now than I was then, I've resisted the urge to rewrite this, because something would definitely be lost in the translation… 

In the summer of 1988, I turned 16 years old, and, just like the Corey's, I got a License to Drive!

It's well documented within the Star Trek community that Patrick Stewart and I bought almost the same car, a 1989 Honda Prelude…the, uh, only problem is, I bought a model that was just slightly cooler than his. (He got the si, and I got the si4WS, baby.) Patrick has really had fun over the years, teasing me about how, since then, he's always had cooler cars than I do, to which I reply something about his driver.

What's not well documented, however, is this thing that happened, in the summer of 1988, in the parking garage at Paramount, where we all parked our cars.

We were all working late one night, probably shooting blue screen on the bridge, so we were all wrapped at the same time (a rarity). I excitedly walked to the parking garage with Jonathan Frakes, who I was already looking up to.

So we're walking back to our cars, and we're talking about something, I can't quite remember what, and I really feel like Jonathan is treating me like an equal. He's not treating me like I'm a kid. It really makes me feel good, and I say to him, "You know, Jonathan, I can tell, just from talking to you, that when you were younger? You used to be cool."

He laughs, and I think to myself that I've cemented my position with him as cool contemporary, rather than lame ass kid.

Then he says, "What do you mean, used to be?!"

I realized what I'd said, and how it didn't match up with what was in my head, which was, "Gee, man. You are so cool now, as an adult, I bet that you were a really cool guy, who I'd like to hang out with, when you were my age."

He knew what I meant, I could tell, and he really tortured me about that, for years. Every time I see him nowadays, he turns to a person nearby, and he says, "You know, Wheaton here told me that I used to be cool." We laugh about it, and I make the appropriate apologies, and explanations, while Jonathan makes faces and gestures indicating that I am full of shit.

You can probably see why I wanted to rewrite that when I looked at it this morning. I almost did, but I just couldn't bring myself to apply my own Red Pen of Doom to it. It's very rough, but the 2002 version of me used his words and developing storytelling skills the very best he could. If he thought that the 2010 version of me would look look back at this story, cringe, and rewrite it, he wouldn't have had the nerve to tell the story in the first place.

So, 2002 version of me, if you build a time machine and read this: Someday we're going to look back on this and want to rewrite it, but then we'll remember how we felt when we sat down at our Linux box on the desk in the living room and told this story for the first time on our lame blog. So you just go ahead and enjoy telling it, and know that I'm going to leave it alone when I get hold of it IN THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!!

Last night, I stood in front of the open refrigerator and thought to myself, "You know what would go good with this vegetarian chili? That Oaked Arrogant Bastard!"

I reached for it, applying my -3 DEX modifier, like you do. A minute later sent the following text message to Anne:

"Hey, we're out of beer. Could you pick up some Oaked AB on the way home? Also, totally unrelated to this, where's the mop?"

While I waited for her reply, I was reminded of this post I wrote three years ago:

We have a new refrigerator. It's energy efficient, can hold an entire horse and a stick of butter, and is generally one of the more awesome "grown up" purchases Anne and I have made since we got married seven years ago.

In addition to the awesome Futurama magnets that adorn its doors, it comes with a nifty little basket thingy which slides in and out underneath one of the shelves, perfect for holding bottles and cans.

We here in Chez Wheaton don't drink much of anything that comes out of a can (the notable exception being Guinness) but I drink plenty of things that come out of a bottle, like Stone Pale Ale and Izze soda, for example.

A few months ago, I uncovered a design flaw in the otherwise perfect basket: the wires spread out a little (okay, a lot) more easily than you'd expect from something intended to hold bottles in their least entropic state. If you have a heavy bottle (like a wine bottle, for example) on the same rack as a lighter bottle (like a Newcastle, for instance) and you look at them funny, the heavy bottle will create enough pressure to spread the wires and launch the lighter bottle onto the floor, where it will explode.

This afternoon, while I was trying to pull out a bottle of Tejava (99 cents at Trader Joe's) to enjoy a cool glass of tea, a bottle of clementine Izzie soda looked up at me, shouted, "Hooray! I'm free!" It then launched itself onto the floor, where it landed in a sticky explosion of horrible, entropic freedom.

I was, of course, standing barefoot in the kitchen at the time, so I got to tip toe through a spreading slick of soda and shards of broken glass that were as pointy and deadly as they were invisible on the floor while I made my way to the paper towels.

By some miracle, I didn't cut the everlivingshit out of my feet, and only got stuck a couple of times, and by the time Anne and Nolan got home, I was nearly done cleaning it up.

"What happened?" Anne said.

"There were . . . errors," I said.

She gave me a blank look. Before I could explain the inside joke to her, Nolan said, "What did you do?"

"I was trying to get some iced tea, and the Izze decided to make a break for it."

I held up a handful of dripping paper towels.

"It succeeded."

Nolan dropped to his knees and looked skyward. "Noooooooo!" He said, while shaking his fists at an imaginary Statue of Liberty.

"Yeah," I said. "Sorry. But there's more, so you can put them in there when I'm done."

Anne walked over to the pantry to get some replacement bottles.

"Would you like me to leave some of this here, as a warning to the new bottles?" I asked.

I got The Look.

I finished cleaning up.