Through the Wormhole

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, oh here we go again. He’s going to start by saying something like “The Oxford Dictionary” describes a wormhole as...” and then lead onto Stephen Hawking’s view on wormholes and then tie it all together with a ropey analogy. And perhaps, you may be right. That’s why I’m purposely getting down to brass-tacks immediately with minimal fanny-ing around. Well, perhaps just a little.

In the span of the week or so, I’ve made trips back to 2001 1990 for different reasons and have returned more and more jet-lagged and nostalgic every time. A lack of desire to listen to any of the music I had on my iPod, dragged me over to an old stack of CDs that I briefly flipped through. A green CD-R caught my eye. On it was a marker pen scrawl. The scrawl read “Bouncing Souls — How I spent my Summer Vacation”. Twas my summer of 2001 when I heard that record the first time.

School was out and the summer holidays had just begun. Simple Man and I decided we’d spend a majority of the summer at the skate park trying to practice and get better, but for that we’d need tunes. The subsequent trip to the local record store helped us unearth this little gem, which after that day, was on heavy rotation in our earphones all day and all night. That summer culminated with a number of live shows (the Big Cheese festival, Less than Jake live and some others I can’t recall) and on September 14 (three days into London’s amber alert because two planes had flown into two towers across the pond), we finally saw Bouncing Souls... live!

Certain parts of the album still send shivers up and down my spine. I was pleasantly surprised.

Now, a little while after this nostalgia trip, came another in the form of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Now I’d enjoyed the Spidey flicks, the Batman ones and hell, even the X-Men films and spin-off, but I’d never really read the comics as a little boy. Shit, I didn’t even know the X-Men existed. But G.I. Joe, I definitely knew about G.I. Joe as a kid in 1990, playing with the first two action figures I owned — Firefly and Major Bludd. (Thinking about it, I did own mostly Cobra action figures).

Using Blu-Tack, bits of twine (excellent for making aerial ropeslides and nets), Lego blocks and my tiny posse of Cobras, I’d create some elaborate little diorama-style domino-effect setups, where one small action would trigger off a series of things sliding, crashing, falling, swooping and falling into a net. I never did manage to work out how to get one action figure to swoop down past another and lift it up. As usual, I digress.

Going to watch the film, I knew better than to expect anything remarkable (Just like with Doom). I knew there’d be no brain-busting storyline, but I also knew that it would be a CGI-driven frag-fest and I was salivating at the prospect of the Snake Eyes-Storm Shadow showdown. The film as expected, was nothing remarkable. The tingle in my spine came a little later, when I realised that I’d actually seen a live action film that contained the same characters I’d sent on various dangerous missions — each more dangerous than the next. The same characters that under my command had at some point or the other been grievously injured or were staring into the chasm of death. And I’d just seen them on the big screen.

My stories and action sequences were better.