Lego: The Building Blocks of Life (And Puns!)

When I was a kid, Lego was without a doubt, and in the most technical of terms, the shit. Any pieces haphazardly put together, thrown in a box and labled some kind of spacecraft I simply had to have, otherwise my childhood would be nothing but a wastleland littered with broken dreams. My lego box was a poorly constructed chipboard mostrosity, which contained coloured blocks and threats of splinters or stab wounds from rusty nails in equal parts, yet this did not once prevent me thrusting my hands into it with reckless abandon. I wanted (and still do) to live in a house made of Lego.

Welcome to my humble home. Please excuse my blatant disregard of physics.

Not surprising then that when it came to my mid-20s, I decided to apply the Theory of Legotivity to my own life.

See, every Lego set had its main model, the one with instructions to build, then on the back of the box there was a series of other pictures of things you could theoretically make with the same pieces. All you had to do was be willing to pull apart what you'd already put together and attempt to build something new based on nothing but a photograph. So that's what my move to England was - my picture on the back of the box.

I had the picture in my head of what sort of life could be made in England, a picture that mostly consisted of me, in front of Big Ben, wearing one of those hats that Beefeaters wear, dining on tea and biscuits and sitting atop a throne made from pound notes. So I systematically began to pull apart the life I'd built, the one with instructions, with people to help when I wasn't sure what went where, in preparation for amatuer life architect hour.

Can't be that hard to put together, right?

Thing is, no how good your efforts were, you were never going to to replicate that picture on the back of the box exactly, for the simple reason that there was 50% of the damn thing they you couldn't see, no matter what kind of angles you looked at that box from in your ridiculous attempt to bend the rules of photography with a determined gaze. At best you came out of the endeavour with a structure vaguely reminiscent of what you were aiming for, held together by spare parts and voodoo, and at worst, well, something worse than that.

OH FUCK! This is not at all what I was aiming for!

So, from a pessimistic standpoint, I was doomed from the beginning. If I was being slightly more positive, then it was somewhere closer to the middle that I was doomed from. But, ignorant to this fact, I ambled around London, looking for the pieces I needed that I could have sworn I had just seen moments earlier, swearing at the parts that painfully lodged themselves in my feet, and becoming more and more discouraged as what I was I was building looked absolutely nothing like my picture. In fact, all I'd managed to assemble was a pile of demolished rubble. That was on fire.

Then came that moment that is always inevitable - when you realise that the reason that model is on the front of the box is because it's way fucking better than any other options. I wanted to rebuild that.

Don't bother turning it over. This is way fucking better.

So since I got back, that's what I've been doing; trying to piece back together what I had built before. As always seems to be the way, I managed to lose a couple of pieces during the whole experiment, but I'm working on getting them back. And when I do, I'm going to build something fucking awesome.

At least this fucking awesome.