Yes, it’s May the fourth and every asshole Star Wars fan (including myself) will be saying “May the fourth be with you.” Thing is, and this is tough to say… But, Star Wars blows. I love it, but it’s an iconic part of my childhood that died on the vine. Two good movies, maybe three, out of how many now? 11? Goddam. You’d think these all these people and the studios who shoved an insane amount of money into these productions could have at least batted a little higher. The worst part about all of it is that I went to the theater and paid for every goddam one of them, thinking to myself, maybe this is the time they’ll actually pull their heads out of their asses.

Nope.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world to pay for Star Wars tickets. And yes, like an idiot, I’ll continue to do it until I die. Waste money on sequels that make me groan and rage.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Nostalgia is a powerful weapon. When I was a kid, Return of the Jedi was the greatest movie ever. The toys, oh the toys. I had a rich friend, Michael Moran, who had them all. He lived in a recent construction on our dirt road that just appeared one day like magic, a sign in the driveway that said Moran Manor. An unfinished five story megalopolis with nooks and crannies aplenty. His bedroom was at the apex of the citadel. A room full of all the most expensive toys. He had the GI Joe headquarters and the aircraft carrier, all the large transformers toys my parents never thought about buying me. Michael was godlike at that age, blond, good looking, and muscular for a young kid, the star of our soccer team. even my mom, my greatest champion, often commented on how beautiful he was. His mom, Fran, was our coach. Like me, he saw his dad on the weekends. That was our bond. We sat on the bus together and drew crazy monsters, the unconscious interpretations and manifestations of our personal demons on paper.

When he would come visit my shitty old house, there was nothing for us to do except play outside. Walk along the property’s crumbling, teetering rock walls, climb up the side of a cliff, or go out into the woods, all of which to him was quite boring. Shit, this was all I ever did. At a young age I went out and explored on my own. Expeditions deep into the woods until I got scared (Hansel and Gretel on the brain) and returned home. To Michael, a wealthy child who once lived in the city, this environment was harrowing.

It all came to a halt one day when Michael and I were playing around and he whipped me hard in the leg with a stick.

“Don’t do that again,” I said.

He did it again. I grabbed the stick from his hand and threw it, then tripped him to the ground, put my knee on his chest, and administered a few crisp right hands to the side of his head to calm him down. When he struggled, got to his feet, and put up his dukes, I used more force to end it properly. He cried and ran to his mother inside my place while she and my mom were talking over tea. That was pretty much the last time Michael and I hung out. I may have been runty and poor with shitty clothes and no toys, but years on a country school bus battling the older kids had taught me how to scrap.

Childhood is weird. You either beat the crap out of your friends and never see them again or fight your bitter enemies and become best friends with them.

Around the same age, my uncle brought me to see Spaceballs in the theater. During that time he took me to see a bunch of movies that were way above my head, flicks I was too young to see. Predator, Aliens, Total Recall. Oh yeah, all the good stuff. I didn’t get most of the jokes in Spaceballs. It was pretty racy for a PG rating. The lightsabers ignited from their crotches. The Vader character satire, Dark Helmet’s, uh, helmet, was in the shape of a penis and the collar and tie on his suit looked like a cock and balls. So on and so forth. The “Schwartz” instead of the “Force” was a dual reference to an erection and the magical telekinesis the characters used. Hence the famous line, “I see your schwartz is as big as mine. Now let’s see how you handle it.”

Sometimes it isn’t the content of the movie, but the conjuring of the time when we saw it. Yes, that’s the power of nostalgia. It causes us to rewatch total drivel like Bloodsport and Commando and actually enjoy it. I haven’t seen Spaceballs in years, but I’m sure, upon rewatching, I will recite the lines before they come out of the character’s mouths and still laugh at the dumb jokes. I’ll think of that precious slice of time in my life before I had bills to pay, when I had all the time in the world to goof off. I’ll reflect and think of my old buddies, like Michael Moran, and wonder where the hell he ever ended up.