Dinosaurs and Other Daydreams
You don’t know him, but I don’t remember ever not knowing my childhood friend Aaron. I was sitting at a bar and having a beer recently when the kind of mediocre but still fun cover band that you expect at your local started playing. I was enjoying my beer and the present company when suddenly my ears shook me from my conversation. The band was playing an old ‘Our Lady Peace’ song that hurled me down into a forgotten rabbit hole of memories. It was like an episode of a classic sci-fi show where the main character wakes up in a different but eerily familiar world. As the band rolled through cover after cover of the late 90s-to-early-2000s whiney voiced Canadian rock band’s songs, I kept sliding deeper and deeper into the old family videos that our minds hide way back in the attic of our long-term memories.
Our Lady Peace was the first ever ‘adult’ music cassette tape that I owned. It was a sharp departure from Fred Penner’s ‘The Cat Came Back’ and The Lion King soundtrack that I had been rocking out to in my Walkman. The credit for my sudden graduation from Disney sing-alongs to alternative rock goes completely to my childhood friend, Aaron Nash. And as I sat at that bar, listening to the falsetto chorus of “Superman’s Dead” and loosening up with a few more drinks, I poured over my old memories with him and came to realize just how important of a role he played in helping me find myself.
Aaron’s parents and my parents both went to the same hip, young, new-agey evangelical church, which meant that we both went to that church too. We probably met in the church nursery. Once we aged out of the pre-school portion of Sunday mornings, it meant that we had to spend the first portion of the church service in the main auditorium with all of the adults, dressed in their silly Sunday’ best. They’d sing and pray, stand up and then sit down a bunch. They’d stage little dramas and make announcements. Then, before the Pastor got up and got down to business, they’d send us kids upstairs to the arts, crafts, puppets and games of Sunday school that actually made any sense to us. Now, during the painfully boring first act of the service, still being too young to be expected to take full part in the pageantry, us kids were allowed to quietly goof off while sitting with each other, doodle and get away with anything short of being a genuine distraction. And being anything short of a genuine distraction was nearly impossible for Aaron and me. You see, one morning we realized that before the service we could sneak into the kitchen, where the nice older ladies were preparing coffee and snacks, and steal and then suck on sugar cubes a dozen at a time. Good luck telling a 6-year-old in a stupid turtleneck or “nice Sunday sweater” to sit still after they’d done the pre-school version of ripping off a few lines of cocaine. We’d run around and in between all the adults as fast as we could until our parents snatched us mid-sprint and dragged us off to our seats. Accepting that we couldn’t be counted on to take part in or sit still like the good, regimented Christian kids that our parents were before us, we were given scrap paper and pens out of our something between annoyed and ashamed mother’s purses. A last ditch attempt to curb our sugar-high induced giggling, wiggling and other symptoms of junkie behavior. Sugar and youth are a hell of a drug.
In any case, I still clearly remember doodling away on my page one day, drawing what I was sure to be my masterpiece, mirroring exactly the divinely inspired image I had in my head. Then I looked over at Aaron’s page beside me. Never again would I doodle with the same freedom and enjoyment. Reality smacked me straight in the face for the first of what has since been thousands of times. It wasn’t that Aaron could doodle better than me. It’s that my doodle could passably be described as ‘OK’ — for a six-year old — while his sketch of a T-Rex tearing a group of cartoonishly muscled action heroes with flame throwers into bloody pieces already looked like it belonged amongst the better drawn comics in the newspaper. Where a moment before I thought that I was unveiling something great, I suddenly realized that I was woefully inferior. Where seconds before I had taken great pride in thinking I was a talented artist (as several completely worn out packages of Crayola washable markers could attest to), I suddenly now knew that there was no value in me drawing anymore. Aaron was an artist; I was just a bored kid with crayons. I would never close that gap.
That was the beginning of realizing that there were things that (so many) other people would be better at than me. And, for that matter, that I was legitimately bad at some things. Look, I’m not saying that he was better at drawing than me like he would get an A and I would get a C+. It’s like I was a cave man grunting and trying to paint basic symbols on the wall with my poop while he was Michelangelo painting the Sistine freaking Chapel. But despite the sudden discovery of my own inferiority, I was not at all upset by it. I was ecstatic! I could barely contain myself. You can make this!? We (kids) can make this!? What is the T-Rex’s name? What’s happening here? Who are those other guys? How did the fight start? Is the T-Rex a good guy, or a bad guy? Does he have a brother? Do him and his brother get along? Wait — is it a girl? Do boy and girl T-Rex’s look the same? This is so cool! Do you have more drawings?
See, I had all these stories and daydreams in my head, but with the shitty mush-people stick “drawings” that I made, they never seemed real. But Aaron’s drawings jumped off the page. They could be real! You could believe that this T-Rex totally just ripped that guys arm off and then swung his head in the next panel to use the first guy’s detached arm to slap the other guy in the face with it. It was awesome! These pictures leapt off the page and I wanted to think about them, tell their stories and see them come to life.
From that time on, Aaron and I were like best friends. It was always an event whenever we could spend time together. My family moved an hour away when I was around ten years old. A couple of years after that his family moved another half hour further from that, and deep into the middle-of-nowhere countryside. We wouldn’t get to see each other often, but for birthday parties and one or two other times a year our parents would figure out how to arrange rides and a few days at a time where we would take turns staying at each other’s houses. It felt like every summer when I went to visit Aaron or he came to visit at my house he would come bearing knowledge of some new and cool part of life that I didn’t know about yet. I remember him showing me the radio. I mean, I obviously already knew that the radio was a thing. But it was something that my parents or my grandma or my babysitter or my older cousin controlled or knew about. He was the first one to teach me that music could be for me, too. That there were songs that spoke to us and sounded badass or fun and just made life seem more important or meaningful when you listened to them. Through the radio Aaron showed me the secrets of Prometheus’ fire. He knew the names and dials of the cool radio stations. He knew that they did the top four at four on mix 99.9 and that we needed to listen to those songs because even if some of them sucked there was this one song I had to hear because it would change my fucking life. And it did. And after that I was empowered to scan the airwaves and discover stations and music videos on my own and find the songs that spoke to me, felt like they spoke for me, stirred something inside me or just sounded really freaking cool. Our Lady Peace’s ‘Superman’s Dead’ was the very first such song. I didn’t know what the hell it was about then, and I still don’t really have any clue what “Doesn’t anybody ever know that the world’s a subway?” means now. I probably just liked that it had Superman in the lyrics and a cool guitar riff. But it didn’t matter back then. Adult culture was now something that I knew how to find and was free to navigate and explore on my own. And man, was that an adventure before we had Apple Music algorithms to do it for us.
When we were younger, Aaron’s family lived in a house with a backyard that opened up into a large forest. Along the creek that separated his yard from the forest there was a little wooden tree-fort. Branching out from that fort and exploring into the woods, we would imagine entire worlds of cowboys, aliens, talking animals and mutants with special powers. We would run around in character, taking turns to dictate what would happen next in the living story we’d spend all afternoon unfolding.
On rainier days we’d try to bring our characters to life on paper. I would come up with a character, his back-story and what his super powers or alien abilities might be, and then Aaron would draw him. Then Aaron would come up with a character of his own, and he would draw him too while I wrote up nonsense escapades of monsters for us to fight and space princesses to join forces with in order to vanquish our evil arch nemesis, who of course had an eye patch. Our characters almost always had powers that came out of their hands and super cool long, flowing hair. We both collected X-men comics and I remember Aaron showing me how the X-men as drawn by Jim Lee and those influenced by him always had an oversized emphasis on the hands in the panels and buried the characters behind hair draped across their faces or blowing in the wind. Covering their faces made them seem more mysterious and drew you into better considering their mood, while drawing attention to their hands opened up a whole new way to express emotion and an angle into what the character was really thinking or feeling through body language. Somehow Aaron picked up this insight when we were 11-years old. He was smarter than me.
He somehow also knew when we were 12 years old — without the benefit of the Internet — that a crimson red antique Gibson Les Paul guitar was pretty much the coolest thing in the world. He got a commercial cleaning job, saved up for a childhood eternity and then bought one. It was the coolest thing that I had ever seen. I remember being in such reverence of it. And then he spent every single day getting good and then better and then incredible at playing it. It was surreal to watch someone you had known your entire life touch rock and roll and make it sound just as good and look just as rad as it was supposed to while you were still a kid. It made me think that maybe I too was capable of reaching out into the sky and molding the clouds into the things that I’d dream they could be.
Time and circumstances with both of our families and our lives became so that it got harder and harder to see each other. Then it became hard to stay in touch. His family was literally and figuratively falling apart, and it was bad. What started as a new phone number turned into a new address with a new number, and then another new address but without a phone number. I remember Aaron would call me sometimes from someone else’s house just to say hi, but he couldn’t leave a call back number if I wasn’t there because he wouldn’t be there if I called back anyways. His family started moving every couple of months, and eventually those months turned into years where I hadn’t seen or heard from him. That was it. We grew up, grew into other things and never saw each other again. I left behind the daydreams that we’d had so much fun bringing to life together and lost them somehow to the clutter of thousands of different every days passing just trying to get by.
The band finished their Our Lady Peace set, the bartender announced last call, and I finished my drink and went back home to my life. I tried to look Aaron up online, see if there was some trace of him on Facebook or anything. There was nothing. He was still gone. One of Peter Pan’s lost boys, never to return from the second star to the right. But I’d remembered the childlike joy and thrill of creating worlds and characters and their stories and then having someone else bring those stories to life with their drawings. I may have lost touch with my friend, but I didn’t forget the fun that we used to have and what it taught me. Aaron doesn’t help me write any of my stories anymore, and I’m not lucky enough to have him draw them. But I never would have written any of the stories that will follow here without his influence. I’m on the path I am today because he helped show me how to find it, and I will forever be creatively in debt to him.
I’m going to keep writing silly things like this story and posting them here, hoping that over time I too can start to get good, then better, and maybe someday great at it. Hopefully I can live up to Aaron’s example. I still miss my friend dearly, and I hope that there is a future where we’ll get to draw and write together about T-Rex’s totally wrecking shit up again one day.
Picture artist: Dani Calverley, @danicalverley
