These are the good ol' days. Right now, all around you. Look to the love you have around you now, and I guarantee you regardless of whether or not you have more or less in the future, the love you have now is a precious moment you'll look back on and yearn for.

That's what my days at Full Blast were (you recall me mentioning it I hope). It wasn't a very large shop, but yet every weekend you'd have me and my friends and the owners and their friends packed in there playing everything from Talisman (2nd edition) to Warlord: Saga of the Storm, Shadowfist, even a bit of Mage Knight and Heroclix, and someone would almost always be playing an RP game as well.

They called us the Scooby Gang, which was a Buffy reference, but none of us had seen Buffy yet. I loved it, I felt like a belonged somewhere. Every day the bus would let us off at a park on the other side of the street, and me and the others would pop in for a bit before heading home.

We didn't exactly bring them a tidal wave of business mostly being broke high schoolers, but whenever we did get a few dollars Steph and I would buy a new RP book, and we did manage to amass a pretty good collection across DnD 3e, d20 Star Wars, and Vampire the Masquerade.

The shop had a LAN setup with four computers. Most of the time everyone was playing Ghost Recon or Battlefield 1942, but I usually played Warcraft 3 or Unreal Tournament 2003. My friend Daniel became infamous for making this "doomp" sound whenever he fired a grenade at people, and so we started calling him Doomp, and his younger brothers Little Doomp and Middle Doomp.

So our little Scooby Gang would meet up most fridays and saturdays to play some kind of tabletop RPG. I would usually run both games, but occasionally the Saturday game I would be a player in a d20 Star Wars or Vampire game with our friend Ken. I had a Falleen dark Jedi named Xuvora, and later a Gand Jedi studying at Luke Skywalker's Jedi Academy who never had a chance to earn a name. In Vampire I played a Tzimisce arms dealer named Alex, but didn't do anything too weird with him.

After our Summer game had concluded and our GM John went back to finish college, I took over our DnD game and let me tell you, it was a rough time. I was going to run an adventure module, the Forge of Fury, but between everyone constantly trying to get under my skin as teenagers are wont to do, as well as the general stresses of my senior year of high school, I cancelled the adventure midway through them traveling to it and decided to do something different and homebrewed.

It was a dark thing that involved desecrated temples and haunted ship rides and the corruption of the soul. Bodies and terror. I know that all sounds metal af but keep in mind we were teenagers so it was just more like if Rob Zombie directed Monty Python's The Holy Grail.

The infighting was ridiculous. Between the fallen paladin Bowen Draco and the idiot wizard Milot Dole specifically, but we all hated Milot Dole. While the party was battling some lizard folk in a volcanic wasteland, Draco tanked and was surrounded by lizard guys, so Milot Dole "helpfully" dropped a fireball on Daniel downing him and maybe two of the lizard guys, and then was swarmed by the rest. Syloqui didn't have a chance and all three ended up in a TPK.

I did decide the lizardfolk would try to cook them alive in order to give them a chance to escape, and Draco decided to burn their little village down. Inane things like this were abundant.

Sometime after the new year, my ADHD took over and we were playing a new game with new characters every weekend. I am not sure why I felt the need to do a reset every weekend for so long. I was pretty scared at the time, with graduation coming up, and my family losing our house slowly. I wasn't too great about staying steady.

One of the owners, Brandon, passed away suddenly after being in the hospital for about a month. I think it was cancer. He was a very big guy, and apparently had had health problems for a while. I didn't really know what to make of it, not having been around death very much at that point in my life.

The shop was going to have to close. We kept playing though, with me just not thinking about the future. We had others come and join our group from school, and I didn't have to deal with Kye anymore.

We played an extended campaign of Star Wars that even went on after the shop closed. Daniel was Vulf Draxol, a Tusken Raider turned dark side marauder. Stephanie was Twitchy, an R2 unit with spider-legs and lots of guns. My dear friend Thomas joined as a Zeltron scoundrel I cannot remember the name of. Israel played a Bartokk force user of some kind with no name other than Bartokk. We would be occasionally joined by a rotating cast of characters who would wander in and out of the shop on random days.

One of them was James, who had a very high pitched voice and wasn't afraid to use it. He once stepped into the shop and said "hi guys" and set off the high-frequency sound alarm that normally detects breaking windows. Nothing like that had ever happened with it before or since.

James played a cat person of some kind who got possessed by a Sith spirit or something while the party was tomb-robbing on Korriban. Eventually the other party members were able to free him and destroy the spirit, leaving James to yell out an extremely hamtastic lamentation of losing "the power you fools! THE POWER!"

During Unreal Tournament one night, I was playing against Daniel, a different James, and I think a different Daniel. I remember losing so hardcore during the first round and Daniel turning to me and saying "aw Jacob don't feel bad someone's gotta lose" which empowered me to snipe his ass nonstop on the second round in which I came out on top "aw Daniel don't feel bad someone's gotta lose" to which he punched me for haha

One of the James' sister came in with her goth friends and would hang out with us in the back while we played DnD and she and her friends would switch off making out with each other. This was highly distracting for everyone in the room except me, but of course that would be the only night my Dad ever wandered in to say hello to me.

Eventually though, March came. And the store had to shut down on my 18th birthday. I couldn't even bring myself to stop by for their last night, though Steph did, mentioning to Mike how it hurt too much for me to stop by. I wish I had stopped by.

Afterwards, we met in Stephanie's garage. We should have met at my house, but Stephanie's mom didn't approve of my parents smoking pot. Things were tough but the Scooby Gang didn't disband.

We played through the summer, and we had so many adventures both in and out of game. At some point, I acquired a dog on top of four cats and he would come to our games too.

But eventually I had to leave Stockton. My family had lost our house and we had no choice but to live out of our RV on piece of property in the Santa Cruz Mountains that we still owned from the 80s.

As we pulled out of the driveway one last time, I saw an "I Was Here" that I had carved into the brick of the house in the 8th grade one day randomly that had been hidden behind the RV for years. I watched Stephanie watching us standing in our front yard as we drove away into an unknown future.

The Scooby Gang did persist though. For a while. Our developing human natures would eventually tear us apart though, but that's a story for another day.