The Dastardly Villainy of My Youth

me, around 1988 or so.

When I was just a Lil' Ryan, I had a friend named Dale.  Growing up, he was a lot of fun and one of my best friends during grade school.  Dale was an interesting kid.  My mom thought he was weird, as did many of the other moms I'm sure.

We used to ride our bikes all over the neighborhood, play Super Mario Bros., and draw comics together.  Dale was a lot of fun because he was fucking crazy.

Dale was great at getting me in trouble too.  It's not like we committed first degree murder or anything, but stupid shit that kids get in trouble for.

There was a girl who lived down the street from me.  I think her name was Amanda, but honestly, it was over twenty-five years ago and that detail totally escapes me.  For sake of argument, we'll call her AmandaGlasses.  We didn't like her because she had nerdy glasses.

You can start typing all the hate mail you want.  I was, like, six years old and this was the mid-80s when it was quite common for kids with glasses to be made fun of.  And if you were a girl with glasses you got it worse than anyone else.

Dale and I just didn't like AmandaGlasses.  Maybe it was her glasses or maybe she had been mean to us in the park.  I don't know.  It was probably something to do with her glasses.  Did I mention she wore glasses?

Because she did.  She wore glasses.  It was terrible.

Dale and I decided we had been wronged by AmanadaGlasses for one reason or another (most likely because she was a girl with glasses and we didn't like her) and we needed to get back at her.  So we pooled our villainy together and did the most devious and dastardly thing we could think of.

We let the air out of her bike tires.

And then we dropped the caps from the wheels down the sewer.

Evil!

Dale and I goofing off like crazy mischievous little snot-balls are supposed to.

Now, we may have been acting like rotten kids but we did have a conscience.  Not enough of a conscience to turn ourselves in though.  Like all evil masterminds, we didn't want to be caught and thrown in prison for our villainy so we decided we needed to go into hiding in case AmandaGlasses or worse, her parents, came looking for us.

So we raided the box in my closet marked "winter clothes" and got some large coats and scarves so we could be incognito.  We didn't want our faces to be seen by anyone either, so we got our Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Hallowe'en masks out too.  And that's how we walked around the neighborhood for a couple hours or so.

Oh, and this was the middle of summertime too.  The weather report wasn't calling for winter jackets.

It wasn't long before AmandaGlasses figured us out and told on us to my mother.

If there's a moral to this story, it's that justice should always prevail.  Instead of buying AmandaGlasses new bike tires, she agreed to let Dale give her his own bike.  Days and weeks went by and Dale never did give her that bike.  And AmandaGlasses moved out of the neighborhood shortly after.

Evil wins!

- ryan of the ryan fan club

...and this was us plotting our next tirade of villainy!