The Ocarina of Time

I remember the exact moment I fell in love with fantasy.  I was in the fifth grade, probably ten-years old, and I came home from school one day to find my brother, Patrick, with two of his friends playing The Legend of Zelda on our Nintendo-64.  They'd just begun their quest and were freeing a talking tree from it's evil infestation.  I loved everything about it: the climbing up walls, the wooden shield, the killin' spiders, and that beautiful, inspired gameplay that put you just over Link's shoulder, right next to Navi the fairy.  One look and I knew... I was screwed.

Like a junkie's first hit on a crack pipe, that cherry-popping glimpse sparked a chemical chain-reaction in my brain so intense that it has yet to stop firing.  I found myself playing for six hours at a time, sometimes right through the night, scouring Jabu Jabu's fatty underside for gold skulltulas, winning my biddy Epona from Lon Lon Ranch.  In the morning, red-eyed and wasted, my body trudged to off to Meadowside Elementary while my mind lingered in Hyrule.

My daydreams were so much radder than the multiplication tables.  I'd go off on inside-my-head adventures all day everyday right from my Fisher Price desk.  I brought friends and family along in my imaginings, even though this makes me a giant loser and I'll never ever tell them about it.  My cousins had a pretty cool stretch of woods behind their house and we'd cut winding paths through the brush; three little boys in the Korkori forest, off to piss off the Deku Tree.

One time my daydreams bled into my regular dreams.  I remember being in my bed when something really fucking dark and miserable showed up.  I don't know what it was or what it looked like but I ran from it, jumping out an open window and landing in Hyrule Field.  This thing, whatever it was, chased me boogey-monster style for miles until I reached some cover in a hill of sparse trees.  They gradually grew thicker the deeper I went, everything getting slower and darker until I reached a clearing and finally stopped running.  Whatever was chasing me before had long since called it quits and I found myself marveling at the magical mist of The Lost Wood.  You know how in a dream you don't know it's a dream?  Well, that means I thought I was actually there in the place I'd been obsessing about for months.  I could've shit myself with happiness.

This dream went on for weeks, every evening picking up where it left off the morning before, allowing me to explore the woods a little more each night.  I remember searching for something though I don't know what and I always, always, always resisted the urge to wake up.  It's the only time I've ever experienced a dream like this, pausing one night and resuming the next.  Carl Jung would probably have something to say about all this 'monster' chasing into 'woods' for random 'searching' business, but Carl Jung can mind his own fucking business.  This is easily my favorite dream in all my years of dreaming and it has stuck with me ever since.

Zelda was but my first of many, many loves.  Over middle school, high school and college, I partook in a continuos stream torrid, passionate, completely inappropriate affairs with everyone from Batman to Captain Planet, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon to Dragon Ball Z, Final Fantasy VII to Final Fantasy X, searching the mailbox for my letter from Hogwarts, scouring the tall grass for Poke'mon.  I took the red pill in the Matrix, went through the wardrobe in Narnia, put it in greek mythology's back door, and very nearly got Shakespeare pregnant (Had a name picked out and everything; would've called her Midsummer).  Each new romance as liberating as the last and each so incredibly difficult to move past that I never actually did, choosing instead to keep them always in my heart.

The ones that hit hardest were always the comic book superheroes.  Marvel and DC have this way of taking everyday people and making them accessibly exceptional.  Teachers employing mind-control, teenagers becoming invisible, business men catching airplanes... literally.  Flames, fighting and flying aside, I couldn't help but identify with the amazing humdrum of it all.  Here are people dealing with jobs, school, difficult families, crappy relationships and emotions beyond their control.  All so human, all just like me, all completely ordinary in every way but one.

The more I look at it the more I realize the human being is an organism of incredible potential.  I watch athletes, ballerinas, singers, politicians, writers, performers, etc, all skillfully fulfilling their larger than life dreams.  They reach levels of excellence beyond compare and make impressions all over the world in ways that can only be described as superhuman.  This should make other big-dreamers wildly hopeful in that stupid, wide-eyed, delusional way usually reserved for children who think they can be the president of the United States and schizophrenics who think they already are.

I used to treat this project like a metamorphosis, but I have recently improved my regard.  From now on, I am no longer a person working out.  The idea of that bores me to no end.  Instead, I am an everyday, ordinary human being exercising an everyday, ordinary, totally kick-ass, superhuman control over his own life and body.  This project is magic.  This project is power.  This project is my X-men mutation and I...

I am a shape-shifter.

...That's so fucking sweet.

Day 15.  Oh shit! 1/10 of the way through!

Thanks for reading.  See you tomorrow.