Imagine

We had this big gully, this big ditch in our yard when I was growing up. It was called simply, The Drainage. I assume this was because it would be a reservoir for drainage if there was ever some sort of biblical flooding in our neighborhood. It was just a rock filled hole in the ground, roughly the size of a football field, with plants and weeds at one end that could grow to the size of a tall boy.

One of my favorite things in the world to do when I was a kid was to spend hours pacing around down in the drainage, lost in my head within some fantasy. I would literally spend hours down there just making wide circles.

One fantasy that I clearly remember was that a friend had a full sized Sarlacc pit from Return of the Jedi in his back yard:

The pit was filled with a trampoline and tons of pillows so that you could jump from a great height, straight in to the Sarlacc's gaping maw, and land safely. This, I thought, would be about the coolest fucking thing ever.

I would also quite often make up action or horror movies and would act out scenes from them. I don't really remember much of any of them. I remember one about the Devil moving through the forest behind a house, but only because I have the memory of seeing the woods behind our house grow suddenly dark as the sun set.

Many of these movies must have involved sword fighting of some sort, because as my brother has mentioned when he has mocked me for this activity, I would be down there swinging a stick around like I was having a battle of some sort.

And I have gotten a fair amount of mocking for spending huge amounts of time fantasizing about stupid stuff. I remember getting embarrassed as my brother sarcastically reinterpreted the movements he had spied me making; I remember wanting to get away when hearing my parents point out the amount of time I spent "walking around in circles down there".

I'm not sure if embarrassment of my imagination was thrust upon me, or it was something that I personally felt weird about. But I do find it interesting that even in the face of questions and derision, I still went down there and indulged this force that bubbled over.

Still to this day, I can catch myself talking to myself while I'm walking down the street, deep in thought. I still feel impelled to walk around in wide circles if there is something I'm trying to sort out in my mind. And yeah, people give me that wary look that tells tales of trying to decide if I'm raving lunatic or not, but shit man, I wouldn't be happy unless I was throwing people off balance.