Neo-Geo Dreamstate

lafayette contradiction: & so it was I was wasted in an airport, listening to the locals debate Mitch Richmond's Hall-of-Fame credentials.

d.d. tinzeros: exactamentally. After the Lutz we traipsed downhill to Plaid & then fuckin' Fridge for a party.

fat: so its not just my Blood Alcohol Content boggling my mind...

d.d.: No, its not. Quite a good constituency of the old crew there. We're glommed together, tho. Everyone else a min 5 years younger & they smoking cigz indoors, which kind of pushed us away from population centers. That kitchen wall still has all those phone #s from back in the day. Names of people & names of houses long past.

fat: Living history.

d.d.: Us or the wall?

Fat: uh...

d.d.: Also, out on the porch, for a few secs thought a couch was there back in '99 or sumthin. Then revealed it was not. Still, was wierd possibility, that, yeah, same fookin' couch 'been on same fookin' porch for 8 years!!

fat: scary. theoretically possible, I blush to confess.

d.d.: yeah, so, hours widdle away. I think we talk about Africa.

fat: that doesn't seem too strange an evening...

d.d.: yah fuk that. check this out. I go home to the missus, I fall asleep, I have this dream? I'm walking into a 2nd-hand thrift store very realistically located on or near 52nd & Woodstock, next door to the auto-part dealer & the Arby's is across the street @ the other corner.

fat: Jesus Arbies! BTW, fuckin' March madness, its like I can't automatically expect to get paid to watch Naruto. So you're in the store?

d.d.: I'm in the store. The floor space is the size of large-ish living room. Tiny. There're shelf thingies lining walls built out of plywood painted a real particular color of brown. Each shelf section is, like: Books. VHS tapes. Coffee mugs. And there's a row of various chairs for sale in the very middle of the store's floor. To get from 1 side of the store to the other, you've walk ALL the way 'round. 'cause its tough to navigate thru' the chairs. I'm browsing & there's an "Old Video Games" section, w/ a mish-mash of games & consoles piled on these shelves.

fat: sweet!

d.d.: Yeah. This where it gets wierd, or at least too realistic. I pull out & start looking at a...

fat: Dreamcast? Nintendo 64? Famicon?

d.d.: No. A fukin' Neo-Geo console.

fat: Neo-Geo? They made a console?

d.d.: SNK really did. Thing is, I never seen a picture even of a Neo-Geo. In the dream t'was black & about the size of 1st Playstation, but its a bit more roundish & takes cartridges - not cds.

fat: Did you buy it? In the dream?

d.d.: Well, I'm looking & feeling it all over w/ my grubby paws & there's these 3 kids of slightly different ages sitting on aforementioned chairs behind me, & 1 is a total smartass & is asking me "wtf you gonna buy that for?" & I come back @ him w/ "cuz its cool, unlike you. Ever." And then the garbage truck wakes me up.

fat: fuckin' kids today.

d.d.: Yeah. No respect for the past.

fat: Are you going to buy a Neo-Geo now?

d.d.: Well, a Neo-Geo in my dreams was really unexpected, so I did look one up on Amazon out of curiosity. It was black, & does appear to be about the size I dreamt it as, but it was CD, not cartridge, I got that part wrong. What I got RIGHT was you can buy one used on Amazon for $1,500, so I was correct to have plucked it up out of the shelf in the dream, & that kid was a fucking dumbshit, 'cause he was sitting across from a plastic box worth $1,500.

fat: So... its a dream where you're dreamstate self "has a feeling" that something is valuable...

d.d.: ...and then it turns out to be massively valuable. yes. a sort of delayed-response self-affirmation dream.

Soul Scything.

With the 1-2 punch arrival of a Dreamcast & a Genesis into my life (& heart), 1 can imagine I spent some considerable free time in front the of teevee. However, none of my Genesis games have save options, & for the Dreamcast all I have is Space Channel 5, which I'm slightly paranoid of playing too quickly. The sum result is I've returned to Pokemon FireRed on my darling pink pearl GBA SP.

My momentum in FireRed became stalled several months ago, when I started slogging through the 'dungeon-crawl' of the Silph Co. Tower in Saffron City¹, which had a nasty infestation of Team Rocket. After finally slogging through all 11 floors of the tower, I had one of those 'levee breaks' moments you experience in video games - the long stall followed by several successive moments of progress, capped off by reaching the remote settlement on Cinnabar Island.

To the eternal credit of the Pokemon franchise, one its greatest strengths, & greatest evils, is that goddamn concept of gotta catch 'em all. Instead of continuing my onward march to Pokemon dominion, I got sidetracked getting several of my higher-level Pokemon to evolve &, even worse, somehow ended back at the Safari Zone...

The Safari Zone is located on the northern outskirts of Fuschia City. You pay like 300 yua & get 30 specialized 'Safari Balls' & can wander the safari grounds for a 600 'steps.' When you encounter Pokemon you can catch them, but not in the usual beat-them-to-an-inch-of-thier-life, then-throw-a-capture-ball method, but by throwing either bait or a rock or a combination thereof at them, then throwing 1 of the aforementioned safari balls. This is fine & all but there's a collection of rarer Pokemon in the Zone, including... Scyther.²


For the life of me, I cannot fucking figure out what the combination of bait & rocks is to catch this motherfucker!! Even more maddening, 1 Scyther's behavior isn't even consistent w/ the behavior of another's!!!

Are you fucking kidding me!? Scyther A eats yr bait, but Scyther B flees the scene?!! WTF?!

Jesus, now I'm going to have to go massacre some Psyducks to calm myself down.³

-d.d.

¹ LOVE those colour-themed town names in the Pokemon series.
² Also Tauros, which also, I cannot catch. But haven't really made the effort I have to catch Scyther, the effin' tease.
³ "How many Psyducks must die?" I pondered as I explored the caves of the Seafoam islands. Poor little fuckers just kept coming at me, like migrained sheep to the slaughter.