LEGO Blocks Piss Me Off

When I grew up, LEGO blocks (those little plastic toy bricks that you could connect together to build things) were nothing but rectangular bricks, much like real bricks.  I think there was a special brick that had a wheel embedded in it, but essentially all the bricks were rectangular, so anything you made looked, well, BLOCKY.  Even the wheeled bricks only came two to a set, so any vehicle you made flopped either forward or backward depending on the weighty end.

Fast forward to the present; apparently the LEGO company now manufactures hundreds of ‘bricks’ in every imaginable shape/contour to make your sad sack building look high-tech.  They have all kinds of very specific pieces now: rounded cornerstones, angled mock-stone walls, interior fixtures, specialty connectors and figurines of all kinds.  These fantastic shapes can make your sorry-ass, talentless kid come across like an architectural genius.

The problem here is that I wasted part of my childhood with these sucky blocks.  Sure, I thought I was making something grand, but deep down I knew that NO square building has ever been grand and any building that was tagged as such was purely out of pity.  I now realize that LEGO screwed me over by forever squashing my self-esteem and dashing any hopes of my future as an architect.  LEGO, you owe me big time.

I also owned an Erector set and Tinkertoys as a kid and these are equally to blame.  I’d trash Tinkertoys, but at least they tasted good when you chewed them, or maybe that was Lincoln Logs.  The Erector set turned out to be nothing but a crap toy that made everything look a billion times more complicated than it should, since you needed a thousand nuts and bolts to hold everything together.  The only thing cool about an Erector set (besides its name) was that it was metal, so at least there was potential for damage to others, but it also meant that the cheap-ass set would rust while being ignored in the garage, so the sum total of the enjoyment derived from these toys is a big fat ZERO, aside from the cool taste of Lincoln Logs and the minor pleasure of attaching a Tinkertoy spool to one of the long sticks and using the resulting wooden mallet to clock some unsuspecting kid in the noggin and listening not only to his subsequent “ouch”, but hearing that characteristic “wood-hits-head” sound that preceded the “ouch”.  

Now that I think about it, Tinkertoys DID rule.