#139. Fuzzieland (Friday, January 14, 2000)
What was your best day…of being happy, without thinking there was any alternative?
My first ever Pokémon Red save file—where I’d blindly made it all the way Celadon City on New Year’s Eve (#67)—had been unceremoniously deleted by my dad a few days after surviving Y2K. And that was the end of my Pokémon obsession. The passing fad had now passed.
No, of course not.
Because after two days back at school from the holidays, and multiple lunch recesses watching kids explore even more exotic locales (like the Safari Zone!), I was back to begging my parents to let me play again. My mom was reasonable about it: only on Fridays, but for as long as I wanted after coming back from school. Which meant, for the next few months at least, most of my life’s happiness would be concentrated on those handful of precious hours each week. Friday evenings were now an event.
It got to a conspicuous start. The Friday before was just… odd. Extremely odd in a way that defies explanation. I came into the day with an intense anticipation of starting a new Pokémon Red save now knowing what the hell I’m doing (#67)—except, well, which start Pokémon I could choose. Squirtle had always been the default agreed on with my best friend Harry Liu (#108, #87), but the day before, on the van ride home, he suddenly started imploring me to instead go with Charmander because its final evolution Charizard could fly. Not because it is objectively the coolest Pokémon, but because it… had wings. (Note that Charizard couldn’t actually learn the move Fly in the original games.) It started turning confrontational… but then the van reached his house, and I figured we’d continue the debate tomorrow.
Friday morning starts off with an eye exam, which makes me a few hours late for school. I walk into the classroom: and everything seems a bit… off. I myself am in a semi-dazed state, the class is in the middle of a loud back-and-forth on a topic I don’t remember, and several of my classmates seem to wearing clothing that’s distinctly more colorful than what they normally wear. Myself, I’m like: “This is pretty cool that I came in late and we’re in this surreal setting. It’s gonna be fun talking with Harry about this!” But then I turn to his seat and… Harry isn’t there.
What the hell? That just this already “off” day completely fall off the edge. (Turns out he had gotten really sick the night before—serves him right for wanting Charmander—and was throwing all day.) Turns out about a nine students are sick that day—they thought ten before I came in. And the rest of the school day proceeds in a paradoxical state of both heightened and dulled sensitivity1, and that aura naturally overtakes the joy later this night from an uninterrupted four hours from Pallet Town (where I naturally choose Squirtle) to Mt. Moon.
For a nine-year-old kid, when your first highly-anticipated experience of something gets contaminated2 by something that may well be metaphysical, the circumstances around the second one doesn’t really need anything good around it—only just the absence of things—to be a special day.
And that was exactly this Friday. Just the fact that this wasn’t the previous Friday (and Harry was back and accepted my Squirtle choice) automatically gave the whole afternoon one of those “everything is happy and getting along and it all just feels so good” aura. This is capped off by the last activity of the day: a reading from our teacher Ms. Ridley of a story called “Fuzzieland”.
And despite us being in fourth grade, we gather around the front of the room—some students lying down and leaning on each other like it’s kindergarten naptime—to listen to the story, which is exactly as deep as the title makes it sound. It’s apparently a well-known story by a psychotherapist, but the whole plot is that everyone in this Fuzzieland has access to these creatures/inanimate objects (?) called warm fuzzies that make them feel warm and fuzzy. But then some evil warlock comes and ruins everything by introducing cold pricklies which… do exactly what they say. I don’t even know how the story concludes. All I know was that following this inspirational tale, we were assigned to draw pictures of what we thought those two subtly titled objects were supposed to look like. A very educational experience indeed.
So that was that. A serene, perfect, brightness-filled afternoon to end the week—following the chaos of the week before—and leading into an equally perfect Pokémon Red binge tonight. Nothing could ruin it. Definitionally, nothing could.
Even Ms. Ridley, in the twenty minute window between the end of our art session and the closing bell, walking by and seeing my agenda entry was empty for Thursday and randomly screaming at me loudly in front of the whole class and demanding I explain myself…3 even that barely made a dent in such a happy, sunshine- and fuzzy-filled day.
- The only specific that sticks in my memory is that for the months after, I would start annoying each of my classmates (who were there) with a name that had a descriptor of what they were that day followed by “rake” (unfortunate word choice I had no context on). What’s strange is that only “funny rake” and “silly rake” are the only two reasonable ones I can think of now; even though at the time I recall having sixteen distinct ones for each student.
- Objectively, not necessarily a “good” contamination or a “bad”. But without doubt a contamination nonetheless
- Without any justification, I’m pretty sure. My homework completion only get really bad after Harry Liu left for San Francisco (#87) a few months later and I fell in a depressive state.