After Erin angrily kicked me out of her house, I ended up living with Granny Bernadette yet again. This time I assumed I would be there permanently, or at least until she kicked the bucket. I was an abject failure, totally dependent on my Grandmother for survival. Technically that wasn’t true, because that summer my assistance was awarded, and I started paying her a little every month for rent, utilities, and groceries. But that’s what I felt like.
My life was incredibly boring at Granny’s. Like I said, for a long time I didn’t have a Video Game System, and my Aunt’s PC was horribly underpowered. So I spent most of my time watching television. I often stayed awake for the whole Adult Swim block every night on Cartoon Network, watching from 11 PM or so until about 2 AM, when the shows started to repeat. I remember terrible shows like Case Closed (originally known as Detective Conan in Japan), but also there were highlights like the entirety of Paranoia Agent by Satoshi Kon, which I watched with relish.
There were shows I watched with Bernadette and Marilynn, too. Every weeknight we would turn on Spike TV and watch mXc or Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. It was an “obstacle course” show like Wipeout, originally broadcast in Japan under the name Takeshi’s Castle, and rewritten and dubbed badly with content that had nothing to do with the original show. Somehow my description of it doesn’t really do it justice, I think you’d have to watch an episode to understand what it’s all about. It was fairly amusing, though not usually laugh-out-loud funny. Granny seemed to love it, though.
Another show we watched all the time was the original Japanese Iron Chef. It was such a weird show, with Luxury Ingredients that were often “Featured” like foie gras, shark fin, and truffles. This being a Japanese show, the rice cooker was usually put to heavy use! The dishes were always so unique and unusual looking when the chefs got done. I remember one time a chef made some kind of disgusting green “vegetable ice cream” that the Judges all hated. Speaking of the Judges, when they were tasting the food, they would frequently use questionable metaphors such as “This dish really reminds me of the taste of Spring,” or “I can sense the essence of sunshine in this dish.” By far my favorite Chef on the show was Chen Kenichi, the Chinese Szechuan Cuisine Chef. He always seemed so flustered and out-of-sorts as he rushed about the kitchen to get his dish done in the hour time frame. My Aunt’s favorite was Hiroyuki Sakai, the dignified and seemingly cultured French Cuisine Chef. Bernadette’s was of course the wizened Japanese Cuisine Master Rokusaburo Michiba, who unsurprisingly won many of the contests as the Most Holy Representative of Japan.
Eventually I managed to get another original Xbox, a copy of Halo 2, and somehow I talked Granny into getting broadband if I paid for it with my own income. So I started playing Halo 2 multiplayer all the time with my friends: my brother, Bill, Delbert, Al, and Darron. That’s when I first began to realize that I really wasn’t very good at Video Games after all, as I got dominated match after match. Some of my friends, particularly Bro, got to be pretty competitive at Halo 2, but I never did. I guess I just didn’t put enough time into it, a curse I’ve experienced for most of my life, although I think my reflexes are innately a bit poor anyway.
One day I got an unexpected windfall of money — can’t remember the reason. So, I promptly consulted my techie friend THE GENERAL for advice, and built a new computer. On that computer, in many late night sessions, I played through Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. I was a little disappointed, though, because in a couple of years some games started to come out that my rig couldn’t quite handle. I think I had bought my PC a little “behind the curve,” so to speak.
Granny was an incredibly light sleeper during this time, and when I first moved in, she was constantly yelling at me for waking her up in the middle of the night. So I invested in a couple of pairs of surround sound headphones: one for my Xbox, another for my PC, and got to be so quiet walking around and opening and closing doors that I was almost like a ninja. Eventually I never woke her up anymore. I was a little proud of that. I need to get back to that, because I tend to wake Brother up these days sometimes.
Suddently Granny started to have heart trouble and spent some time in the hospital. She had some stents put in, and was very weak from the procedure. So, she said she couldn’t bear the additional responsibility of my living with her, and asked me to leave and move in with my brother in Lexington. I think she was partially just tired of me, as most people are eventually. I must admit I was a little hurt. Life was so easy living with Grandmother. But, I did as she asked, and came to Lexington in 200X to live in Apartment 69 at The Grove apartment complex.