Marbles 1980
bwana spoons
Kinda a lot to unpack here… Marbles. So much fun. Me, the cutest dweeb. If i remember right, a woman who worked for the newspaper thought it was quite charming that me and this other kid were playing this old timey game of marbles. Yes, even waaaay back in 1980, it was considered some weird thing from the past.
Central Valley which is now called Shasta City… a teeny town near the Shasta Dam… just north of Redding. The original home of Skyway tuffs!
Schlitz?!? Back in the day when it was fine to just stand up in the back of the pick up truck and hold onto the roll bars for safety, and a little kid could where a beer hat, and your parents could just take you to Buds Steak house (not a steak house, but a dive bar where old ladies might give you a quarter to play the one video game in the place), to enjoy several drinks while i just hung out. Learned a lot how to be happy all by myself. this is probably how i became sorta good at making up my own stories and characters.
Mark… Each new place we moved to I would usually be lucky enough to make one good friend. We usually thrashed around in some bamboo in the back of my yard, or rode our BMX bikes up in the hills.
My name. My name growing up was James Brandon Stepp. Nobody, not even my parents ever called me James. Bwana was a nickname for me as a young adult by my partner, after an ape in the SF zoo, when we got hitched we changed our last names, and I completely dropped James. So my actual human legal name for 30 years now is Brandon (which I rarely refer to myself as) Bwana Spoons.
Baby Bwana history. JBS becomes BBS.