Tag: nicknames

Looking back at my life a couple of centuries ago when I was a 72 and fueled by emotion not logic I met one of my best friends of all time. I lived in the apartment next door to my soon to be buddy ,and one day I was over at his apartment just killing time (which I had too much of at the time I get myself in the most trouble when I’m bored) and there was a small group of people having a lengthy conversation about Chili recipes. After approximately 20 minutes or so give or take I couldn’t stand having to listen  to their conversation a minute more. Unlike other people who would just leave the apartment and go about their day I stayed for the soul purpose of antagonizing the Chili lovers for my own amusement.

I walked over and weaved my way into their conversation only to announce that Lithuanian’s (for a while I was obsessed with picking on Lithuania for some weird reason even I’m not fully aware of) Chili is by far the strangest Chili recipes in the entire known world. I backed my statement with the claim Lithuanians used Bean Sprouts as a main ingredient in their various Chili recipes. Immediately without pause one young man called me out saying that my statement about Lithuanian Chili was absolute bullshit. I then took the offense and demanded to know how in the name of all things Universal did he know what I was saying was in fact utter horseshit. He replied quite adamantly the reason he knew I was full of shit was the simple fact he WAS Lithuanian ,and that amused me to no end.

So over the following months since the Great Chili Convention Conversation my neighbor and I grew to be very good friends. Since it turned out in a bizarre stroke of luck my neighbor was really Lithuanian I dubbed him The Nightmare of Lithuania which then was reworded to The Lithuanian Nightmare (since the second version of the nickname reminded me of a 1980’s WWF Wrestler who’d have had epic pay-per-view matches against Hulk Hogan and shit) and then the final condensed version Nightmare which was the version that lasted the test of time. One day Nightmare’s roommate up and pissed off all of a sudden and Nightmare invited me to be the roommate replacement. I of course accepted his offer without a second thought, packed up my gear, told my current 2 roommates I was moving and then promptly left them standing in the living room looking rather bewildered ,and a tad unhappy about the out of the blue announcement.

Nightmare and my friendship is based on essentially how different we are which greatly improved my life thanks to Nightmare. Nightmare is one of a minute number of people that have the unique ability to calm me down once I lose my shit (My Wife would be the best of the best as the kiddies say) ,and back in those ancient days I lost my shit constantly. A Classic example of what I’m talking about is what I refer to as “2 a.m. Anger Avoidance” which played out back in those medieval days as follows. Nightmare and I would meet up in the evenings after work and other assorted shit back at our apartment. Now at some point I would vent furiously about how someone or something had totally pissed me off because what ever happened was a Damnable Offense against me, and if you fuck with me I’m going to fuck with you 10 fold. Nightmare then would spend up to several hours as the night marched on words morning slowing the progression of my angst from Rage to Anger to Disgust to accepting that indeed shit does happen.

Inevitably in an attempt to end the discussion Nightmare would remind me that the current time of night was say 2 a.m. at which point I would start to ramp up again because now on top of whatever it was that pissed me off (whoever was to blame basically) had now kept me up till 2 in the morning. Having to work his magic all over again from basically the start Nightmare would get me to simmer down so we could try and get a few hours of precious sleep before work. We had at the time taken on 2 more roommates in our 2 bedroom apartment so Nightmare and I shared a room. Now as Nightmare was desperately longing for sleep intermittently I would readdress the issue that angered me earlier that day until finally I would run out of steam and fall asleep. Unfortunately for Nightmare he would remain up a while longer and before he succumbed to sleep he would suddenly find himself agreeing that what I had been raging about the entire night was in fact quite fucked up.