So, way back in the day (around 1994 or so. Maybe '95. I was pretty young, and little kids have absolutely no sense of time. Seriously, try putting one in a small dark closet for two hours and see how long he thinks it was. Really, try it. Especially if they're the kind that cries loudly on an airplane.) I was in kindergarten. Not just any kindergarten, either; I was in public school kindergarten, which is the best kind of kindergarten, not counting all of the better ones that you actually pay for, and the ones in other countries where they actually teach the kids useful things like how to tie their own shoes.
So I was in kindergarten, and we had about twenty minutes of free time every day. I lived for that twenty minute period. I lived... for the blocks.
See, our classroom didn't have normal, tiny, puny, wooden toy blocks that most classrooms had. We had massive, manly blocks. The kind of blocks you could use to beat another child unconscious with. We had blocks that you could make into forts! Blocks that inspired the little tykes to go into architectural design and contracting! We built towers that breached the walls of heaven. Or at least went up a little higher than we could reach, and fell down with the sound of a lawsuit.
Of course, you couldn't get the blocks every day. Half of the days that side of the classroom was reserved for the other kindergarten class, and when it was our turn, you had to draw straws for it because it was the most popular toy.
By "draw straws" I mean, of course sprint to the block bin and lay on it until the other kids got tired of trying to pry you off and wandered away. Kindergarten was a brutal period of my life. It's where I got my killer instinct.
Anyway, one day I had won the right to the blocks fair and square, if you didn't count the part where I pantsed some poor fool who started out in front of me. But pantsing was allowed, as long as the teacher wasn't looking, so I got the blocks and everybody else could just suck it.
I immediately built a massive, impenetrable fort, reinforced with steel girders and the death of several workers. It was a squat, ugly thing, but it was mine, and I knew how to fix the ugliness.
The magic of interior decorating, and then exterior decorating as well!
One of the decorations I added was a medium sized dump truck. Now, one of the other kindergarteners had something of a thing for cars, and, as I was sitting in my fort, he walked up and began moving the truck back and forth. He didn't even remove it from the premises. He just did a little "vroom vroom" thing and acted like my fort was some sort of road.
Naturally, this chafed a bit. So I punched him in the face.
The next few minutes were a tad confusing. I remember being locked in a mortal struggle with him and trying to brace myself against a coat rack, but it didn't work because the coat rack had wheels, and then time out happened.
Time out lasted for a while. And then there was the talking to the parents, and the "apology" (I wasn't sorry. He was touching my dump truck.) and the "you're usually such a good kid why'd you do this" and a bunch of other stuff I'd rather not get into.
My mother took me to the grocery store that evening, and who should I meet but the very same jerk who had become intimately acquainted with my fist earlier that very day! He was hiding behind his mum.
But then, I was hiding behind mine.
They marched us over to each other, did the mom chat thing, and forced us to hug.
We were very best friends from that moment on. No, I'm not kidding.
The moral of the story is, if you don't have any friends, go out and punch somebody in the face.
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