They should have asked "who do you want to be?"

Monsters, you say? Indecision. Insecurity, despair, frustration, and fatigue.

1. Start making a list of 5 things 2. get a cup of coffee 3. get distracted by my phone. 4. Wonder how someone could not know that mailing their friend in a box would be illegal 5. Forget what I was doing but then, at the last minute, finish that list!

When I was about 15, the D&D hangout becames the drugs and alcohol hangout one weekend when my friend's parents went away and left him alone with the house. On Friday night I drank for the first time. (Aside from a glass of wine with my parents. That was a thing in the 80's.) By Saturday night I was so hung over that someone helpfully offered a bong hit. My parents quickly found out that this particular kid was not a good influence. He was someone I had met recently, and all my friends started hanging out with him. He was just a little bit older: a year, not more than that. We all stopped hanging out with him within about a year or a year and a half and a new social circle was formed between some of my old friends and some other people turning away from "Bob Bitchin." (Not his real name, but he did call himself that sometimes, based on a local rock radio station mascot.) If you watched Stranger things, Eddie Munson reminded me of "Bob." Charismatic, reckless, able to magnetically gather a circle of people around him and be the center of their social world. In the show, Eddie was never revealed as any kind of toxic, but Bob certainly was. He was a wounded kid, somehow. His parents were very stable and fairly conservative in an 80's sense. Dad was a professor and also a Boy Scout leader. The parents seemed excessively permissive, as opposed to being abusive or absent. But the youngest son was troubled. he didn't finish high school. He continued to gather teenagers around him, 14, 15, 16 years old, for at least a decade after he was that age. I lost track of him after that. The last time I saw him, he looked like Jim Morrison in 1971. He would have appreciated the comparison, I'm sure.