Vaffunculo!

Wiped out and emotionally hung over from last night's Red Sox win, I had no idea if I'd be able to follow up last night's disappointing blog premiere. Fortunately, inspiration came in the form of an offensive text message from my friend Phil. While in the ICU at the hospital I work at I was surprised and alarmed to notice my phone vibrating - surprised in that I never really get calls or messages during the day, and alarmed as I was in a goddamn ICU and was hoping my forgetting to turn my phone off wasn't about to short out some patient's iron lung. I discreetly opened my phone and saw the words "Eh, funcula!" on the screen. My brain froze for a moment before I was able to form two thoughts - 

1. "What the hell?!"

2. "That's spelled wrong."

I searched my memory for a few seconds and finally was taken back to a simpler time and place, say, about 1997. Phil and I were awkward poorly socialized high school students, a far cry from the awkward, poorly socialized adults we have worked hard to become today. After enjoying an evening of Goldeneye and pringles (I promise they won't get mentioned every time I write here) we sat in front of my extremely underpowered old mac and decided to do what every abnormal teenager does when presented with the opportunity to browse the early internet for porn - record stupid sounds.

Imagine our youthful sense of awe and wonder as we spoke in to a little round microphone, waited a few seconds, heard the whirrs and clicks of the computer, and heard our voices played back to us in all the glory of 22 KHZ 8 bit mono. I like to think it was akin to what Edison felt in his lab, albeit with less of the armpit noises and pale Beavis and Butthead impersonations. We recorded a few forgettable samples, some of which I recall involved extremely creative but woefully ineffective insults of each other's girlfriends. 

I should step back and set the scene a little further and let you know my already antique mac was set up on a flimsy folding table, and it was upon this table which we rested our trusty apple microphone. At one point, while recording, I smashed my knee hard on the table and Phil and I discovered that the resulting sound created by the bouncing mic sounded frighteningly like a crashing bullet or crunching bone. Being the mentally depraved young men we were, we decided to take this and run with it. Phil started off in rather tame fashion, yelling "OW" and hitting the desk, perhaps to recreate my injury of a few moments past. I took things a step further and narrated the sad story of a young man who fell down a flight of stairs and cursed the whole way down, smashing and breaking various bones as he went. My first official recording date.

Suddenly, and not dramatically at all, one of us remembered some Italian we had learned from a friend in French class - don't bother asking, my most impressive achievement in three years of Français involved running face first in to a chalkboard. Our friend DJ had shared a few Italian curse words, "Vaffunculo!", being the one which stuck with us the most. In short, it means "Fuck you!" and has a wonderful "Stereotypical-Italian-I-feel-like-it-should-be-somewhere-in-the-Godfather-movies-but-I-don't-know" sort of sound. Say it out loud with me. Hard drive whirring I did my best attempt to put on a bad accent... what follows is an approximate transcript.

"Eh, Fanculo!" (Pronounced as spelled, incorrectly)

(Three to five loud taps on the desk to simulate a drive by shooting)

(Muffled screams)

And with that, history had been made, a line had been crossed, and Phil and I set a gold standard for simultaneously surprising and letting each other down. I'll spare you the rest of the evening, only telling you one sound involved an Abraham Lincoln quote and more simulated gunfire. Ten years later and I start to wonder if I'm going to be telling a court-ordered psychiatrist about this someday. I would take relief in knowing that surely our offensive sound files are gone forever, where nobody can use them against me, but that's not the case. 

Phil has an odd capability for holding on to items that I usually misplace or forget about. He still owns (and wears) his middle school soccer t-shirt. He is in possession of most of his old French homework, and strangely, some of mine. Imagine a sort of Smithsonian for losers, and you have Phil's room in Concord. Posters from our first gigs, cassettes of our feeble attempts to start a band, and other memorabilia that will skyrocket in value when one of us becomes/harms a prominent public figure. Somehow Phil still has those sounds from all those years back, and I still hear them from time to time. 

Once the realization that I've sadly always been this weird passes, I'm glad Phil still has all his stuff. It makes me want to try and have some sort of record of what I'm hoping I'm about to set out on. If things go as planned in the next few years I want to do some pretty ambitious and crazy things. I think that's a big reason I started writing like this - maybe sometime I'll want to dig up one of these entries and reminisce, or think about how far I've come or where I thought I'd be. Anyways, I'll save the sentimentality for another night - if anything else I'll run out of words soon if I write like this every night. So in short, good night, good luck, and Vaffunculo!