Weird childhood associations.

It’s strange how long the completely weird and utterly illogical associations we make as kids stay with us.

When I was little one of my friends had a really awesome computer. Like, way awesomer than any computer you’ve ever had. The best game was SimCity. Like, the oldschool original SimCity. We played SimCity for hours. We knew all the little tricks. For example, if you built a power line over a railroad, neither the railroad nor the power line would ever need maintenance. Who knows how many thousands of dollars we saved by never building roads, connecting everything with train tracks and then having unnecessary power lines everywhere?

Once I was spending the night over at my friend’s place, and his mom had to run an errand. She packed us up in the car and we drove to the house of friend of hers, I don’t remember why, but get this: he had SimCity 2000. Two thousand! Oh man. We weren’t there very long, maybe an hour or so, but we spent the entire time watching in awe as he showed us his super metropolis and all the cool, amazing features our pissant crappy regular SimCity didn’t have.

At one point in the evening his phone rang, and he didn’t answer it. I asked if he was going to pick up the phone and he answered, “I screen all my phone calls.” I didn’t know what that meant, and I didn’t want to appear stupid so I didn’t ask. I probably figured it out on my own years later, but I am fairly confident that was the first time I’d heard the phrase used.

Fast forward to maybe a couple months ago, where my girlfriend bought up a bunch of songs from No Doubt’s greatest hits on Rock Band. One of the songs she selected was Spiderwebs, a song I had heard countless times before, but never knew the lyrics to. Part of that, I guess, was just not ever being a big fan of No Doubt. Another part is that the song’s lyrics are about 97% incomprehensible.

Of course I get around to doing the song on vocals one night, and as it turns out about half the song is comprised of the lines “It’s all your fault/I screen my phone calls”.

And now suddenly I can’t play that song on any instrument, or even scroll by it on my track list, without getting the very vivid recollection of placing power lines over train tracks in an effort to avoid paying maintenance costs on either.