How's life in a bigger prison, Tiberious aka Sparkles?

For relaxing times, make it Suntori time.

-- Bill Murry, Lost In Translation

Bear with me. Some nights, after the little girl has gone to bed and the wife has situated herself feet up on the sofa and with a bowl full (or, if you prefer, a bowlful) of plums, amidst the onslaught of creativity that is Korean dramas, I myself tend to put on some music, crack open an imported beverage of some alcoholic fortitude, and get nostalgic.

Beware: though I am far from drunk, this is going to be disjointed and jumbled.

Exibit A:

Charlie Sheen and his brother, Emilio Estevez (who has heaps more talent in my opinion, but who may have died without my knowledge, because he's been absent from films for almost 5 years --No, wait, he co-stars in a film with Snoop Dogg about the LA riots: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388193/

...

(And this is the fucking dude who starred in Repo Man, The Breakfast Club, Young Guns and its underappreciated sequel (appropriately titled Young Guns II), and, most notably, Men At Work? A sad, sad day for Hollywood

... )

I say, Charlie Sheen and his far more talented brother -- who was once Paula Abdul's husband, for you younguns out there with no appreciation of World History-- made a film in my backyard. I kid not.

Here's the jist of a phone conversation between me and my best friend, who lived four houses up the street, on a summer's eve, 1999:

Gus (not his real name): Dude, did you know that Charlie Sheen and his brother (Emilio Estevez) are making a movie up at the rock quarry?

Me: ^^

Gus: I'm serious, dude.

Me: ^^

Almost two years later, I'm with the girlfriend (now wife) in a video store near Sinchon, Seoul, when I espy a movie titled Rated X. I rent it under the impression that my latent homosexual fantasy of seeing Charlie Sheen and his brother in an incestuous tryst will soon bear fruit. Instead, what I get is a scene of the brothers Sheen/Estevez parading about with a camel, not a 10 minute walk from my back porch.

I don't have a reasonable answer for why I don't own that movie on DVD.

See, the woods behind my home in Burlington, Ontario, Canada is where I first learned the joy of nature, of forest life -- and of the pleasures of underage drinking and, to a lesser extent, drug-taking.

Part of me wishes and wonders that, just maybe, Charlie Sheen himself blew a few lines of coke and got busy with a by-the-hour gal not a few feet from where I as a young know-it-all had once consumed illicitly-procured beer and spirits. I bet he did, that sly bastard!

It's probably a local urban legend, but the story goes that one time a police officer chased a drunk teenager through those woods and the teen ran over the edge of the quarry, falling nearly 100 feet to his death. Regardless, the cops never interrupted our ad hoc drinking activities up there, no matter how popular nor how boisterous the gatherings we held there became.

I know -- much as I know that some of the spectacular shots in Martin Scorsese pictures were superseded by films prior -- that we weren't the pioneers. Teenagers before us blazed trails, scorched level land and cracked dime-size holes in discarded beer bottles so as to make efficient tools to smoke hash with. But we defined the genre, so to speak. When I was 14 and my brother and LD (not his real name, but his real initials) surveyed the woodland and built a passable two-bench and garbage can-cum-fireplace forest lounge, we saw it and knew that it was good. When it was corrupted and became obsolete a year later, we reformed and built another. In fact, the forest as it stands now still bears the stamp of our progress. For almost 10 years we had many adventures; and I believe the story continues still, though I nor my former cohorts have anything to do with the current shape of things.

[end]allegory[/end].