Why I hate/love time travelling child photographers

I was reading HuffingtonPost this morning and came across a picture that literally flooded my mind with images from my childhood.

Yes, I understand the meaning of "literally" and am using it correctly.  My mind is divided into sectors by a series of elaborate dikes, walls, and sentry towers.  Seeing this photograph LITERALLY knocked a hole in the retaining walls separating sector 45-A (kids from my neighborhood that I wanted to be) and 12-D (memories from a time when clothing and costumes were the same thing).

This structural failure allowed all the kids in costumes from my brain-crypts to invade the areas inhabited by kids with better bikes, faster shoes, or longer capes than I had.  The shock of that level of awesome in one place at one time caused a long-forgotten character from my youth to resurface.

I know this kid.  He only came to my school for one grade, but the impact he had was amazing.  This is all you need to know about him (i.e. all you can handle):

• 1) This is what he wore every day.  They are his real clothes
• 2) The moustache is real.  How do you compete with a kid sporting that kind of man-face-pelt
• 3) He was expelled for starting a corn fight in the cafeteria.  Someone offered him corn and he went absolutely berserk.  One second he was a little kid like us, just with cooler clothes.  The next he was a red and blue tighted blur, his  tiny fists and red sneakers striking everything that dared move close enough.

The bottom line, I guess, is that my day was going pretty normally before I saw this photograph.  Remember that all this took place like 80 years before Nacho Libre.  Now I am not sure of anything.  Well, I am sure that this kid spent all day every day of my kindergarten year rocking.   In my recently flooded brain, he still does.