I was watching Malick’s ”The Tree of Life” recently and there is a sequence where the main character, Jack, sneaks into his neighbor’s house. The boy in the film steals a nightgown from the house. This scene reminded me that I also sneaked into my neighbor’s house one time.
It was my next door neighbor and I wasn’t alone. My friend Aaron spearheaded the whole thing. He had been given keys to their house in order to feed their dogs while they were on vacation. I think my brother came along as well, and possibly my sister too. I didn’t steal a nightgown or anything like that, and I didn’t vandalize anything, so don’t think me too bad. I wasn’t even trying to get a rush by going somewhere that I wasn’t allowed. It was to play their Super Nintendo. I had a Sega Genesis, but I’d heard the Super Nintendo was cool, and I wanted to see what it was all about. By my account I sneaked in for academic purposes in order to compare the two video game consoles.
The Super Nintendo is generally regarded as the better system, but growing up with a Genesis means that I will always be biased toward that system, and playing my neighbor’s Super Nintendo only confirmed my suspicion that Sega made the better console. I had Disney’s ”Aladdin” for Genesis and they had ”Aladdin” for Super Nintendo. Playing that game on both systems would give me a perfect scientific basis for deciding which of the consoles was better. Indeed, I confirmed that the Genesis version of ”Aladdin” is better, and so as far as I was concerned, the Genesis was the better gaming system.
Back to my original story, though… I got caught. Yes indeed, I got caught sneaking into my neighbor’s house and my Super Nintendo exploit was cut short. It wasn’t my neighbor that caught me, they were on vacation, after all. It was my own mom that caught me. And, bless her heart, she ratted me out to them when they got back from vacation. I, myself, would never rat out my kids for doing such a thing. I’d just give them a quick spanking, have a laugh about it when they weren’t around, and call it a day, except for the spanking part, I probably wouldn’t actually spank them.