I realize that the majority of posts I’ve made in my relatively brief blogging career have relied on outrageous fiction as a crutch.  My next post is going to be about a dragon who can speak English and flies around fighting crime in New York City.  But for now, I’ll stick with the facts, and assure you that everything that follows here is completely true.

I spent part of my childhood in Woodstock, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta.  My parents made me join the Cub Scouts, and it was there that I met some kid named Nick Markakis.

Nick loved to talk.  All the time.  The kid would not shut up.  Most of our conversations were dominated by his love of “G-LOC: Air Battle,” a Sega Genesis game.  Was it worthy of his hype?  Hard to say, because he would never let me play the damned game.  He would sit there in front of the television, answering my requests to play with dissertations on how realistic the game was.  Since, you know, ten-year-olds are authorities on modern air warfare.

His dad worked at the Lockheed facility in nearby Marietta.  I only remember this because he uttered the sentence, “my dad works at Lockheed,” no less than 750 times.  His mom often helped out with den activities, and was a very nice person.  I was invited to his birthday party at Whitewater, a nearby water park.  We packed into their car, and for the next half-hour, Nick interrupted all my attempts at conversation with anecdotes about how his dad worked at Lockheed.  At one point, his mother turned to the back seat, looked at me, and said, “sorry.”  Nick didn’t seem to notice.  His dad worked at Lockheed.

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