The Eyes of the Beholder

Here's Olga enjoying the sunshine on Saturday by the back door. Yesterday wasn't as sunny so she didn't have sunbathing opportunities. We spent most of the day on the couch -- me reading and catching up with blogs and television shows that Dave doesn't like, and Olga snoring. Dave was in his chair with his headphones on, watching Drum Corps marching band videos and the latest on Trump's shenanigans and probably several episodes of West Wing or Downton Abbey.

Such is life around here on the weekends.

We did get a special treat when Dave bought two big packages of strawberries at the supermarket. "Oh, are you going to make strawberry shortcake?" I said. Dave said he hadn't intended to but he could, and that sent him off on a culinary project, which he always loves. We had excellent strawberry shortcake last night for dessert, with biscuits as big as both my fists put together. "As big as a baby's head," as my Peace Corps friend Jennifer would have said.

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Apropos of nothing, here's a little journey back in time, taken from one of the journals I wrote as a young teenager:

Nov. 24, 1980:

Have I got a drawing for you today! This gruesome little fellow is called a "Beholder" and is a monster from the game "Dungeons & Dragons." I traced him from a book that one of my friends had at school, and he was one of several other monsters, like Black Pudding, Gelatinous Cube, Green Slime, Ochre Jelly, Gray Ooze (that one really gets me) and other gruesome things. I think Mr. Beholder here is sort of cute. He has a look-alike called a "Gas Spore," which isn't really an animal like Mr. Beholder is. Believe it or not, Mr. Beholder is an exceptionally intelligent creature, and he supports his body by levitation. Now I know what they mean by "The eye of the Beholder"! (Forget it -- that was a very weak joke.) When JM first saw him, he said, "It's you!" Very dumb.

I had just turned 14 when I wrote that. (JM is my younger brother, who was 10.) Was I a nerd or what? I was actually not that into Dungeons & Dragons -- in fact I've never played it to this day. I'm not sure I even really understood what it was. But I did like reading my friend Andre's Monster Manual, which we'd do in Phys Ed instead of exercising. My nerdy friends and I would sit on the stage in the gym and basically ignore the rest of the class, who were out on the gym floor playing basketball or volleyball or some other awful game and getting all sweaty. Blech. I actually failed PE that quarter. It's the only F grade I ever received as a high school student.

The original D&D Monster Manual is now online and can be found here, with the Beholder on page 11.

Anyway, I was inspired to look this up because we got a new Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual in our library the other day. It looks like this:

Yes, that's the Beholder, in a much more modernized and frightening form. And I belatedly realized that this isn't even the newest version of the Monster Manual -- it's the 2014 edition. (We got it as a donation.) Here's the newest one:

These new renderings make the Beholder look far scarier, don't they? It looked almost friendly in its earliest guise, as if it were smiling with its toothy mouth. But apparently in the game it really is a terrible creature, known as the "Eye Tyrant" and described as "hateful, aggressive and avaricious."

Looking this up made me think I should type up my childhood journals (which span the years from 1979 to 1983 or so) and put them online, as I did about ten years ago with the paper journals I wrote as a young adult. (They're not publicly accessible, but having them in blog form allows me to search them quickly when I want to find something I wrote.) The only downside is, the childhood journals are full of inside jokes. I lived a very insulated childhood and my brother and I developed our own humor, which would make no sense to anyone else. I'd have to edit a lot of that stuff out, particularly if I were ever to make them public.

In my drawing of the Beholder above, for example, see the little creature at lower left saying "Oh, God"? That's my pet turtle Stunky, who featured in practically every drawing in my journals. (My brother had a turtle named Stinky.) You had to be there.