Manhood for Amateurs, Part 9: Freedom and Adventure

[Soundtrack for this post: Aimee Mann’s The Forgotten Arm; Tom Waits’s Small Change]

On to the eighth essay in Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs (for previous posts on Michael Chabon and MfA, click here). [n.1]

The Wilderness of Childhood

In this essay Chabon writes about growing up in his suburb in Maryland (I’m pretty sure it’s Columbia, a planned community outside of Baltimore), specifically how he and the other kids used to roam his neighborhood and the nearby woods. He also talks about how things have changed, and how his kids, and pretty much all kids these days, don’t get that experience.

I grew up in an exurb of Los Angeles that is completely ringed by hills that buffer it from the surrounding towns. It was a remarkably safe place in the ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s when I lived there—it probably still is. It was pretty consistently ranked the safest city in America with a population over 100,000, and even when it wasn’t number one it was always still in the top three. [n.2] I don’t think I ever once thought I was in any sort of real danger when I roamed my town.

And roam I did. I have memories of walking with a friend to the closest shopping center when I was six. Maybe even five. And because my house was almost square in the middle of our expansive housing tract, the store was about a mile and a quarter away. Through the course of my childhood I made that walk countless times. We used to go to the liquor store or the pharmacy and buy baseball cards and bubble gum, and later the video store to rent movies and games. When we got a little older we’d ride our skateboards or bikes, and we’d go much farther. We’d go to the movies, or Target, or a restaurant, or the hills, or wherever. The park, the library, friends' houses. Sometimes I’d go alone but usually I was with at least one friend. Often we rode in a pack—a little bike or skateboard gang racing down the hills. It was great. We explored everything, we took care of ourselves, and we did it all the time. We even did it in the middle of the night, when our activities were almost never malicious but were often…impolite.

Those sorts of things are things I can’t imagine letting Carver do. Chabon talks about this, about how things have changed. But what’s changed isn’t the level of violence, or abductions—he cites Department of Justice numbers that say the frequency of these things hasn’t really changed all that much, and that abductions by strangers (possibly the biggest fear of many parents) are extremely rare [n.3] —it’s that the horrors are much better known; that parents are practically encouraged to develop deep, irrational fears about things happening to their kids; that we’ve developed a cult-like obsession with protecting our children to a level of absurdity. But he acknowledges that he’s like that too, that he’d never give his kids the kind of freedom he had.

This change is most unfortunate. This is at least the second post I’ve written about how I’m concerned that my children’s childhood is going to be different than mine and thus extremely disturbing. But I honestly think there’s more to it than just a “kids these days” and “the world is going to hell” thing. Chabon talks about how children wandering their neighborhoods and the nearby wilderness is a historical thing that pretty much every generation so far has shared. And I think that’s true. My grandfather and father were raised in very different places (my grandfather in depression era Prescott Arizona, my father in post-war Los Angeles), but they still shared a similarity in their childhoods that were rooted in parentless adventures. My dad used to tool around his town on a Flexi Flyer or Flexi Racer and was in near constant peril of smashing into or under a moving or parked car. He has stories of riding his bike around town, going fishing, sand skiing, heading down to the beach, et cetera et cetera, without a hint of parental involvement. Much of my childhood was the same. I sometimes liken it to the movie Stand By Me—it was always a group of kids making their own adventures, heading out on their own quests, walking down railroad tracks out in the middle of nowhere, with no adults involved (or even informed). [n.4]

These parentless adventures were invaluable in creating independence, developing problem solving skills, socialization, and so on. I have been a fiercely independent person since I was about 13, and while I was a child in many ways for many years after that, I was quite capable. I was very prepared to leave home at 18, and I’ve never felt like I needed help in getting by (except when it comes to dry-wall repairs and electrical work—that’s an inside joke). What happens to the kid who doesn’t have that? I don’t know; all the people I knew very well when they were in their late teens and early twenties had it.

So when I think about this issue I can’t help but think about whether it would be better to live in the suburbs, or a small town, rather than in the city. Everywhere I’ve lived in the last 10 years has been near a city center. I want to live in the city. But I’m not sure if living in the city is the best thing for my son. My wife grew up in the city of Chicago, but I don’t know enough about her childhood to discern how it compared to mine pros and cons wise. All I know is that just about everything I loved about my childhood was possible only because I lived in a safe exurb. But I also don’t really know what I was missing by not being in the city as a child. So I don’t know.

But even if we were to move to a suburb or exurb or small town, would it even then be the same or similar to my youth? Or are parents so paranoid even in those places that that lifestyle of unsupervised children roaming the streets and hills and woods is gone everywhere? I think it might be. Chabon mentions how one of his kids got a bike and wanted to ride around, but the only thing he was comfortable letting her do was to peddle to the store with him walking behind her. He also mentioned that there are two nine-year-old kids on his street (in Berkeley), one kid a couple houses up the street and another a couple houses down. These two nine-year-olds have lived a few houses from each other their entire lives and have never met. So he notes: even if he were to stifle his fears and let his daughter ride around on her bike without supervision, who would she ride with? No other kids are out there doing it.

Note 1: I just looked back and realized that it’s been more than a month since I wrote a substantive post (stuff other than lists of what I’ve been reading on line and words from Sutree). I’ve also been thinking that I’ve been dragging out these Manhood for Amateurs posts for way longer than I thought I would. I’m hoping to get through the rest of the posts much more quickly.

Note 2: Thousand Oaks, a neighboring town, and Irvine were always the other two.

Note 3: 115 total in 1999.

Note 4: Coincidentally, after I wrote this part of the post (it’s taken me a few sittings), I got an email from a friend who mentioned that he always thought of one of our mutual friends as the Corey Feldman character from Stand By Me of our group.

Scary Scarry

I was a huge fan of Richard Scarry's books when I was a kid. And we have some for Carver that I hope he learns to love.

I came across this the other day and I was literally rolling around unable to control my laughter:

It's from a website that has a bunch of photoshopped Richard Scarry stuff. I like some of the others, but this is the only one that made me laugh uncontrollably.

Tom Petty and Eddie Money (and the glories of the Internet)

I’m in the process of putting together a “mixed tape,” one that, depending on how you look at it, could be considered long overdue. But in my defense these sorts of things are not easy for me. The first “draft” is going to have easily more than 20 hours of music. I’m guessing the whole thing will take me way, way more than 40 hours to put together. If you think I’m joking, you don’t know everything about me as well as you might think you do.

Just now I added some Tom Petty and some Eddie Money to the draft playlist, and I want to share a couple things:

Tom Petty

Old Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers stuff is just awesome. Unfortunately, Tom Petty seems to have had totally lost his mind by the late ‘90s. I blame it on what I assume is his totally out of control drug use. I don’t know how to feel about this. Can I damn the drugs that killed his brain, and thus ruined his later musical output, when I think the drugs probably had a lot to do with his earlier production in a positive and possibly necessary way?

An aside: One of my sisters once ran into him at a gas station in the Valley and shared a joint with him. I just heard this story and for some reason feel grossly slighted for not having been told such awesome news earlier.

Here’s one of my favorite Tom Petty songs and definitely my favorite TP&tHB video:

Don’t Come Around Here No More

Eddie Money

Eddie Money is the man.

One of my sisters died a little more than 12 years ago, when she was 29. It was undoubtedly the hardest thing I’ve suffered. She really liked Eddie Money. One of the most precious memories of my childhood—of my entire life—is of watching Eddie Money and Ronnie Spector perform Take Me Home Tonight on David Letterman’s show. It aired when I was 10 or 11, but I remember it like it was a couple years ago. My sister and I were simultaneously rocking out, and also laughing hysterically at the fact that Ronnie Spector spends about half the video facing away from the camera, shaking her butt. Never ending is the butt shaking. This moment was, seriously, one of the top-five most memorable moments of my entire childhood.

When I was thinking about this, just now, I thought, “I bet that video is on YouTube.” And sure enough, it is. In a few important ways I think the Internet is ruining my life, but this is one of its magical, wonderful, amazing properties. In less than 30 seconds I was transported back to the late eighties, was instantly taken back and offered the chance to live in one of my most precious memories. YouTube, with all the ridiculous crap on it, has allowed me to relive a moment, has allowed me to relive a brief few minutes with the memory of my sister, and for that I say God bless you Internet.

(Check out Paul totally rocking the keyboards! and I’m pretty sure that’s David Sanborn on the sax—who knew?)

If I could walk on water, and if I could find some way to prove—if I could walk on water, would you believe in me? My love is so true.

Christmas and Parenting

Anne, Carver, and I have now lived together as a family for two Christmases, and for two Christmases Anne has jokingly but seriously tried to talk me out of getting a real Christmas tree. [n.1] Anne’s suggestions have, however, been unsuccessful, for I am adamant about having a real Christmas tree for Carver.

Not only do I insist on having a real tree, but I also am extremely particular about the lights that are on it, what sits atop it, and the music that is played throughout the season. I’m particular about how we do Christmas because I want Carver to have what I see as the right sort of Christmas accoutrements, so to speak.

After my mom moved out when I was just about 16, my dad and I became a bit lazy about Christmas trees. After a year or two we gave up on real ones, and decided to bring in a potted tangerine tree that we had out by the pool. It was a small tree in a huge pot, beanpole thin all the way up and topped by a nearly round plume of green and tangerines. While we noted that the tangerines served as fine ornaments, if not technically, we also threw on a small string of lights, a handful of cheap ornaments, and even some tinsel (something we’d never put on a real tree). It was awesome, and most of my friends viewed it with envy as the coolest symbol of bachelor ease they’d ever seen. The tangerine tree was all well and good for that point in my life, but for Carver’s early youth, I want him to have the things that I had and cherished about Christmastime.

I have many fond memories of Christmastime, but most of my fondest involve our tree in one way or another. I can still see in my mind’s eye the soft multicolored glow and twinkle of the lights as I lay on the couch, dreaming of Santa and enraptured in the joys of the season. I can still feel the excitement I felt when we’d go to a lot, or a self-cut farm, and pick out the year’s tree. I can still smell the evergreen. All of these memories remind me of good things, family and hope and joy and love. They are precious memories to me and I want my son to be able to have similar memories of his own.

Of course he would still have his own memories even if we had a fake tree, but no one can convince me that it would be the same, that the memories would be as sweet.

I have serious literary support for my obsession with the importance of the tree in Christmas memory making. Truman Capote, in his A Christmas Memory (hello? can there be a greater authority on Christmas memories?), discusses the joy of the hunt for the perfect tree. [n.2] There are also positive tree references in Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Cather, Cummings, Thackeray, and I suspect many more. And here’s a great, very apt one from Dickens:

"There was everything, and more." This motley collection of odd objects, clustering on the tree like magic fruit, and flashing back the bright looks directed towards it from every side—some of the diamond-eyes admiring it were hardly on a level with the table, and a few were languishing in timid wonder on the bosoms of pretty mothers, aunts, and nurses—made a lively realisation of the fancies of childhood; and set me thinking how all the trees that grow and all the things that come into existence on the earth, have their wild adornments at that well-remembered time.

Being now at home again, and alone, the only person in the house awake, my thoughts are drawn back, by a fascination which I do not care to resist, to my own childhood. I begin to consider, what do we all remember best upon the branches of the Christmas Tree of our own young Christmas days, by which we climbed to real life.

Straight, in the middle of the room, cramped in the freedom of its growth by no encircling walls or soon-reached ceiling, a shadowy tree arises; and, looking up into the dreamy brightness of its top—for I observe in this tree the singular property that it appears to grow downward towards the earth—I look into my youngest Christmas recollections!

Of course Carver is his own person and his life need not mirror mine. He can and will have his own memories. But why would I not want to share with him what I so loved? Isn’t that part of what bonds us? Isn’t that part of what parenting is? I say yes. When he becomes old enough to make his own decisions and have his own preferences, I’ll be perfectly happy to entertain them. If some day he, like my friend Marco’s son, decides that he doesn’t like the idea of cutting down a tree just to later throw it out (or, more properly, recycle), we can consider other options. But for now I want to share one of the most precious aspects of my life with my son, and I hope his Christmas memories are even greater than mine.

Note 1: By real I mean an actual formerly live tree, preferably some sort of fir.

Note 2: My Christmas memories don’t involve hiking into the woods to cut down a tree, but if I ever live somewhere where it is possible, I’d like to start that tradition.

Manhood for Amateurs, Part 2

I saw Michael Chabon last night. He’s touring to support Manhood for Amateurs and spoke at the Chicago Public Library. He read two pieces from the book, answered questions, and then signed books. I had a really nice time. Three notable impressions: (1) the guy can read, and by that I don’t just mean he’s literate, which of course he is, but that he really does a superb job reading his essays, possibly the best I’ve heard live; (2) he’s very funny and charming when answering questions and interacting with the audience; and (3) he’s very attractive in a sort of bookish “cute” way, I can see why the ladies would be into him, and why some gay men really wished he was gay. If he comes to your town, I recommend seeing him.

The Loser’s Club

The first essay in Manhood for Amateurs is called The Loser’s Club (I’d like to avoid spoiling the essays for those who haven’t read them, so I won’t do thorough summaries, but I’ve got to set it up, right?). He writes about the time when he was 10 and started a comic book club, complete with a newsletter that he did the layout for and typed using nothing but a typewriter (he even made columns and sidebars!). He rents a room at a community center and advertises the first meeting. His mom helps him set the room up and then leaves him there. Only one person shows up, a young boy, but he leaves almost immediately after seeing no one but a lone, lonely boy and his newsletters.

Carver and I visited my mom and sister and pretty much the entire maternal side of my family about two months ago. We drove into Neah Bay for Makah Days, my tribe’s annual celebration. As we were looking for a place to park, I saw a pair of kids running a lemonade stand in a very bad location, business wise. I pointed them out and asked my mom if she remembered the time my friends Chad, Sheri, and I set up a lemonade stand at the bottom of our cul-de-sac, which is quite possibly the least trafficked spot in the entire city. In the few hours we sat down there I think we saw one car, which did not stop, and one pedestrian who was nice enough to act excited about the lemonade and suggest he’d come back if he could scrounge up some money. My mom admitted, for the first time, that she hated it when we did “things like that,” admitting that she always knew they’d be horrible failures but also not wanting to be discouraging.

Chabon says that this failed comic book club meeting was when he began to think of himself as a failure, and that no one gets past age 10 without learning that the glory of success is always trumped by the pains of failure, that a criticism is not evened out by a compliment. But when I think about that lemonade stand, I don’t remember ever being disappointed. I don’t remember feeling like we failed. In fact, if memory serves, we actually did it again. Granted, we were under Chabon’s designated failure-recognizing age of 10, so maybe that had something to do with it. I certainly have a fear of failure now, and I’ve had it for a long time.

I had a birthday party when I turned six but didn’t have another until my dad decided to throw one for me when I turned 21. I never wanted to have a party, because I didn’t want it to fail. To this day I’m very unlikely to throw a party or host a dinner because I’m convinced no one will show, and it’ll hurt, it’ll be undeniable evidence that people don’t care about me. Without that evidence I can go on thinking otherwise.

While I have my means of trying to protect myself, flawed as they are, I don’t know what to do when it comes to my son—I certainly don’t want to raise another me. At this point I suppose the best thing to do is what Chabon’s mom did when she rented the room and helped him set up chairs, and as my parents did when they didn’t discourage my lemonade stand. I want him to try, to put himself out there when he’s ready, but I also can’t stand the idea of him getting hurt and becoming jaded, of his dreams being crushed.

My friend Matthew once mentioned to me how during a trip they took with a group of friends his son first experienced another person being consistently very mean to him, and how hard that was to watch. Now that I have a child of my own I know what Matthew meant, and when that day comes for Carver, when someone is cruel to him, it’ll break my heart. Which is why I’m worried about how to deal with his lemonade stand and comic book club aspirations. It’ll break my heart the first time life is cruel to him too.

Manhood for Amateurs

[Soundtrack for this post: Stan Meets Chet and Kill to Get Crimson]

I bought Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs last week. It’s a collection of essays about being a father, husband, and son. I’ve never read anything by Michael Chabon (pronounced, according to him, Shea like the stadium, Bon like Bon Jovi), but I really like the movie Wonder Boys, which was based on one of his novels. I heard him giving an interview on NPR last week and thought the book sounded like something I could learn from and perhaps identify with. [n.1]

I’ve read the first three or four essays and each one has either caused me to think back to my childhood or my experiences as a new father, and they’ve all sparked a desire to write down those experiences and the related stories. So that’s what I plan on doing. As I read through Manhood for Amateurs, I’ll post responses to the essays that cause a spark that leads to ignition.

But before I do that…

I’d like to comment on the back cover of Manhood for Amateurs. It contains “praise for Michael Chabon” in the form of six quotations. Here are excerpts from the first four: (1) “Probably the premier prose stylist—the Updike—of his generation”; (2) “He is one of the best writers of English prose alive” [n.2]; (3) “The best writer of English prose in this country”; and (4) “A prose magician.” My point, in case it isn’t obvious, is that HarperCollins must really like the word prose, or maybe reviewers feel like it is a mandatory buzzword when talking about Chabon. Either way, it’s ridiculous.

The Kingdom of Snow and Ghosts

Before I start with the stuff in the book, I’m going to begin with an essay that Chabon has up on his website (you can find it here). This essay is similar to the stuff in the book and it’s called The Kingdom of Snow and Ghosts. The gist of the essay is that when he was young he had five channels on his TV, received through “rabbit ears,” and he discusses how the change to the present’s hundreds of always-on channels is in some ways a loss for his kids and their peers. He talks about the incredible, in some ways marvelous, boredom that resulted from the dearth of programming options, and how kids will watch anything, no matter how bad, rather than nothing.

This might sound like a typical “kids these days” or “things were better back in the day” type essay, and maybe it is, but I don’t read it that way an that’s not what I want to focus on anyway.

The “kids will watch anything rather than nothing” thing really hit home for me. When I was young, say 12 and under, I would watch just about anything, even if it pained me. I remember watching Pink Floyd The Wall repeatedly with my sisters in my parent’s bedroom. I was probably seven. My sisters rented it and watched it three times in one day. I hated it. I had no idea what was going on and it bored me into a near coma-like state, yet I watched it with them. I watched it with them three times and bitched and complained the whole time. I could’ve left the room, I could’ve watched the other TV, I could’ve gone outside, I could’ve done countless other things, but I sat there and watched three times over a movie I absolutely loathed. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe it was a desire to try to get into what my older siblings were into. Maybe it was a fascination with the film even though I had no idea what was going on—I still recall the scenes with the children falling into the meat grinder and the bullets on the train tracks. Maybe I just wanted the company.

The same thing happened with the Little House on the Prairie. I hated that show too, but I still watched it. I even briefly got into the Young and the Restless one summer when my sister broke her leg and was more or less bedridden—every day I’d actively go into her room and watch it with her, even though (at least at first) I hated it.

Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I think I agree with Chabon that there was something magical about that boredom, a level of boredom I haven’t felt since.

That’s not to say all I did was watch TV. I feel like a had a pretty idyllic suburban childhood, despite a one or two year period where I had a deep fear of being murdered in my sleep that required therapy (a topic for another post) and more than a few problems in my parent’s marriage that ultimately lead to divorce. I had a tight group of excellent friends, and we spent a great deal of time playing outside, running games of football or baseball at the top of my cul-de-sac, making M80-charged cannons in my backyard, playing hide-and-seek or freeze tag or “swords” or gun fighting. We also spent most summer days and evenings in my pool, sometimes only getting out long enough to eat. I also once built a very elaborate cat trap in my garage, something similar to what you put together in the game Mouse Trap, to catch stray cats that I thought were holing up in the garage. I actually caught a cat, which, considering my trap, bordered on miraculous (now that I think about it, I can’t help but wonder if my parent’s rigged it). We of course also played our fair share of video games, but as with the TV it never seemed like it got in the way of our more active fun.

Now that there is so much more TV programming—and the Internet with its social networking, online video, and all—I can’t help but wonder if it’ll reduce the amount of old fashioned (?) outside fun. When I was young we had cartoons available for an hour or two in the afternoon on weekdays and on Saturday mornings. Now you can watch cartoons whenever you want with the Cartoon Network and the kid specific channels out there, not to mention DVRs.

There’s something to be said for limited opportunities. I remember sitting in my friend Chad’s room when we were probably around seven or eight trying to record songs off of the radio. We’d have a tape in the deck and would sit there and wait for a song we wanted to come on and then we’d hit record. Once Chad was hoping to get a copy of Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust. I wonder how long he waited, how many songs he sat through that he didn’t know and didn’t care about before he got it, if he ever got it. I couldn’t imagine doing that now, and my son will almost surely never know what its like to have that experience. Within seconds he could find a copy on iTunes or even a video for the song on YouTube. My son will never know what it’s like to miss an episode of a TV show and have no way of finding out what happened, only hoping that it will be rerun sometime, most likely months later. He’ll never know what it’s like to stay up late enough to see the channel “sign off” with the Stars and Stripes waving proudly before turning into a wall of static. He’ll never know what it’s like to have to sit through 45 minutes of the inanities of the nightly news to catch his favorite team’s score or, worse, have to wait until the next day’s newspaper.

Perhaps in the grand scheme of things, being able to find out the Dodgers’ score in seconds on ESPN.com, or even “watch” the whole game on GameCast, compared to having to wait for the results in tomorrow’s newspaper, isn’t a huge loss. Of course in many ways it’s a big gain, but it is a change that will certainly have an effect on how he relates to sports and information in general. While I certainly appreciate being able to get my scores with a single click of my touchpad, I think there is absolutely something good lost with the forced waiting and patience, the anticipation, and it’s a loss to be mourned.

Note 1: About my use of “identify with” [Did I end my sentence with a preposition? So fucking what if I did.]: I initially wrote “relate with” but then wasn’t sure if it should be “relate to.” I did an Internet search, because I was too lazy to get up and get a book, but wasn’t satisfied with the results, [n.1a] so I had to get up and get my copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage. Garner—a man for whom I have a deep respect nearing reverence—calls relate to a “voguish expression,” which in Garner-ese is a damning pronouncement indeed. He links relate to to identify, and under identify he notes that identify in the sense of “to understand sympathetically or intuitively, esp. through experience” is “often disapproved of because when used in that way, identify is a VOGUE WORD—more specifically, a pop-psychology CASUALISM—bearing a nontraditional sense.” OH SNAP! and DAMN! He continues to say that a more conservative writer would simply use understand. But come on, understand doesn’t mean the same thing in this context, and I was too lazy to try to think of a different way to put it, so I went with indentify with. Deal with it.

Note 1a: I often do Internet searches when I’m looking for a quick answer about grammar or usage. The top results given by Google always contain English language forums where “non-native” English speakers discuss grammar, usage, words, et cetera. There are almost certainly all sorts of sample size problems here, but it makes me think that non-native English speakers work a whole lot harder at speaking English properly than most native speakers do.

Note 2: I think that would be better as “one of the best living writers of…” Don’t you? [n.2a]

Note 2a: Sorry, again, for the notes. Anne, I swear I’m not doing it to piss you off. But really, you’ve got to admit that none of this belonged in the main text, but I wanted to mention it, so . . . .

Love/Hate: Carlos Santana

Why I love Santana

My first concert ever was Santana at the Universal Amphitheater just outside of Los Angeles. I was seven or eight years old. I went with my friend Chad and his parents. At that point I could recognize Black Magic Woman or Oye Como Va, but I didn’t know much more than that about Santana.

I had a very good time at the show—it was very exciting. But there are only two memories from that show that have survived the test of time. In no particular order:

Santana, in case you’re weird and don’t know, is a talented guitar player—he can play a mean solo. Memory number one is Chad’s dad, immediately parroted by Chad and me, yelling something along the lines of “Blow up your amp!” Chad and I later noticed smoke rising from the neck of Carlos’s guitar. I cannot effectively relay the excitement we felt upon seeing this smoke, as we elbowed each other and marveled about how Santana’s guitar playing was so awesome and fierce that his guitar was smoldering and about to combust. To say I was somewhat let down when I realized that Santana simply stored his lit cigarettes between the strings of his guitar’s headstock would be an understatement.

Let’s just say, without incriminating anyone, that at this point I knew what marijuana was and what it smelled like. There was a ridiculous amount of marijuana smoking going on at this Santana show. Memory number two is this: As we’re enjoying the show, Chad and I notice this gargantuan joint making its way around the row in front of us. This was an absolutely colossal joint, like the one from that scene in Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke. It was the size of a medium banana, both in length and girth (without the curve). So this joint is getting passed around. Eventually it makes its way to the lady sitting next to me. She takes a hit and then—keep in mind I’m seven or eight years old—gives it to me. I’m dumbfounded, so I give it to Chad. This is the image that will stay with me for as long as I exist: tiny little Chad in his denim jacket with the Corvette patch, holding this massive joint—his fingers don’t make it all the way around the monster J—looking at me with this “What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?” look on his face. Then…then Chad tries to pass it to his MOM, who is horrified and probably had a mental seizure right then. Chad ends up giving it back to me, and I give it back to the lady next to me.

I will forever treasure my first concert experience. Thank you Mr. and Mrs. Grothe.

Why I Hate Santana

He unleashed Rob Thomas’s “Smooth” on the world, which became arguably the most popular song in Billboard charting history. I loathe Smooth. Mood, moon, cool, and groove, do not rhyme with smooth. Maybe they’re assonant rhymes, but I hate it nonetheless.

Heard and Seen

A Completely Unexpected Follow-up

I was in a fast food burger joint filling my drink when I overheard the end of what was a very brief job interview. I first noticed the applicant when I walked by her a few minutes earlier, but I didn’t know she was an applicant at the time. I silently noted that she had a red bandana around her head and a solid red jacket—it was conspicuous enough for me to think that she was mildly “flamed up” [n.1]. I found her decision to sport the rag a little odd when I realized she was interviewing for a job. Anyway. Here’s the end of the interview:

Bossman: So, who do you know that works here?

Applicant: [Pointing at a box on her application] That, uh, that right there.

Bossman: I don’t have anyone who works here by that name.

Applicant: Oh, I thought that said emergency contact.

Bossman: No, why’d you come here? Someone, you know someone here?

Applicant: Oh, oh. I know Linda, uh, uh…

Bossman: Johnson, Linda Johnson? [n.2]

Applicant: Yeah, yeah.

Bossman: [Very severely and seriously] Don’t ever mention that, tell anyone that. [All severity instantly gone] So, I’d like to take a chance with you. What’s your availability?

A Blown Assumption

At the burger joint I’m sitting next to a man and a woman of similar age (30ish) and apparent social standing who are dining together. As the man tears open their shared bag of french fries he says, “Big ol’ bag-o-fries! Get ready for some artery hardenin’…” At which point I think, oh, a little awkward attempt at ice-braking humor, they’re probably on a first date [n.3], and just as I’m finishing the thought he finishes his sentence with “…ass blowin’ action.” At which point I was pretty sure they weren’t on a first date.

Sword Play

On my way out of my barbershop [n.4] I see four boys (10ish) playing with approximately 5' sections of PVC pipe. Each with their own. They are obviously “sword” fighting [n.5]. It immediately made me think back to when I used to play the exact same game with my friends, though we had the good sense to do it in my backyard, not out in public where everyone could see what dorks we were [n.6] [n.7]. I was flooded with warm and happy nostalgia. I couldn’t believe that when I was a kid that I ever desired to be older (I did). I realized, perhaps for the first time, that my severe “the grass is always greener…” outlook has been with me for a long, long time.

n.1: I know what that means 'cause I’m cool like that. I'm not sure, though, if one can be "mildly" flamed up.

n.2: The name has been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty alike.

n.3: Trust me, it really seemed like it was a first date, though I admit the location was odd. But, hey, I took my first-date-ever to a Burger King.

n.4 State Street Barbers on Webster. Ask for Dana.

n.5 The cute, innocent young-kid kind, not the dorktastic older teen and adult kind.

n.6 Perhaps they are victims of tiny city yards.

n.7 Sorry for all of the notes. I’m currently reading two David Foster Wallace books.