rob's memory lane

in the vein of bevin's recaptured 90's music memory extravaganza and issues that suzanne and i have been discussing lately, i've found myself rediscovering parts of my youth and teenage years in shameful places.
first i'd like to discuss some dvd purchases. i recently bought the princess bride and hook from duane reade. both of these are excellent films. the princess bride blew me away. i hadn't seen it in so long, and when i was younger i don't think i could really appreciate how great of an actor andre the giant was.
"it's not my fault i'm the biggest and the strongest, i don't even work out."
as a kid the movie made me want to learn how to fence, but the farthest i ever got was hitting my brother over the head with the leftover cardboard tube from wrapping paper. yet another foregone dream, tossed aside for the sake of practicality.
which leads me into my next dvd purchase, hook. it's actually a pretty clever way of revisiting the tired old theme of peter pan, at least it was back in 1991. when is it exactly that we forget how to have fun? when is it that reality becomes so crushing that it completely eliminates our will to laugh and run and scream and fight? call me an ass-puppet if you like (i'm anticipating androo here), but i want to remember what the hell my happy thought was. i remember when i couldn't sleep at night when i was a kid because i was afraid of the dark i would close my eyes and try to think of a safe happy place. i remember a giant theme park, but even then i don't think i imagined any more detail than a big roller coaster and a ferris wheel. i look back on my childhood fantasies and find disappointment, not just for the past, but also for the future because i fear that imagination isn't a muscle you can develop after age 12. i guess the point of hook was specifically that it's not something that just disappears as time passes. it can and should be something i push further and further, as often as possible. at the very least, i remembered a kind of feeling of innocence that i want to try to hold onto.
and then we watched howard the duck. i was really reluctant to watch this movie (thank again to alluc.org) particularly because i remember liking it so much when i was a kid. i don't trust my judgment from back then, and as it turned out, i was right not to. that movie was freaking terrible, excepting of course the gratuitous nude duck scenes (scenes...plural). you actually get to see a nude, female duck in "playduck" magazine, as well as a nude, female duck in a bath tub in the beginning of this movie. funny, but a little bit odd considering this movie was probably marketed to kids. then of course there's the spectacular acting from lea thompson. i feel like she could've given more if she wasn't crouched over for 90% of the movie because her co-star is a midget in a duck suit who probably wasn't even saying the lines that were dubbed in later. there's some implied sexual tension between lea's character, "beverly" and howard, who she continues to call "ducky" throughout the movie, which i thought was really demeaning, but maybe howard is into that stuff.
anyway...can you imagine fucking an oversized duck? well, I can, thanks to those early duck-breast scenes, and let me just tell you, it would probably be pretty weird. i'm not gonna say i wouldn't do it, i'm just saying it would probably be pretty weird.
this post is getting pretty long and weird. i also wanted to talk about this old journal i picked up that forced me to remember a very depressing part of my early college years, and to scoff at the kind of friendship that seemed so strong and yet almost completely desintigrated when the right catalyst was introduced, but i don't think i'm going to really get into that.
where am i? how did I get here?