[insert placeholder name here] teaser

Crudely carved deeply into the surface of my high school-era wood desk (which currently sits in my basement wedged between the far wall and 2 utility closet doors and serves on the rare occasion as a beer-setting table during impromptu pool matches) is a 3" x 10" name: Johnny Shmoe.

I'm no forestry expert and so have no idea what kind of wood this antiquated piece of furniture is made of, but it's far more sturdy and long-lasting than the cardboard shit they make furniture out of these days. Or at least the furniture I could even dream of affording, and if I actually had an urge to own good stuff rather than the mostly 70's-era, side of the street on garbage day crap I've always had free access to.

The deep burnt rust with a swirl of truer browns-tinted desk pretty much looks the same as it did so many years ago. I was an anguished teen who felt a need to destroy things as creatively as I was then capable. I mostly used a screwdriver and a bit of one of those foldy boyscout knives, if memory serves.

On the remaining lacquered surface, peppered randomly around the iconic placeholder name are scratched the monikers of an even dozen of my then fave metal bands; Judas Priest, Metallica, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Aerosmith, Motley Crue, Triumph, Dio, Dokken and Krokus (what? the FUCK? was I thinking?? Eat the Rich I guess...).

Ok, ok, I know what your muttering to yourself under your breath right now, thinking past the Krokus mention: fuck that, let's get to the real crux of this mystery name, shall we mutherfucker?

Short answer: I have 'nary a clue.

This Harvey-figure name staring up at me from my past with no past itself vaguely disturbs me. Was this some lost to the sands of time demi-god of my patchy imaginary past? Perhaps my childhood chum Tim could (or more likely not) shed some light on the origins of the hero of this name game, I don't know (and we've lost touch for the most part, as I have with all my pre-freedom friends coincidentally, as is apt to happen anyways when you live in different cities, different states, different cultural realities, regardless of one or the other side's gender choices).

I remember this specific name, and not one of the more common ones such as Joe Blow, as my favorite D&D character - the one I fought the hardest to keep alive over the length of my multi-year fling with escapist fantasy games, the one with the deepest personality, in the imaginary dungeons of my mind. I remember him as the title character of several shorter-than-punk-length instrumental ballad-hums I often used to settle myself in quiet, alone moments. As a side bit of oral history, I still find myself humming these machine-gun, action-movie-dramatic sonic patterns. It is only just this moment that I ever made a connection between these child-like musical outbursts and my actual childhood.

Who is this still unformed figure from my past? What did he mean to me back then when I was spending hours obsessively defacing the aged wood into symbols of my uncomfortable reality?

Getting fucking old myself moment # 23: I have no fucking idea.

The portrait of that shy, reclusive boy is mostly faded to near obscurity to me. What I can't figure out, and that's certainly to my mind more important than the original quest for a hero origin story, is whether this current memory-fade-affliction is due more to the simple and natural passage of time, drug and alcohol over-use, or even some instinctual mental defense mechanism to protect the integrity of the still-forming and finally-free me?