When I was a child, a close buddy was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis symptoms. He had the odd shaky spell and relentless warnings from his relatives to be cautious not to overexert himself, but it never appeared like he had a real problem. We would play video games. We chucked a baseball around. We tried to erect a second-story on the treehouse correctly created by his dad. To compensate for the shortage of contact sports in his life his parents decided to buy him a great deal of toys. We had Nerf wars that would last hours. He had dozens of action figures, from the small size army men in green to 12 inch full colour articulating G.I. Joe’s with lots of weapons and accessories. The most amazing collection was of Halloween paraphernalia. In particular the family’s collection of plastic bloodstained butcher knives. These were particularly fun to chase each other around the house with. I can’t think what we must have looked like. Two boys one of whom, very fat and out of breath, running along with a bloodstained plastic knife, screaming at the top of his lungs. I would have thought, at least we’ll be able to out-run the next generation of serial killers, and we will hear them coming.

It is always difficult to explain play to an adult things just make sense when a child is playing. Not all the rules are functioning, up and running at once. It is truly innocent, but nonetheless annoying.I recall my cousin as a child used to play with Barbie dolls and cut the hair uselessly short. It would wreck the Barbie doll in about 10 min, but he was doing it specifically to provoke us. I asked him about his about his behavior last year at a wedding. He admitted that he just was looking for for reactions. He was very messed up as a kid.

And this all leads on to my near death incident that still sends a shiver down my spine when I remember it. We had being playing a truly macabre game of war and the body count must have been close to thousands when we came under attack by the largest troop we had come across to date. Despite this all being a game we had whipped ourselves up into quite the frenzy and quickly scrambled up the rope ladders to the relative safety of our tree house base. Little did I know that our enemies had secretly boobytrapped the place with landmines, and by that I mean I stepped on a marble and then time seemed to slow down. I recall slipping and seeing everything as clear as day as I fell over the side of the treehouse and drifted down towards the bloodied battlefield. Unexpectedly I was jolted back to reality from my slow motion dream like state, by my foot getting tangled in the rope ladder leaving my face hanging inches from disaster. If my friends did not show sclerosis symptoms, I might never have faced my mortality at age 8.