In 8th grade, I had made friends with a bunch of boys and we found this like, we found this little like forested area between a gas station and a bunch of storage units over by the airport. And it was just this little like hill with a bunch of trees and shrubbery and stuff on it. And we were just, it was me and a couple of friends, we were just walking through the area and we found this little place, and somebody had apparently used it to hang out before because there was like an old medicine cabinet and like some junk. It's probably from the storage units. And like a lawn chair. Maybe two, was it two lawn chairs? I can't remember if we brought a lawn chair. There was at least one lawn chair though. And it obviously hadn't been used in a while. So we decided that was gonna be our hangout spot, 'cause it was pretty close to one of the guys’ houses. And we, we nailed the medicine cabinet to a tree. And we brought, um -- the other guy's, his dad had like this foldable army shovel. And we like dug these like steps into the hill so that we could go up and around, like, up over the hill instead of like walking around it and stuff, 'cause it was pretty steep. And we -- I can't, again, I can't remember if we brought the second lawn chair or if there was a second lawn chair, but we would like go to the gas station and buy like Jolt energy drinks and like sodas and stuff and we'd put it in the medicine cabinet for later. Which like, ew, gross, warm energy drink, but, I don't know. We were 8th graders, so we just thought that was really cool and we'd sit there and talk about stuff and like, at this time PlayStation Portable was a big thing and like, I don't exactly know how it worked 'cause I didn't have one, but one of them had one and he’d play games on there and stuff and like we'd just sit and chat, and like.  I remember I went there with that second friend with the shovel by ourselves, just me and him because he wanted to play a prank on that first friend by, um -- we dug this, like…

We did have a pretty bad injury on that tire swing. We would always mess around, like, me and my friends, like, we would always like tease each other and, like, if somebody knocked you off the tire swing you would, like, pretend to get hurt and, like, just kind of goof around. And so that happened to my friend one time. She had fallen off, and she, just like, kind of started crying and we were like, “What is going on? Like, it’s not funny, like, we–you’re fine.” And she got up and I just remember, like I can picture this right now, she had–the tire swing had kind of stopped swinging, like, right above her–she was on the ground–and she got up and she looked up with an open mouth, and whole, like, bottom jaw was full of blood. And we were like, “Oh my God, this is not a joke.” And so I remember her just, like, crying, but having a mouth full of blood, and you just, like, run to get the person–there was always just, like, somebody’s parent or something who volunteered to be the playground monitor, which, my God, looking back, what a boring gig but yeah, I just remember turning and running to show the person who was the playground monitor and being like, “Needs help! Needs help!” And, like, it was always kind of a privilege to be the person who, like, escorted somebody into the office.  So, probably, I don’t remember, but I probably, like, you know, elbowed my way into being the person that, like, walked to the office with her. I also remember, even at the time, thinking like, “Wow, that’s pretty gnarly.” Not, like, “Ew, oh my God,” but just, like, “Whoa, that was crazy, she, like, almost bit her tongue off,” which I think is what happened. I think she somehow fell and bit her tongue really hard, which sucks, but I do not think that she, like, lost–and I mean at the time we were being like, “Oh my God, she, like, bit her tongue off!” I remember that’s what we were repeating. But I think she was totally fine. I think she just bit it pretty hard.

One of the questions says when is the time that you've seen someone do something and get away with something that was wrong and they probably shouldn’t have gotten away with? And this is a little bit of rumor, a little bit of fact, a little bit you got to know somebody.  My cousin, and his cousin -- the one not related to me, opposite side, got arrested as juveniles for armed robbery and transporting drug, trafficking drugs, and a few other things as 15-and 14-year-olds. And they were both like, like I said, arrested at the same time, caught at the same time, committed all the same crimes but because my cousin's cousin was one year younger my cousin got labeled the ringleader, charged as adult given 5 to 25 years and the 14-year-old was given 6 months in juvie. And let me tell you that 14 year old, while this whole thing was happening, the armed robbery, the transporting the drugs, the everything, they were going across state and back, was wanting to shoot people at rest areas, but my cousin was not letting him and telling him “What the –" you know, “Heck are you thinking that you cannot do that, we're just using these guns basically for show to get what we need to get and do what we need to do. We're not robbing people at the rest areas. We're just going across state, we just needed a car that's why we did the armed robbery.” Anyway. So that kid gets six months in juvie. And then a couple years later, just a couple blocks from where he lives, they're building an apartment complex. And it burns to the ground, right? And all these rumors start swirling, and people saw a certain person running from it, and people saying it was him. It was the one who was 14 who was arrested with my cousin. And the reason that we all believe this probably is true is because there was also an insanely tragic incident. When that person, the one who we believe burnt down the apartment complex they were building. When that person was younger, we also believe they may have set their house on fire. And again, that's more of a could’ve, would’ve, nobody really knows the truth of it but we kinda do know the truth of it. Nobody wants to say…

Another student, not one of my students, but another student just really wanted -- His mom makes great Mexican food, and he just really wanted to bring some in. So he brought -- he said, "I'm gonna bring in, I'm gonna bring in tamales." And like, "Okay." And then, you know, I don't hear anything and then one day he just brings tamales. So -- and he passed them out during lunch. But of course, we all have our lunches. You know, I mean, we didn't plan for this because most people didn't know it was coming. We didn't certainly didn't know what day it was.  So, he gave me a package of, um, tamales, and another para that was sitting with me in the lunchroom. We were watching kids. And then he took the rest of them to my teacher that I work with. I said -- and you know, they distributed them around, and when I came back to the room, I said, “I've got my tamales. I'm gonna put them in the fridge and I'm gonna have them for lunch tomorrow.” And she said, "Oh, will you take this bag of leftover ones and put it in the fridge as well?” “Sure.” “But the -- but don't put the bag in there because he wants the bag back." I mean yeah, I can do that, so I made a special place to put my tamale and the tamales that she was, um, taking.  And went on throughout the day, and then I went home. And I came back to work the next day expecting, expecting my lunch would be in the fridge and then opened it up to put them in my lunch bag, and then -- and they weren't there. I'm like, "Where are the tamales? I laid my tamales right here!" And she goes, "Oh my gosh, I just took them all home," and [laughs] -- and I'm like, "Why? Why would you do that?" And I, um, I became more upset than I normally would become. But my, it wasn't about the tamales for me. It was the fact that I didn't have any lunch. It was like, that was all I was eating, was this thing I had set aside from the day before. And she goes, "I'll go home at lunch." And I already knew that she wasn't gonna be able to…

Have you ever met someone online and it turned into a real friendship? Yes. Well, yeah, I think so. So -- I guess real friendship makes it sound like you hang out in real life a lot, and I can't say that's true for the one that I was thinking. I do a lot of work with like -- one of my hobbies is digging through basketball archives, and I have a YouTube channel devoted to that, that has a small cult following. I hit my 100,000th subscriber earlier this year and that was like, something to me that meant a lot because I, I don't, I did it my way is what it felt like, I never got into the game where I'm spamming my channel everywhere or where I'm -- you know, I don't really advertise myself. I don't want to, so if someone's gonna subscribe to my channel, it's gonna be ‘cause they just stumble upon it and decide that they like it. And so that felt good to reach that milestone. But anyway, in the midst of that, I've been able to make some connections with people who were similarly interested in, like, archival work, or just have a broad interest in, in basketball, especially like the older eras of basketball. And I've actually made a, a pretty good -- we haven't met each other in real life yet -- but I have made a pretty good friend from Australia, who has his own like classic basketball podcast and I actually -- it's, it's a friendship that I value. We don't speak every single day or anything, but it’s certainly to a point where we have spoken in person -- over the Internet, that is. And he even had me on as a guest on his podcast and it's been really fun to sort of like, flesh out a little bit of a community online through a common hobby. Isn't that kind of like a case of the internet doing good internet stuff? Like, bringing people together who otherwise wouldn't be brought together? Of course, if, if my friendships were only with people online like that, I would need more. So I still have of course, like -- I have a real life if you want to differentiate between the two. But it's been neat to get to know these folks within this community. So yeah,…

Well, the worst injury I’ve probably received on the school yard is getting my toes broken. And I’m sorry if this makes whoever’s listening to this sad to hear, but when I was young, I was teased relentlessly and had not a single friend until I moved away in fifth grade to a different school. I was that kid. I was fat. I was poor. I was dirty. I was five feet tall in kindergarten and stuck out like a sore thumb. So I was just constantly ridiculed and picked on, and literally hurt by other children. Well, one day we were all standing in the bus lines, and a kid -- I believe he was like a grade above me -- I was only in like, first or second grade. He had a bat for, you know, whatever. Practice, playing on -- playing baseball on, you know, recess or whatever he wanted to do, you know? And as we were waiting to get in the lines to get on the buses to go home, he took that bat and he kept just popping it on my toes. I was wearing sandals -- I was wearing little white sandals, and he just kept hitting my toes with it, and it was hurting, but I wouldn’t say anything ‘cause I was a very weird kid. I probably discovered I’m probably autistic but was just never diagnosed or anything. So I didn’t say anything. I just stood there and eventually there were, like, tears rolling down my face, but I still wasn’t saying anything or telling anybody ‘cause I was a very awkward, shy, quiet kid that didn’t talk to really anybody for years. But when I got home -- by the time I got home, my toes were like, already black and blue and swollen. And my mom had to, like, tape them together, ‘cause we were pretty sure they were broken to make sure they just, you know -- for a couple weeks, make sure they healed up. And that’s probably the worst injury I think I’ve gotten on a schoolyard ‘cause I wasn’t the kid that was always playing sports or running or, you know, being real wild on the playgrounds. Because in those years we didn’t even have playgrounds, it was basically elementary school. Like I said, I didn’t have friends. I didn’t play on the playground. I usually just…

I was tortured by someone using a video game. So, when I was a child, we lived in the country and it was very common that people would drop cats at our house or our neighbor’s house. And if it wasn’t people dropping cats, then our neighbors had unneutered cats that were often having kittens. If they did eventually make their way to our house, we would neuter them, but you know -- all that to say there were always cats and there were always kittens, some of which were feral, semi-feral. And we had one such kitten one year, and I had formally adopted it, which we didn’t always do, ‘cause we couldn’t obviously own 25 cats. But this was one that it was very sweet, and I had adopted it, and we were in the process of sort of house breaking it. But it still had accidents. And one of the places that it had accidents was under the shelf in our den, and that also happened to be where my brothers stored their video games. This was their N64, so it’s like a cartridge and it was very possible to ruin the cartridge and then you were just out of the game. So I didn’t know the cat was having accidents until they discovered that one of their games wasn’t working. They were rightfully really upset, but maybe less rightfully blaming me for it, and I was probably eight at the time. Seven or eight. And one of the video games that still worked was Super Mario. And there is a portion of the game where Baby Yoshi hatches, and I always loved -- so, you know, I often would watch my brothers playing and I loved when Baby Yoshi hatched. And in that game -- I think it was Super Mario -- you could ride on baby Yoshi or Yoshi. And that was how you kinda got around faster. And after my cat ruined a different game, they were really, really mad at me and so they sat me in a chair. One sat me down and held me, and then the other one kept like, saving right before that part of the game where Baby Yoshi hatched, and then Baby Yoshi would hatch and they would immediately run Baby Yoshi off a cliff and kill Baby Yoshi.  And it was really sad and traumatic and it made…

My daughter and my son and my daughter’s friend from childhood, and my son-in-law, all played Pokémon and -- oh, shoot, the one that you -- I can’t think of the name of the game. But they all played a couple of games during the pandemic when you couldn’t go anyplace, and they all got on there again and played like they had when they were kids. They actually had a pretty good time and we were all laughing at them because they ended up finding other kids that had lived on our street when they were in, like, junior high and high school and playing games. And they all ended up playing together on some different things like that, and they had a really good time considering the pandemic. But it was funny. They even found some of the kids that they had been babysitting for who are now adults and all the rest of it.