How Super Mario Bros. taught me how to love.

I think the convergence of puberty and music and movies can profoundly affect a forming brain. I was 11 and on the cusp of so many problems, mostly emotional, which were crystalising and cementing my psychology. I remember really feeling miserable, uncertain and anxious. My body was just ready to be a hormone factory. And there's a point where you might attribute feelings of love, something like a romance or longing, for someone. Only I didn't connect with a someone, it was a something. Not like a wall or particular object. I felt a longing for a movie. And for some insane reason, that movie was Super Mario Bros.

I didn't get to see it in the cinema for what seemed like months. I think I had the novelisation before seeing it, I'd stacked up the collectable cards I was going to (or already did) fish out my doubles and send them to someone. I even made a small model dinosaur in art class with a blown egg body, which I liked the colour I painted. I later painted him green and put a cardboard head and feet and tail on him to make him look like the game Yoshi, but he was always Yoshi. I even made a Lego Yoshi, and kept a little picture of the movie Yoshi in a jewelry box. I don't know why.

I was in love with Daisy and Luigi's romance. Just recently I got into a podcast of How Did This Get Made? Everything they said of the movie brought back so many memories, but I still don't know if I could sit through it now. I came home and my brother had a making of on, I was so into Roxette's Almost Unreal, even though it makes me cringe. It was just an obsession that gave me a melancholy of unrequited love. I saw it with my "best friend" who'd moved away and we met up in the city to go watch it. But when I was older, I didn't fall over myself to get it on DVD. It's tough to find but it's coming out on Bluray. I still can't say whether I want this. You can rent it on YouTube but I won't give them my money.

But Jesus H this is not a kids movie. Did they think kids wanted to see Mario grinding with a big momma just to get a rock off her. It's an utterly insane movie that never got a sequel. Like it's a hot mess but for some reason it got into my brain the way a crush kind of worms its way in until you have nothing left. Then it just died away, like most crushes, I guess.