I ushered in 2008 with all four of my friends, hosting a pathetic excuse for a party in my house before moving out of home. Calling it home still feels weird, but it’s still the place I’ve lived in longest to date. I had just spent the previous year essentially house-sitting until the lease ended after my father retired from the Air Force. No one should’ve left eighteen year old me in charge of anything. In the year I lived alone I held a lot of intimate drunken gatherings, I lived off a single meatloaf for three weeks, I blew up the fridge and one month during winter I slept in front of my heater in the lounge room for warmth.

Those drunken gatherings were known as Camp Dirty Bad Fun, and mainly consisted of my best friend who had moved schools, a friend from the year above and two other friends from the year below. So basically I’m admitting to giving minors a lot of alcohol and letting them throw up in my garden. We’d try and have a theme every time, the first Camp Dirty Bad Fun ended up a Midori-stained toga party, there was a bad mall goth night and the final gathering was meant to be classy cocktail party. It was not. It pretty quickly descended into a rant about these dang Metal Gear games I had been playing and I drunkenly tried to quote a bunch of crazy stuff I had just seen in Metal Gear Solid 2. No one really cared. Then I spilled a bunch of cheap wine on my nice dress and went to bed grumpily. Why didn’t anyone find being pissed on by a Russian PMC hilarious? I thought I was friends with a bunch of plebs.

I had found a copy of Metal Gear Solid 2 for $15 a couple of days before, and having just finished Metal Gear Solid 3, I was keen to get back into sneaking around as a well rendered ass. I knew vague details about the twists, the possessed arm and of course – the famous purple stuffed worm in flap-jaw space. I thought it would be good for a laugh. I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. Continue reading