January 2, 2023:
I'm in my tiny room on Cowley Way. On a folding card table I'm playing an SPI game called "CA", simulating with dice and hexagons the Battle of Tassafaronga. I'm fourteen or fifteen, I have the flu, and I tend to arrange for my favored side to win.
With or without germs, I typically match this game with cartoned chocolate milk and orange candy peanuts. Where this combination of colors, textures and tastes seems satisfying even beyond destruction of the Japanese fleet. With the flu that'll be my nutrition for the day. My mother is fine with this: she encourages the calories.
I can't see into the past to inventory the room. In later years there'll be books of art and literature and political theory. Right now it's likely military: the Ballantine's Illustrated History series, Samuel Eliot Morison's multivolume history of the Navy in World War Two, many many books and catalogs of military aircraft. Where the goal pre-myopia had been to be a Navy pilot.
It's possible there are still models. I don't think I blew those up for another year or two. When the time came, I destroyed them with BB gun, lighter fluid and M-80s. Yet when younger I'd built and painted them by dozens: military aircraft, warships, tanks, Godzilla (painted yellow), the Seaview and its flying sub. Including a six-foot B-52 which must have hung from the ceiling — today I have no glimmer of a clue how it could have fit.
The Americans are winning. Japanese torpedoes are tending to miss, although that sometimes requires multiple die rolls. The chocolate milk is thick and brown, the candy peanuts are stale but their texture tending-toward-hard is satisfying. I'm quite flu-struck but overwhelmed with energy, my own plus that of the sugar I'm supplementing with. I come here frequently.