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Cmos’ enormous shipment of loose LEGO bricks arrived on his thirty-first birthday. You might think it odd that a 31 year old man with no children would spend nearly $800 on an enormous but meticulously chosen list of loose LEGO bricks, but this was a new age. A new age of being allowed to play with toys from when we were six.

Cmos had invited us all around to ogle his amazing new LEGO purchase, but only my crazy ex-third flatmate Victor Ninox and I had shown up. And the boots of course, but they were a given.

Excitedly, Cmos upended bags and bags of LEGO onto the carpet of his flat, hampered only slightly by having his right arm in a sling due to an accident on Coogee beach, which involved Cmos, a pretty girl, Cmos not paying enough attention, and an unexpected battle between a seagull and a pigeon for Cmos’ last chip.

“So…” I said uncertainly. “Is this a thing now? LEGO for grownups? Are geeks really doing this, building LEGO alone in their flats?”

“Hells yes!” cried Vic, dropping onto hands and knees and running his fingers through the LEGO sort of like a pirate captain running his hands through loose doubloons. “Look at how awesome all these pieces are! Here’s a little pirate captain! He has an eyepatch and a parrot and everything!”

It certainly was a far cry from the fire engine I remembered dimly from my third birthday, where half the firefighters had their legs permanently fused together. Incomprehensible bits of plastic danced on the floor as Cmos and Vic almost literally rolled around in the stuff.

“What are you even going to do with all this?” I demanded. “There aren’t any instructions!”

“Dude,” said Cmos, eyes shining. “This isn’t about instructions. All the LEGO kits suck except for the cool unique pieces they give you. This is about MOCs.”

“Mocks?”

“MOC. It stands for My Own Creation. There’s websites and everything, people build just the most awesome stuff. Like Cthulu dioramas and massive spaceships and intricate medieval villages. Anything you can think of.”

I frowned. It still looked like two men with a collective age of 64 playing with toys.

“I thought LEGO was all about branding now,” I said. “You know, Star Wars, Harry Potter… I thought I saw LEGO Batman. It’s a game, anyway.”

“Hells yes!” said Vic again. “Indiana Jones too. Those kits are so sweet.”

“No Vic,” Cmos corrected him. “Those kits all suck. But the unique pieces are cool. Especially the Star Wars stuff. With all this though, I’m going to build an exact replica of my apartment block, except my apartment is going to take up the whole top floor and have a pool and a sauna and a control room where I can launch ICBMs at that cyber cafe in Glebe where they have the doorstep that tripped me up.”

I rolled my eyes.

“No way dude,” said Vic, almost drooling. “You should totally make MOCs of all the most awesome games. Like a Team Fortress 2 MOC. You’d have to order some more orange bricks, but it could be awesome. And you should do Wing Commander stuff. Arrows and Scimitars and Raptors and Rapiers. Dralthis and Salthis. The Tiger’s Claw.”

I had to admit I was impressed that Vic was able to dredge all this gaming knowledge out of his wretched brain. Cmos, for his part, had a considered look in his eye.

“What about some World of Warcraft MOCs?” he wondered aloud. “I could totally make an awesome Molten Core or Sunwell Plateau, and then show it to Blizzard and they’d be like, woah, we should get LEGO to make these for real and also pay Cmos for being awesome.”

I collapsed onto the couch with a sigh.

“LEGO is definitely the Meccano of the twenty-first century,” said Vic importantly. He held up the little pirate captain and made him do a dance. “Shiver me lanyard!”

Working with an awkward but undeniable skill, Cmos assembled a series of small yellow bricks into a passable pac-man. “It’s amazing to think,” he said, “that back in the 50s toy stores wouldn’t stock this stuff because it was made of plastic. They thought people would only ever buy wooden or metal toys.”

“I had some lead soldiers,” Vic announced. He pulled off the pirate captain’s head and replaced it with a policeman’s. He also appeared to be chewing on the parrot, which was just a little bit too much regression for my liking.

“Man I need to order more bricks!” said Cmos suddenly, despite the massive pile heaped before him. He leapt to his feet, presumably to run to his PC and hit up bricklink.com, but naturally he slipped on a batch of grey spaceship wings and went crashing to the floor. Bits of LEGO became, perhaps indelibly, buried in his forehead.

Vic, for his part, was given such a fright that he swallowed the LEGO parrot and began choking immediately. Wearily, I hauled myself off the couch, picked Vic up and gave him the Heimlich manoeuvre. I was well practised. The parrot shot out of Vic’s mouth and hit Cmos in the eye. Cmos wailed and went over backwards, catching his sleeve on his bookshelf and bringing the whole thing crashing down.

Eventually the dust settled. The LEGO, as LEGO is wont to do, was scattered everywhere. Cmos moaned and Vic gasped.

“See,” I said, “this is why you guys should stick to software.”