Freeing up a Sunday night

The last football game I attended with my father was a little over 20 years ago on the day after Thanksgiving. The home state Hogs were playing the Tigers of my alma mater in my home town. Dad had two extra tickets, and my brother and I jumped at the chance to see a game with the old man, even though both teams were terrible that year, and the game was essentially meaningless.

The temperature was in the mid-30s with a cold drizzle at game time, and it was raining hard by the end of the first quarter. The game was not going well for the home team, and the situation was plainly not going to improve in the second half. Soaked, freezing, and miserable, my brother and I decided that a hot shower and a cold drink were called for, so at half time we told Dad we were leaving. "All right, then," he growled from under his poncho, showing no inclination to join us. He didn't call us pussies out loud, but it was clearly implied. He stayed until the bitter (30-7) end, and never mentioned the game to us again.

This is a long way of saying that football is important in my family. We all played growing up. My parents had season tickets most years. When other girls were hanging David Cassidy posters, my sister kept an autographed picture of Joe Ferguson on her bedroom wall. I think Archie Manning was on my mother's list. She still watches football every Fall weekend between naps, and both of my brothers are active on the sports blogs.

The trouble started when they moved the game indoors. Image from here.

So it's not a trivial thing for me to skip the Super Bowl. I have watched them all* since Super Bowl -1 (the 1965 NFL Championship game). I saw a few epic games, and more than a few I could have done without. I watched the Packers, Colts, Cowboys, Dolphins, Cowboys again, Steelers, 49ers, da Bears, Broncos, and the rest put it all together and grab the big prize. I suffered with the Bills through four straight Super Bowl losses. I even lived long enough to see my Saints make it to the big dance and win.

I have been falling out of love with big time football for a while now, but I seem to have passed my personal tipping point. It's not just the concussions and other health problems. A lot of people work jobs that are every bit as dangerous for way less than $10 million a year, though when Ditka says the game is not worth the risk, that gets my attention. It's not even the animal abuse, domestic violence, and murders. They select these people for aggressiveness and violent tendencies, then pump them full of drugs and give them more money at one time than most of us would earn in three lifetimes. Am I the only one who is not surprised when some of them don't act like model citizens?

No, the camelback straw for me was watching the Patriots clearly think it was funny that someone caught them cheating. Worse, I found myself laughing along with them.** It seems to have finally dawned on me that the NFL owners not only don't care about the players or the fans, they don't have any respect for the game. Through scandal after embarrassment, the league shoots a big finger at the fans, lights another cigar with a billion dollar bill, and watch the money-machine keep cranking.

I am not trying to start a movement or anything. I expect everyone I know to watch the game, and I wouldn't expect them to choose differently. I know that neither the sponsors nor the league will notice me gone. My personal choices are the only way I have to shape my world, so I am making this one. Who knows, maybe I'll be back next year.

My father loved football for what it taught young men about leadership, teamwork, sportsmanship, and perseverance through pain and heartbreak. He liked how the game brought families together, and gave manly men some way to express emotions. He loved the game itself. I don't think he would like how professional football is being run. He would probably still watch, and while everyone else was standing around eating snacks and discussing commercials, he would be glued to the biggest television in the house, watching every play to the bitter end. But he would definitely grumble about the erosion of respect for his favorite sport.

All right, then.

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* I may have missed one or two being on the road or working, but if I did I don't remember, so they must not have been important. I am also a little fuzzy on the particulars of the 1965 NFL Championship game, other than that it was in color.

** I'm not picking on the Patriots especially. I wasn't particularly enamored of Marshawn Lynch's eloquent defense of his personal right to privacy, either. There is not a team in the league with clean hands. New England are just the latest, and their "what's the big deal" attitude is particular galling to me.

My dirty little secret

Hello, my name is Chris, and I'm a gamer.

It's been forty-eight hours since I last gamed.

Over the past few weeks I have created a super-intelligence that will rule the world, restored the Illuminati to power, and destroyed the global communications network, plunging the world into a new dark age.  I have killed or incapacitated hundreds of terrorists, shadow government soldiers, cyborgs, mercenaries, karkians, greasels, and greys (don't ask), as well as a few innocent bystanders, policemen, health care professionals, and rats.

They are still with me. When I close my eyes I see them. They appear in the sights of my tricked out sniper rifle. I can feel the comfortable kick of the assault shotgun, and hear the thrilling "whoosh" of the rockets from my GEP gun. The unsolved puzzles and paths not taken float through my mind like ghosts.

It all began innocently enough, stopping at the Carousel Sandwich Shoppe for a few games of pinball every day on my walk home from junior high.*  Before I knew it, I was pinballing at every opportunity, slipping away from friends and family in restaurants and shopping centers for "a quick game." I even watched Tommy. Twice. There is a rumor from my sophomore year of college that four or five guys took a bunch of windowpane and shattered the record high scores on all of the machines in our dorm in a single night. I can't comment on rumors, but I do remember seeing a guy playing the Gottleib's Quick Draw one-handed, and doing quite well.

I don't remember my exact high score on this machine, but I rolled over the counters on at least one occasion. 

Pictures from here.

During my senior year of high school, the Minute Man hamburger joint and teen hangout near my house installed Battle Tanks, an early arcade game where you shot wireframe polygons at other wireframe polygons shaped like tanks. Pyramids and squares provided cover. Quarters flowed like water as I sought to master this new and wonderful genre. But video games were still rare and expensive conversation pieces, and pinball ruled for several more years.

It was a Sunday night about five years later, in what they would now call a sports bar on Northwest Highway in Dallas that I sat down at the coffee table version of Pong that heralded the coming revolution. Within another year I owned an Atari 2600, and the future ex and I spent countless hours jousting, repelling space invaders, destroying asteroids, and responding to whatever other challenges came along. I'm pretty sure Missile Command is the primary cause of the chronic pain in the back of my left hand.

Real char-broiled burgers with grated cheddar and BBQ sauce. 

And a back room full of pool  and pinball. What more could a teenage boy ask? 

Picture from here. 

A couple of years later I was managing a community center in a bedroom community, and talked the powers that be into installing a video arcade. The idea was that it would keep the kids in the center after school instead of them being on the street, and would generate much needed income. I spent the better part of four years mastering Donkey Kong, Tron, Galaga, and twenty or thirty more "classic" arcade games.

I managed to kick the habit for a couple of years, mostly due to constant relocation, even more constant working, and a lack of disposable income. The next revelation came in 1988 when we brought home a Packard Bell 500 XT computer with a screaming 8 megahertz processor, 14" amber monitor, and a giant 20 mb hard drive. The machine came with Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy games loaded, which kept the now-very-soon-to-be-ex occupied, but my life changed (again) for good when I bought a copy of Zork** at the local software and dot-matrix printer store. I wandered into dark places and was eaten by grues on many nights until approaching dawn drove me to bed. The richness of a game that presented puzzles to solve, that I could talk to, and that always offered a different adventure in the next round was like a drug to me, and in some ways set the course of my life since I first typed "open mailbox." I had to know how this was possible. How could such a wondrous machine be built?

The years after this road to Damascus experience saw hundreds -- no thousands -- of hours spent with Leisure Suit Larry, SpaceQuest, Aces of both the Pacific and Europe, F-19 Stealth Fighter, Doom, Myst, Riven, LightHouse, Empires, Schism, Fallout, and countless others, driving, flying, solving puzzles, jumping chasms, turning valves, building and destroying civilizations. Through it all, gritty-eyed, sleep deprived, distracted, and various levels of unprepared for my day's activities, I kept my secret from all but those closest to me. I didn't talk about games, go to LAN parties, or join gamer groups. Mostly because I was a grownup. Oh, and the shame thing.

It's been close to ten years since I seriously played a game. I just can't afford to waste 40% of my time on fictitious adventures anymore. And I can't stay up like I used to could.***  But now Fate -- or perhaps the Goliath Corporation -- has rolled a twenty and thrown games into my professional path in a big way. Perhaps I will finally be able to put my enthusiasm to work in some productive way. Or perhaps I will learn why obsessions make bad professions. The one thing I do know is that I'm going to be spending more time than I have in a long time thinking about games.

So wish me luck. And if you see a dragon sneaking up behind me, give a little yell or something.

---

* This is an institution they had in the olden days that covered grades 7-9. Apparently, it didn't really catch on. The middle school concept came along when I was in 9th grade, but they didn't completely get rid of junior highs in my town for another decade or so.

**You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

*** Sometimes spelled use-ta-could. It's a legitimate Southern word. Look it up.

Road Stories: The day the music died

About halfway through my road career I worked for a few months on Linda Ronstadt's Born in the USA tour. Whatever you may think of Ronstadt's work, it's hard to overstate her popularity at that time, and her influence on all sorts of music. Besides her undeniable position as the first female rock superstar, she exposed large audiences to the work of people like Warren Zevon and Elvis Costello, and introduced a new generation to the likes of Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and the Everly Brothers. Her refusal to perform within one of the prescribed formats influenced a number of subsequent performers to "play what the music demanded."

Linda was already having intermittent struggles with her weight by this time, 

but she was always down to fighting weight for the start of a tour. 

She rocked this Cub Scout uniform, and it was her favorite concert outfit for a while. 

Picture from here.

Linda also had the most astounding singing voice I have ever heard. There are a number of women who have been able to belt out a song over the years. But whether your favorite is Aretha, Annie Lennox,  Mariah Carey (shudder), the little fat one from the Dixie Chicks, or someone else, none of them combine the power and clarity of Linda Ronstadt. Not only was her octave range impressive, she could carry crystal pure notes from a stage whisper to a volume level I still can't believe a human can make, seemingly effortlessly. I would have sworn there were times I could hear her singing over the PA during a concert, as improbable as I know that to be. Linda says Maria Callas was better, but I never heard her, so I couldn't say.

Besides the technical quality of her voice, her interpretation of songs ranged from very good to goose-bump producing. The ballads -- like Blue Bayou and Alison -- would have the house so quiet that her voice seemed to fill your head, though everyone's favorite was undoubtedly her cover of The Eagles' Desperado. I watched the show every night from a spotlight perch about twenty feet up in the lighting rig, and I will admit to wiping a few tears during that song on several occasions.

But it was the rock songs, like It's So Easy, That'll Be the Day, and You're No Good that really showcased her with the band. And it was a good band. Waddy Wachtel on guitar, Dan Dugmore on pedal steel and guitar, Andrew Gold on keyboards, and (I think) Russ Kunkel on drums and Kenny Edwards playing bass.* Many of these people played together for other musicians, all had played on her album, and they sounded great.

For about the first thirty days, this was one of the best tours I was ever on. Linda and the band were having a great time, feeding off of each other's energy, moving around on stage, improvising -- you know, all the stuff we used to go to concerts to see. They loved it, the crowds loved it, and even the crusty old roadies loved it, though we would only admit that among ourselves.


This is from the tour before mine, and the lighting is terrible.
That's probably why they hired us.

The fun all ended when Peter Asher showed up about a month into the tour. Peter was Linda's record producer, and an influential force in music. He was the Peter of the 60's duo Peter and Gordon, before becoming A&R man for The Beatles' Apple records. He quit Apple to manage James Taylor, and produced some of the biggest albums of the 1970's. He was also a major wiener.

After watching one performance, Peter stamped his little feet, called the band and road management team together for a meeting, and read them the riot act. The gist of his diatribe was that this was not the Linda Ronstadt and Her Band Do Anything They Feel Like Doing Tour, it was the Linda Ronstadt Living in the USA tour, and people came to see the songs performed like they heard them on the records. He told Linda to remain at her microphone stand, ordered the rest of the band to "stay in their lights," and forbade any sort of improvisation or shenanigans.

Needless to say, that ended the good times. The music was still high quality, but the spark was gone. That tour became what most of the rest of them were -- a wagon train trek across the country. Each day ran into the next, all of us doing what had to be done, but looking forward to the day when we wouldn't have to do it again.

I didn't know it at the time, but that was one of the early shots in the annihilation of the concert as an artistic form of expression. Within a year, virtually every performer under major industry management was having their concerts packaged the way Linda's was packaged, namely as a set piece regurgitation of their recorded music. A couple of years after that, tape assist to fill in background tracks became common, which eliminated any ability to vary even the tempo of a song.

Music is a product now, carefully designed, produced, packaged, and marketed. Virtually all creativity and innovation is gone from the mainstream, and we are left with whatever Sony, Viacom, and the rest believe the bulk of us will continue to pay for. I know there are still people out there doing it from the heart, but music industrialization makes it ever harder for an old fart like me to find them. And it's a shame that most people will never have the opportunity to see their favorite musicians cut loose and have some fun.

---

* It was a long time ago, and for some reason many of my memories of that period are somewhat fuzzy. I put it down to sleep deprivation.

Movie Sunday: 633 Squadron

Image from here

I know this one is not going to have what you would call broad appeal, but I'm writing it anyway.

My parents came of age during World War II. I don't think it's possible for us to understand the impact that it had on their generation and culture. "What did you do in the War?" was a common question even during my childhood, a full twenty years later. And WWII movies were still a booming business in 1964, when 633 Squadron was released.

The film is based on a 1956 novel of the same name, which draws from several real events and missions during WWII.  It holds the distinction of being the first aviation film shot in color and Panavision.

633 Squadron tells the story of a group of fighter-bomber pilots training for and executing a special, especially dangerous mission. The squadron flies the de Havilland Mosquito, one of the most amazing and beautiful airplanes of the era.*  The Mosquito was one of the fastest planes of any kind in the war, made possible by its twin Rolls Royce Merlin engines and the fact that it was made largely of wood.  Yes, wood. The light weight and high power made it particularly graceful in flight, and it was well-loved by its two man flight crews.

de Havilland Mosquito in flight. Picture from here

The plot and characters of 633 Squadron are somewhat typical of the time. Cliff Robertson does a credible job as the hard-bitten cynical wing commander, and Maria Perschy is delicious as "the woman" (every good war movie of the day seemed to have exactly one).  There is a bit of ironic tragedy, and the film is made late enough that a bit of the horror of war is beginning to seep through the glory and righteousness typical of earlier war films, but it's not exactly Apocalypse Now.**

The real star of this movie is the Mosquito. The film includes a great deal of footage of real Mosquitoes in flight over beautiful Scottish countryside, and the planes are mesmerizing to someone who built as many models as I did as a child. George Lucas credits the primary action sequence in this movie with inspiring the "trench scene" in Star Wars.

So if you like old war movies, or are a fan of planes of the era, you should check out 633 Squadron. It's currently streaming on Netflix.

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* The Supermarine Spitfire, Vought Corsair, Lockheed P-38 Lightning, and the North American P-51 Mustang round out my childhood top five. But the Mosquito was always my favorite.

** Also, you should watch Apocalypse Now, if somehow you have managed not to see it. Awesome movie.

Movie Sunday: My Six Loves

Image from here

Biscuit and I both have colds, brought home from our holiday travels. We are choosing to blame my niece from L.A., who was inconsiderate enough to travel 2000 miles with two kids under five and presents for twenty, just so she could spend the holidays feeling like crap with a lot of people she barely knows. As a bonus, she got to have a big fight with her mother (my sister-in-law), just because her mom brought an ill-behaved, child-biting yippy little dog into a small house full of little kids.

But that has very little to do with this week's movie. Or maybe it does, how would I know? I have a fever, and probably won't remember writing any of this later. Anyway, we got Biscuit's parents a Roku box and a Netflix subscription for Christmas, and even though it doesn't work that great with their small town, steam-powered broadband, it seems like it's going to be serviceable, and they seem to like it.

Biscuit's mom is what you might call traditional, meaning most of her favorite books and movies were made before 1968. So when we were looking for things to add to her instant queue, the second thing she settled on (after a John Wayne movie) was today's gem, My Six Loves. Released in 1963, it stars Debbie Reynolds as an overworked actress, with Cliff Robertson, David Jansen, and Eileen Heckart, the Joan Cusack of her day.

Reynolds plays a successful actress suffering from exhaustion,* who is banished to her Connecticut estate for rest by her manager/boyfriend Jansen. There she discovers six trailer-trash children living in her old greenhouse. The ragamuffins have run away from a neglectful aunt and uncle who apparently wandered off the set of The Beverly Hillbillies. Once the local minister (Robertson) persuades her to take care of the kids until something suitable can be arranged, the wackiness starts. Also, there is a song jammed into the middle of the film for no discernible reason. Perhaps it was a signal to the men of the day that they could step out for a quick smoke and a bathroom break.

Some people will see this movie as a nostalgic look at a simpler time. Released today, it would be viewed by most women under 50 as a misogynistic propaganda piece, possibly secretly financed by the Mormon Church. The story revolves around Reynolds' realization that she "may be an actress, but she's also a woman, and should start acting like one." Apparently, real women can only be fulfilled when they are in a morally unambiguous relationship with a righteous man and a passel of kids. Heckart plays Reynolds' friend, assistant, and external super-ego, whose main job seems to be telling everyone that Reynolds will eventually come to her senses.

I like watching movies like this, because it reminds me of how far we have come in what is really a very short time. And also why our parents and the Tea Party (admittedly largely overlapping sets) seem so crazy about some things. Attitudes usually change over several generations, and seeing mainstream entertainment so obviously out of touch with today's mainstream sentiments helps lend a sense of perspective.

I wouldn't waste a DVD choice on this, but if you feel like streaming as much as you can stand, I found it pretty entertaining. You will probably need drinks.

---

* This was before the likes of Liza, Mariah, and Lindsay taught us that "actress suffering from exhaustion" is normally a synonym for "ho-bag on the Joe Cocker diet."** But it's implied.

** Bloody Mary's for breakfast and cocaine for lunch. Supper usually consists of jumping around onstage for a couple of hours, followed by a handful of M&M's.

Movie Sunday: Meet Me in St. Louis

Image from here

I figured I had better do something light-hearted before Amy stops reading this altogether, so we're doing MGM's 1944 classic musical, Eat Meet Me in St. Louis. Actually, we can probably throw in Singin' in the Rain while we're at it, since I will probably never do this again.

I'm not really a big fan of musicals in general. My mother was all about them when I was a child, and many of the LP's that she played on our big console record player were soundtracks. It got worse when she got an Electra 225 with a cassette player. I thought if I heard about how the wind comes sweepin' down the plain in Oklahoma one more time, or how unsinkable Molly Brown was, I was going to pull out my hair.* My hatred of musicals peaked when I had to sit through my older brother's junior high school production of H.M.S. Pinafore, which I know is technically an opera, but whatever. Such distinctions were lost on me in fourth grade.

But high school boys will follow high school girls almost anywhere, so when Meet Me in St. Louis played on Sunday night at the Arts Center, I was there. And I have to confess that I was pleasantly surprised. It was a nice little family comedy, centered around a group of children and their misadventures. And the singing and dancing aren't quite so ridiculous as I had feared. Think Sound of Music, but with the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair instead of Nazis.

The most memorable part of the film today is probably Judy Garland singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." Apparently, the song was originally supposed to be about the soldiers fighting in WWII or something. The fact that this movie was supposed to occur in 1904 really didn't enter into the decision to change the lyrics, such was the fantasy-land that was 1940's musicals. They decided to rewrite the lyrics because the original seemed too sad to sing to a little girl.

Singin' In the Rain came out almost a decade later, but is another opportunity to see the old people in laxative commercials when they were young and hot, sporting pointed breasts and pencil-thin mustaches.** The plot is more zany but just as predictable as Meet Me in St. Louis, and is really no different than a bomb shelter full of other musical comedies of the 1950's. This one is special because of the dancing.

If you're a fan of Dancing with the Stars -- which I definitely am not -- you owe it to yourself to see some of these old movies starring people who really knew how to dance. And before it became a competitive sport. Gene Kelly is almost unbelievable, and the cast is packed with first-rate dancers. The notable exception is Debbie Reynolds, who was apparently a gymnast with very little dance experience. Kelly was quite mean to her, and was surprised she would talk to him after the film. This led to Fred Astaire famously finding her "crying beneath a piano," and agreeing to help her with her dancing.

Of course, it's the title song dance sequence that has gotten most of the attention, but the whole movie is fun to watch. Especially with other people. Drunk. Maybe playing a game, or doing a puzzle or something at the same time.

---

*  I had hair then.

**Though hardly ever on the same person.

How to build a perfect day

I've had a lot of great days with wives, lovers and good friends. Some even by myself. But like a particularly shiny rhinestone on Dolly Parton, they may have a hard time standing out from the rest of the great days. I think to have a really perfect day, it has to stand alone, unexpected and unencumbered by context.

Image from here

And I'm not talking about perfect moments, like the birth of your child, or the time the guy in your school who looked like Ashton Kutcher kissed you in the closet at your older sister's party. Because the birth was preceded by twenty-seven hours of screaming and threats, and the Ashton look-alike never called again, even though you let him go under the shirt in the closet. See where I'm going here? Minimum six hours, all pleasant. No complications before or after. These are the rules.

I've had exactly three of these wonderful days, and after careful analysis, I have a hypothesis about how one could go about building one for oneself. Because that's what I do. Show me three unrelated food items and I will develop an hypothesis about how they would taste together in a pie. Also, I invoke really old-fashioned spelling and punctuation rules intermittently, and with no perceivable pattern. Anyway, here's my (I'll count when I'm done) rules for building a perfect day.

1. Be in high school. I can't stress this enough. Perfect days require a particular blend of energy, ignorance, and foolishness that should only be found in high school kids. If you are a grownup and still doing/believing/imagining this stuff, move out of your mom's basement and get a job. Or maybe enroll in community college. Either way, the important thing is to take off the cape, put down the bong, and join the rest of us in the real world. Oh, and if you're younger than high school age, you are really not old enough to participate in, or appreciate, the PG-13 type activities required, so you're disqualified. Sorry.

2. Go someplace unusual. Preferably someplace exotic. It doesn't have to be Phuket or Xanadu, but Six Flags or Colorado will work, for instance.

3. Ditch your parents, chaperones, or any boring or ugly friends. You're allowed no more than one wingman (or lady). I really shouldn't have to include that one, but some people just need everything spelled out for them.

4. Meet someone of the opposite sex who is probably out of your league, but just barely. It helps if they are a little bored. It can be someone of the same sex if that's how you prefer to roll. I guess. Never tried it, because it's not how I roll. Not that there's anything wrong with it. And now that I think of it, a perfect gay day may be completely different than what I'm thinking. If anyone has one of those, let me know how it goes, and I will try to develop a hypothesis.

5. Play. Shop in the straw market, ride roller coasters, or explore a frontier town together. Smile. Laugh. Hold hands. You know, the crap they stuff into montages in romantic comedies, accompanied by Beach Boys music, or upbeat indie love songs.

6. Make a fool of yourself. Sing to them, draw their picture, buy them a straw hat and pull it down on their head, or something equally ridiculous. If they don't push you down and laugh at you, this is how you know that you have left reality behind, and it's safe to go on to the next phase.

7. Unexpected deliciousness. Something that indicates you've both lost all common sense and inhibitions. None of my days involved sex, at least not by Presidential standards. But at least two involved things I never expected to do with girls I just met, especially without buying them dinner first. And all three were at least partly in semi-public. In fact, I think we probably need a corollary, or a lemma, or something.

7b. Inappropriate deliciousness in semi-public. Examples include behind the smokestack of the Carnival Mardi Gras, standing on the platform between two cars of the Durango-Silverton railroad, and behind the Spindletop at Six Flags Over Texas. This is just the right degree of naughtiness to ensure that there will be a little (but not too much) shame tossed in, which seems to be important for Americans to feel like they've enjoyed themselves.

8. Leave everyone wanting more. You're going to want a hard deadline. Let's face it, most of us lose our luster pretty quickly, and if someone is going to populate my fantasies, we need to hit it and quit it before they start telling me I would look better with long hair, or how I remind them of somebody famous but they can't think of who and it's going to drive them crazy all day.* Or how their college selection process is going, or what sort of car they hope they get for graduation. The park needs to close, ship dock, or train arrive while we both still think it's going great.

9. Never see them again.  This is really an extension of the last one, but I'm starting to feel like I can stretch this to ten rules, so I'm going for it. It's okay to write for a while, if you must, and you can stalk them on Facebook when you're older, but don't try to parlay this into any sort of relationship. First of all, it's never going to work, and you're just going to end up ruining a perfectly good memory. And no one wants to have to explain to their steady girlfriend or boyfriend why this person from Stone Mountain, Georgia, keeps calling their house.

10. Don't go back there. It's good not to return to the scene for at least twenty years, after everything has changed and you're not 100% sure you can recognize the place where all the fun happened. If you go back too soon, you're either going to put ridiculous expectations on yourself and whomever you're with for how much fun it's going to be, or you will see your original experience in the harsh light of reality, and realize that what actually happened is a mutual sexual assault between two underage strangers who were overcome by boredom and an unexpected blast of hormones. Great memories are like great wines. They definitely benefit from aging. And there is always some crap in the bottom of the bottle that you don't want to examine too closely.

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*It's either Jeff Bridges or William Hurt. Let's move on.

Black Cats and Black Crowes

When I was a kid, my family had a fireworks stand. And when I say my family, I mostly mean me and my older brother, though the other two kids spent some time there, too. My parents' were the owners of the operaton, but neither of them ever spent a minute in the stand. Their end was being able to tell us that they weren't buying us [insert name of thing we wanted] because we had the fireworks money. Also, my father took as much product as he could carry to put together the fireworks display that ended our big 4th of July party. Which I never got to attend. Because I was working in the fireworks stand. But I'm not bitter. Anyway...

Image from here

We had quite a racket going. Fireworks were illegal to sell within the city limits, but our property and our neighbor's had been surrounded by the city and never annexed. We were on a busy street with good parking and about two miles closer than the next stand. We made several thousand dollars every year during the three week season. Which is not bad for a couple of teenagers during the seventies. Not that I ever got half. Even though I spent the most time in the heat, selling firecrackers to little kids that were raiding their parents' coin collections after spending all of their allowance. My brother got a bigger percentage because he was older. But I'm still not bitter.

The point of all of this is that there were little mom and pop stands like this all over the country, and you don't make that kind of money without attracting some attention from people with more money. So by the time we grew up and got out of the business, the big operations were starting to appear with their buy one, get one free promotions and air conditioning. The easy money disappeared pretty quickly, and the independents along with it.

This is exactly what's wrong with the music industry today. Well, actually what's wrong is that it's the music "industry," which is my actual point. There is so much money in music that the big studios have become music factories, and just like fast food, the secret is to make it just good enough that people will eat it. There is no reason to take a risk, or make anything different, when they have a formula that works. And since they own the distribution channels, there is no way for anyone with an independent voice to compete.

You can see the impact everywhere, though nowhere more apparent than American Idol. I mean, Kelly Clarkson? Really? They can pick an average person with a slightly above average voice, stick them in the machine and a pop star comes out.

I had a show on the college radio station at the second college I attended.*  We programmed our own shows, and typically brought a lot of it from our dorm rooms. I'm sure it was terrible, but we enjoyed ourselves, and with a listenership that numbered in the dozens, who cared, really? I was horrified to learn the other day that there is a format called "college radio" now, and that it's just another channel for big factories to market a slightly different version of mechanically separated music.

There is still good, independent music around, if you have the means and motivation to find it. Like food, local is probably best. Personally, it seems I get busier all the time, and hipness is much less important to me than it used to be, so I find myself relying more and more on old stuff. I'm fortunate to still have friends in music who turn me on to new sounds on occasion. Like Bottle Rockets. If you haven't heard them, and you like an unpolished southern rock sound (think Presidents of the United States of America meets Georgia Satellites), spin up some "Welfare Music" and see what you think.

(See how I did that thing with "Bottle Rockets," bringing us back to fireworks? That's literary, is what that  is. My English composition teacher would be proud.)

---

* There were four altogehter.

Looking for a One Man Dog

Dramatization*

I received a comment on a post a while back, from someone I respect, questioning my taste for a specific music artist. It didn't particularly bother me in the "oh, no, she doesn't like my music" sense. My tastes in music are all over the place, and I have never really met anyone who likes exactly the same things I do. But it did leave me pondering how I might convey the impact that some of these artists had on the period of my youth, which I think we can (mostly) all agree produced a lot of amazing music. I have struggled somewhat to find a foothold, because most of these people have long been relegated to the genre of "music old squares listen to," while many of their contemporaries have been credited with helping to change the world. But at the time, it was all one tapestry of far out groovy heavy sound.

One possible stroke of fortune in my search for common ground is that my wonder years bore some striking similarities to the present time. There were contentious racial, economic, and political divisions in the country and the world. Common people were struggling. It seemed then, as it does to many now, that global industrialization and unbounded capitalist greed would put an end to the American middle class once and for all, and that our country was being divided cleanly between the "haves" and the "trickled down upon." The country was suffering through a long, increasingly unpopular war, and optimism for the future was at an all time low.

The media narrative of the time was almost universally grim. Body counts from the meat grinder that was Viet Nam topped the news nightly. Ghettos burned in cities across America. Churches were bombed. Banks were bombed. The Manson Family unleashed their special brand of helter skelter. American college students were shot dead by the National Guard. One political figure after another found the wrong end of a gunsight. Stories like the Son of Sam killings that would dominate the national media for months in today's climate, struggled to stay on the front page. The Apollo missions were virtually the only national bright spot in this violent, troubled landscape.

They say great art is born in suffering, and the young and rapidly expanding genre of rock produced some lasting and powerful music during these years. You've heard some of it, if only in movies. Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, CSN (and sometimes Y), CCR, Richie Havens, Edwin Starr, Steppenwolf, and dozens of others produced music that was fresh, relevant, and powerful. They are the soundtrack to the pain, confusion, fear and hope of a generation of Americans. Their message was simple and compelling. Get yours now; the country is burning.

In the midst of all of this, a different movement emerged. Unlike today, this was not a movement of angry and frightened old people. Those were the people in charge. These grass roots were mostly young,   overwhelmingly white, and decidedly middle class. Their fathers fought in WWII, or Korea, and went to college on the G.I. Bill. Their mothers were housewives. Their grandparents had struggled through the Great Depression. These people believed in the innate goodness of America and its citizens, but could not delude themselves that what they saw in front of them was the American Dream. Instead of taking to the streets, they turned to each other.

The soundtrack for these people was written and performed by Simon and Garfunkel, Harry Nilsson, Van Morrison, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Carole King, Jimmy Buffett, and John Denver. That's right, I said John Denver. I dare you not to think of a John Denver song right now. And almost everyone my age liked his music, whether they will admit it or not. I knew people who had his albums right next to their Iron Butterfly. 

The music did not usually focus on the burning of America, but it also wasn't about surfing, or sock hops, or fast cars. It was music of the land, the seasons, and the road. Songs about love, and growing up, reflection, and loss. These songs reminded us that every story is a personal story, and that the only way to really make the world a better place is to be kinder to the people around us. It was about the things we valued most about our country and our lives, back then. These were the songs that people would play -- and sing -- at this time of year, outside around a fire, sometimes with a goat on a spit, or a pig roasting in a hole, but always with beer, and wine in skins or screw-top bottles. They were songs you could sing while holding your breath, which was very handy in those days.

Okay, maybe I can't explain it after all. That time is long gone, and no matter how similar this time feels to old farts like me, the world is a much different place now. Wood smoke adds to our carbon footprint, and I wouldn't even begin to know where to find a goat these days. Whole Foods, maybe? Young people have more serious things to worry about than "finding themselves," like whether the corporate recruiters are going to find the toga party pictures that their friend posted on her Facebook page.  Taking to the road is something only homeless people and illegal immigrants do.*** 

I guess I will have to be content to know that the people who didn't live it will someday struggle to explain Wilco, or Coldplay, or whatever music touched their heart when it was still tender. And every time I hear Everybody's Talkin', Moondance,  Bridge Over Troubled Water, or  You've Got a Friend, I will unabashedly sing along. Singing makes us feel better, right?

---

* The stuff in the picture is a mixture of basil, oregano, and mint. Seriously. I grow it myself.  I wouldn't even know where to look for that name brand weed the kids smoke these days.**

** Okay, so that's not precisely 100% true. I do work at a college.  But it may as well be true. The last thing I need is to be even more confused, forgetful, lethargic, and hungry than I am already.

*** Isn't this really what the Tea Party is up in arms about? The world got more complicated without their permission? After all, these are many of the same people. They are just old, sober, and frightened now.

Movie Sunday: To Have and Have Not

I guess it's natural for us not to fully appreciate the places where we grow up. This was certainly true when I was growing up in Little Rock, a city probably best known as the location of a fairly ugly episode in the history of school desegregation and civil rights. In those days, Little Rock was a small, relatively pretty, capital city in one of the poorest states in the nation. One of the more surprising jewels of the city was the Arkansas Arts Center, featuring a theater, sculpture garden, a nice gallery, and all sorts of studios for classes and artists in residence. I took numerous classes there, confirming to all that I have no artistic talent in any medium.

When I was in high school, the Arts Center used to show classic movies on Sunday nights. We would watch a Buck Rogers serial and then be treated to one of the best films of the black and white years, featuring a lot of people that our parents would never shut up about. A group of us went almost every Sunday, and gained a real appreciation for some of these old screen gems.

I hear the Arts Center has fallen on hard times, but I still watch a lot of movies. Since my friends are tired of hearing me talk about them, I thought maybe I would write about one a week. Some will be oldies. Some will be late models that make it to the top of my queue. Some will be just plain strange, I guarantee.  We will see how long I can keep it up.

I will kick it off with one of the first shows I remember seeing at the Arts Center, and one of my favorites, To Have and Have Not.

If you're not familiar with it, this was Lauren Bacall's first film, and she and Humphrey Bogart fell in love on the set, eventually ending his marriage. The chemistry between them is more than apparent. The story is loosely based on Hemingway's novel, but the story was changed extensively, early on with the help of Hemingway himself, and later by William Faulkner, among others.

Plot-wise, it's not that much different from a number of wartime romance dramas that were typical in the mid-1940's. But you won't be watching it for the plot. Watch it for Bogie and Bacall. Few of the movie stars were really very good actors back then, at least by today's standards, but this really didn't require much acting from the two of them.

To Have and Have Not also produced one of my favorite movie lines, in one of the most memorable scenes in early film history. Bacall tells Bogart to whistle if he needs anything, and then follows with, "You know how to whistle, don't you Steve? You just put your lips together, and ... blow."

Road Stories: Ridin' the storm out, Part 2

This is one of the few artifacts to survive the ex-wife's great purge of 1984, 

when she threw away anything that meant anything to me, in retaliation 

for making her stay behind and sell the house when I got transferred.

So when we left our intrepid hero, I was screwing up the climax of REO Speedwagon's concerts and getting reamed for it every other day. I called the office after almost every show, begging them to ship me the real special effects board. But they were on some sort of cost-cutting kick, and decided that I should let Flash Gordon rewire the controller they had given me, because at least that would shut him up. I was positive this was a bad idea, but was given no choice.

Now, in their defense, the bomb cues were not coming off as planned. In my defense, this wasn't my fault. Each band member was playing to a different beat, the lighting director seemed to have no sense of timing, and the equipment was faulty. I ended up doing this sort of thing for many of the biggest acts of the day, including work for the late Kirby Wyatt, SHOWCO's own lighting director, a man whose fastidious attention to detail and standards of perfection make Tim Gunn look like a Squidbilly by comparison. This tour was the first and only time I ever had a complaint about cues.

The rewiring happened on a day off we had before REO headlined the Rockford Jam, an outdoor show at the Rockford Speedway in Rockford, IL. If you've never been to Rockford, don't sweat it. Life Magazine once said it was "as nearly typical as any city can be." It's probably best known in the rock and roll context as the home of Cheap Trick. The Rockford Jam that year featured Head East ("Never Been Any Reason"), The Cars, REO, and someone I can't remember. Since Bob was traveling on a different bus, there was no time for testing his work, but Flash wasn't concerned.

The Rockford Jam was remarkable, mostly for its lack of planning and nightmare logistics. Whoever produced this piece of shit knew nothing about outdoor shows. We had no alternate way in, so we sat in traffic for almost two hours before arriving backstage, where there was no place to park the trucks or buses. We rolled or carried the equipment piece by piece through the mud, and by the time we got the gear onstage and plugged in, it was time for the first act to start. There were no walkways cordoned off in the crowd, so every time one of us needed to go from the stage to the lighting and sound consoles at the center of the infield, we were required to walk over the crowd, trying not to step on the people, or their growing collection of fluids and other leavings. This also meant we had to run all of our cables over or around people*, and hope that no one unplugged anything. The whole day was a come-from-behind clusterfuck of epic proportions.

To make matters worse, the music was horrible. You don't take a job like this if you don't love live music, but Holy Hell this was bad. I knew by then that REO would be bad, but I assumed some of the other groups would make up for it. The first band, whose name escapes me, reminded me of the band that played my junior high dances. Head East sounded like they had all been born deaf. Worst of all, I had really been looking forward to seeing The Cars, but they were bored, wasted, off-key, and thoroughly unimpressive. Eventually, it was time for the main event.

Unfortunately, Flash Gordon wasn't even smart enough to realize that a fog curtain would be worse than useless outdoors, so I got to drag all of that crap through the mud, knowing that we would be lucky if any fog made it to the stage at all. And also knowing that it would put the band in a foul mood once again. I finally got the pyrotechnics prepped during what should have been dinner, plugged in my newly rewired pyro box, and waited for my cue.

This is the part where I have to teach you more than you ever wanted to know about concert pyrotechnics. A flashpot is generally some sort of metal container, wired with an electrical cord. The ones that are sold commercially are a couple of inches on a side, and are recommended to use up to a half teaspoon of flash powder. We used roasting pans and washtubs, and loaded between a half an ounce and a quarter pound of powder in each. An electric match or squib would be connected to the terminals on the pan, and placed in contact with the powder. When current is applied to the circuit, that's rock and roll.

Image from here.

There are any number of ways to close the circuit, from foot switches to plungers to just touching bare wires to a battery. Our board used 12 volts direct current generated by a 110 volt transformer, and had military-grade safety switches, like the setup shown in the professional grade artwork below.

Artists misconception: this isn't even right. There were

twelve switches, a push button for each, and one key 

to arm the whole system. Just work with me on this.

Each flashpot had it's own circuit, with an LED, a safety switch, and a little red button. When the key was turned, the LED's for correctly wired circuits would glow green. When the rocker cover was raised and the switch was thrown, the circuit was armed, and the light changed to red. After that, pushing the button would set off the explosion. Or at least that was the plan.

Mis-wired circuits didn't light, and I always liked to turn the key a minute or two early, so that I would have time to run around and fix any connections that may have come loose during the show. This time when I turned the key, one of the pots exploded. Hmm, that was weird. The band members turned to me as one, and gave me a look that was, by now, all too familiar. All the lights were green except for the one that had just gone off, so I waited. A half minute later, when I threw the first switch to arm the first flashpot, the one at the front right corner of the stage went off. This was right in the middle of Gary Richrath's big guitar solo, so Kevin Cronin just happened to be dancing around on the right front corner of the stage, and the explosion was about three feet from him. If I close my eyes I can still see the fury in his face, his bro-fro blowing in the breeze from the big wind machines onstage, as he dropped any pretense of being involved in the music and pointed at me in the expression that universally means, "You are dead!" He remembered where he was after a second or two, and turned back to the crowd.

Flash was thoroughly panicked by now, and was yelling into the headsets, "Turn it off! Turn it off!" I flipped down the rocker switches to disarm the rest of the pots, and another bomb went off. When I turned off the key, one of the washtubs exploded. By now, the band barely knew where they were in the song, and everyone backstage was looking at me. The real bomb cues were approaching, and the best way to disarm one is to set it off, so in the end I just randomly turned things on and flipped switches until  all of the remaining pots were expended. A couple were even on the beat. To this day, I can't tell you what the problem was, but it seemed like everything I touched was connected directly to some common firing circuit.

As soon as the show was over,** Kevin Cronin stormed over and gave me a cursing such as I have never heard. And I've worked retail. He cursed me, my company, my ancestry, and pretty much anything else he could think of, for probably two minutes. He was actually clenching his fists and stomping his little feet, he was so angry. It was like Richard Simmons impersonating Yosemite Sam. I may not have helped when I responded to this tirade with a cheerful-sounding, "Thanks for your feedback!" as he walked away. He turned and gave me another round, and I think he would have jumped on me if I hadn't been about twice his size.

I assumed I was fired, which was going to be the only thing that saved the day. Unfortunately, once people calmed down and things were explained, the band sent one of their minions to apologize for Kevin's outburst, and I think they even sent me a beer. Of course, not one of them was man enough to come himself, and Kevin always managed to be somewhere other than where I was after that.

By now, even the shop was convinced, and they shipped out my effects board the next day. One of our sound guys rewired the control box to bypass all of the safety circuits and interlocks to get us through the next couple of shows. I threw it in the dumpster behind whatever arena we were playing when the real board arrived.

I stayed on the tour for a few more weeks, when I was saved by Paul McCartney's tour to Japan. He was scheduled to use every special effect we owned, including bubble machines, so I was needed back in Dallas to get all that together and put it on a boat to Japan. That ended up being a fiasco of a different color, but that's a story for another time.

I'm only now getting to the point where I'm able to listen to a few REO songs all the way through. The onstage sound mixer for the tour, who has remained a good friend of mine, still can't make it past the opening synthesizer blast from "Ridin' the Storm Out" without suffering a minor panic attack.

---

* Typically, the control cables were run along the edges of arena floors, or along the side of the cordoned walkways for outdoor shows. This also tended to be the most convenient place for people who overindulged, or maybe suffered from hairballs, to relieve themselves of their gustatory burdens. You did not want to be the person whose job it was to roll up these cables at the end of the night, especially for a band like REO. And you could find the box those cables traveled in by smell alone.

** And I mean as soon as the show was over. He didn't even leave the stage after the song. The people in the front row were treated to an encore they did not expect.

Pressed ham and vanilla wafers

Every so often, normally when I'm getting tired of listening to people blame all of society's ills on the poor, I remember the summer after my first last semester in college, when I worked on a CETA-funded program to provide summer jobs for disadvantaged youth. This particular program entailed loading a couple of hundred high school kids on school buses and taking them out to clean up illegal dumpsites, or pick up trash from the side of the highway.

The day-to-day administration of this little band included myself, my older brother, his future ex-wife, a friend who would later become a preacher only to leave the ministry to work as an over-the-road trucker, and various liberal do-gooders, most of whom did not last the summer. We were called counselors, as if this were some especially shitty summer camp.  We had three or four senior* counselors who drove the buses and provided on-site supervision, and another who floated from site to site, making supply runs and relaying messages to and from the program's administrators when upper-level decisions were required.

Upper level decisions included things like what to do about the six foot wasp nest, or giant snake pit, or dead horse we occasionally ran across at the dumpsites. (That's right. Dead horse. Swear to Baby Jesus.) While we waited for decisions, supplies, or backup,** work would stop at the site and the kids would chase each other around, or braid each other's hair, or find especially disgusting bits of trash to throw at each other. You know, regular teenager stuff. I was possibly the first white boy in Arkansas to have cornrows. Fortunately, they looked really good on me.

It was obvious that some of the kids didn't really have a chance to amount to much. Those kids generally didn't last long. An eighteen year old (not in the program) walked onto a bus and shot one of our fifteen year old boys while we waited to leave one morning. Other kids would just fail to show up one day, and we wouldn't see them again. But mostly these were good kids. Just like your kids, but not as spoiled. They depended on each other, and took care of each other. You could tell that many of them were fending for themselves, or that the money they were making was feeding their family.

They even took care of me. I was really poor at this point, among other things, and rarely had any food for lunch. As far as I was concerned, there were better things for me to do with the pittance I made at that job than feed myself. A group of my kids stopped at their neighborhood grocery every morning and bought pressed ham*** and a bag of vanilla wafers to share for lunch. These weren't Nilla brand wafers. In fact, they probably weren't even vanilla. Just some sort of illa wafers.

Anyway, I digress. About a week after they noticed that I was starving to death, the kids started feeding me. What you do is, you tear a piece of meat in half, fold it once, place it between two illa wafers and eat it like some sort of Soviet-era Oreo from Hell. They're disgusting, but they are great if you are hungry enough, and it was all these kids could afford.

It was incredibly touching that these children, who had been crapped on by life from birth, and had no reason to expect any different in the future, would share with me what  might be their only meal that day. I have never forgotten their unassuming kindness, and while I know that the experience that summer affected some of them in a positive way, I don't see how they could have gotten more from it than I did.  My attitudes about work, and poverty, and facing adversity with grace, were changed forever by a handful of kids from the ghetto and a few scraps of food.

I know that most of those kids have faced an uphill battle since that summer, and too many are probably dead, or in jail, or in some other desperate strait. But I'm sure that many have met whatever situations they faced with as much faith, kindness, and humor as they could muster. Every couple of years, I will put a piece or two of Black Forest ham between Nilla wafers and remember. And hope, and be thankful.

---

* "Senior" in this case meant more or less 25, and able to buy beer.

** This is what life was like before cell phones. People sat around waiting a lot. And without the Internet, we had no choice but to learn things about each other. It was horrible.

*** Pressed ham is lunch meat that is sort of like SPAM, but not as snooty. And it's conveniently shaped for Wonder bread and sliced about as thick as a Hallmark card.

Good girls

A little later this summer, a hundred or so alumni from my high school will gather in the bar of the restaurant where many of us drank dinner before the prom, and marvel at how old and fat everyone else has gotten. I was discussing the event a few days ago with an old classmate who won't be able to attend.

I mentioned our senior banquet, which was one of the only times our class was together as a group, without dates from other classes or schools. The theme was the Roaring Twenties, so all the boys dressed as gangsters, and the girls mostly went as flappers. My steady girl was a year younger*, so I went to the banquet with my friend Sharon. I was half hoping that she might throw me some "we're never going to see each other again, anyway" action, but Sharon had other plans. She had hatched some sort of Lucy and Ethel scheme with our mutual friend Vi. I was apparently on Vi's high school bucket list or something, and after a short string of shenanigans, Sharon informed me that I would be taking Vi home after the banquet.

Good wholesome fun, pretending to be bootleggers and whores.

It turned out that I wasn't taking her straight home. We went skinny dipping in the Arkansas River with about a dozen other people, and I forget what happened after that. I walked in the door at 7:00 am, wearing different clothes than the night before and carrying the newspaper. My mother was walking into the kitchen and assumed I had just gotten out of bed and gone outside to fetch the paper. This was another of the incredible strokes of luck that I enjoyed during those years.

It was the mention of the skinny dipping that apparently blew my friend's mind, and led to a flurry of e-mail messages that continue still. She has always believed herself to be a borderline bad girl in high school, mostly because she drank a couple of beers and may have given up some over the sweater action to a long time boyfriend. The fact that her friends and classmates were carousing naked in groups seems to have turned her world upside down, and I think she may have felt like the only virgin in the class.

The truth is that probably half of the girls in my class graduated with their virtues intact, or only slightly dinged. That figure went down quickly during freshman year of college.** We grew up in the middle of the sexual revolution, and our generation was trying to reconcile the Puritan morals we were taught with the obviously changing reality. Girls who did it usually kept it quiet, often not even telling their closest friends. Boys were boys, but the ones who were smart knew to keep their mouths shut if they wanted to do it again.

The decisions were as individual as the people making them, but the narrative was much less diverse.  Girls who weren't sexual enough were fish.  Girls who gave it up were sluts. There was an exemption for long-term relationships, but only if no one spilled details or got pregnant. I still remember listening to one douche canoe telling the entire football team how his girlfriend of over a year had come across with a bj, and the whole group spent several minutes talking about how gross it was, and what a ho-bag she must be.  I resolved never to hang out with any of them, and made a mental note to call her if they ever broke up.

Apparently, this inhibition is hard to shake. My friend spent the weekend with some of her sorority sisters, and since she is now obsessed with this topic, she apparently interrogated each of them. Only about half were willing to talk about their high school experiences even now, all these years later. My impression is that girls today are much more open with their friends, and that perhaps there is a little more freedom to make your own decisions. But I could be wrong. I get all of my information on modern culture from watching Glee.***

So how about it, girls? Any stories you care to share?

---

* Steady was a fluid concept for me in those days. Hey, don't judge. It was the 70's. I was up front about it. And I was a seventeen year old boy.

** Like your mom.

*** Just kidding. I would rather stick a needle in my eye than watch Glee.

Late Bloomer

There has been a wisteria next to our driveway since we moved into this house, growing around a big gum tree. In the ten years we have lived here, it has never once bloomed. Not even a little. For several years, we tried everything that anyone suggested to get the thing to flower. We fed it, we starved it, we disturbed the roots, we cut it back. Nothing.

Eventually we gave up. We decided it was never going to bloom. I intended to dig it up, but have not ever quite gotten around to it. It continued to grow, and every year it continued not to flower.

Then this Spring, just before Easter, for no apparent reason, I noticed a single bloom hanging over the driveway. When I told The Wife, her response was, "Shut up!" She stopped whatever it was she was doing to come see. You would have thought I had found a pot of gold, or the face of Jesus in an oil stain, seeing how excited we were. It was kind of stupid.

Today I turn -- well, older. A little more than twenty years ago, on my thirty-somethingth birthday, I was served divorce papers. It was also my ninth wedding anniversary. At that point in my life, I had accumulated about a hundred credit hours toward no particular major at a series of ever less distinguished colleges and universities. I lived in a strange town, far from friends or family. I had a crappy one bedroom apartment that I couldn't afford, and a new job that I kind of hated. I was ending my third career in twelve years.

In short, I had less than no money, no prospects, and a seven year old Subaru station wagon with a slow leak in the right rear tire. I had failed at nearly everything I tried. My life was over, and I had a lot of sad, lonely years ahead of me. I was destined to end up selling cheap suits at Men's Wearhouse.* I had made a few new friends, and they were about all that was keeping me afloat.

Today, I have been married for more than ten years to a woman who is not crazy, and in fact makes me laugh almost every day. She will undoubtedly buy me a great birthday present and then worry that it is not good enough. I have two college degrees in a field I love. We live in a big, comfortable old house, and most mornings I drive three miles down the prettiest road in town to one of the most beautiful college campuses in the country, where I have ideas for a living. I still find plenty to complain about, but most of it is meaningless. My life is unbelievably sweet.

I hear people talk occasionally about how unsatisfied they are with their lives at 26 or 30, and I find this both humorous and sad. Humorous, because I know how young that is, and how much it can change. Sad, because I know that some of them will give up. A few will even be overwhelmed with despair, and cut the journey short.

Life can change in an instant. Whether lovestruck, lightning-struck, car-struck or hit with a realization, we all have moments on which our whole existence pivots, and takes a new direction. If things are good, savor every blessed moment. If you're waiting for things to improve, well, waiting serves a purpose, too.

In the end, we never know when the first bloom will appear. All we can do is wait, and grow, and try to believe that it will happen.

---

* I guarantee it.

Just say ... wait, what was the question?

When I was in eighth grade, pretty much all of my knowledge of drug culture came from watching Dragnet on television. I was standing outside of the school one afternoon, lurking around a girl I thought was pretty (and maybe a little fast), when one of the ninth grade biker boys rode up on his Yamaha 250. After a few minutes of chatting, he pulled out a homemade cigarette (professionally rolled with the Laredo cigarette machine) and started sharing it with the girl. About thirty minutes later, and halfway home, I realized what had been going on.*  I was appalled, and certain that those people would be drowning babies in bathtubs shortly before going insane. Obviously, they were all going to hell.

Less than a year later I was at a Bread** concert with LC, my girlfriend at the time. In those days it was common for someone at a concert to light a doobie, take what they wanted and pass it down the row. When it got to LC, she took it, did what you do, and then passed it to me. I took it without hesitation, passed it a few seconds later, and then tried with all my might not to cough up a lung.

While my attitudes had softened some over the preceding year, I think it's safe to say that my beliefs about this particular herb changed a lot in a few seconds, and primarily because of my feelings about a very small redhead. It's hard to even imagine how many "Just say no" commercials it would have taken for me to make another choice in that moment. Peer pressure is an unstoppable force at that age, especially when amplified by hormones.

That moment marked the beginning of a very different direction for my life. I'm not saying that LC or Bread are responsible -- it was almost certainly the path I would end up on anyway, given my personality and the emerging culture of the day. But every journey has a beginning, and that was the first step of that particular aspect of my life. Over the next ten years or so I would gravitate to different people and activities, make different decisions, and face different challenges than what my eighth grade self expected.

I don't regret that choice, or any most of the ones that followed. but I know my life would likely have been simpler if I had gone another way. I would have been more likely to get a degree from the first college I attended. I probably would have missed some adventures. I definitely would have gotten more sleep, and would have been way less cool.

I think the only thing that can help kids (and adults, really) make informed decisions is giving them real information and real tools. The pressures on them are intense and immediate, and expecting them to think, or remember their values when they are awash in the smell of Love's fresh lemon and the taste of strawberry lip gloss*** is just asking for disappointment. They literally can't help themselves, so someone else has to help them.

As an outside observer, I can't even imagine how overwhelming these choices are when it's your own children. In many cases, a parent's own investment makes them incapable of adopting the strategy that is most likely to succeed. It's got to be even harder when you wish for your children to make different decisions than you did.

There is a lot one gives up when one chooses not to be a parent. But to quote the guy in Office Space, in this particular case, I wouldn't say I've been missing it.

---

* I was always a bright boy, but not super-quick on the uptake. Not much has changed.

** Still a guilty pleasure, though I never replaced the 8-track. I dare you to listen to "Baby, I'm a Want You" and not sing it all day long.

*** Those are still popular with kids, right?

Passing on the Road: Ian Knight

In general, it seems that road dogs have a shorter than average lifespan. No surprise, really. That's part of what we signed up for all those years ago. Live fast, die young, I forget the rest. As Mickey Mantle is reputed to have said, if I had known I was going to live to be this old, I might have taken better care of myself.

Late last week we learned that Ian (Iggy*) Knight had passed away in London. Ian was never really a friend of mine, but we all knew him. He was a pioneer in staging and special effects design for concerts, and some of his effects inspired pervasive and lasting technology. He is also the inspiration for one of the most important lessons I ever learned about design.

Before you get the impression that Ian was some sort of intense, towering visionary, I'd better stick in a picture. This is Ian backstage at a Led Zeppelin show, striking a welding rod against a piece of railroad track to simulate lightning. He is wearing laser safety glasses, which of course offered zero protection against the welder.

If you don't stop it, you really will go blind.

Photo courtesy of Steve Jander

Also, almost every time I saw Ian he was carrying a rum and coke, probably on the assumption that it was after 5:00 in London. I heard that he switched to screwdrivers for a while after his doctor told him that his drinking was killing him. He apparently decided that the cola was the problem, and that orange juice would set him right. I assume he eventually cut back or stopped drinking, or he never would have lived this long.

Ian is probably best known for some of the effects he designed for Led Zeppelin, but I knew him for the Genesis mirrors. If you were fortunate enough to see Genesis in the late 70's or early 80's, you saw the mirrors. Mylar was only just then becoming commercially available, and Ian designed six octagonal mylar mirrors, each eight feet across, able to rotate 360 degrees on two axes, and computer controlled. They were designed to hang over the stage, and we bounced every type of laser, spotlight, floor light, side light and flashlight we could find off of the things.

Photo from here

Here's where the design lesson comes in. Mylar was important because it was lightweight, so the mirrors could be hung in the lighting rig, turned with small drill motors and transported easily. The problem was that they were built in Holland, where at the time there was virtually no aluminum, and therefore practically no one who knew how to weld it. So they built the mirror frames out of tubular cast iron, which meant the motors had to be huge, which meant more power, etc. When it was all said and done, each mirror unit weighed in at 450 lbs. That meant extra bracing, extra rigging, extra power, and an extra truck to carry it all. As we used to say, from the people who brought you wooden shoes...

The mirrors taught me that one little detail can have tremendous and lasting ramifications. We hauled those things around for years. It drove us all crazy, but Ian took it all in stride. Ian took a lot in stride. I doubt he ever knew how many of us learned from him.

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*All men from England named Ian were called "Iggy" in those days. I think it was a law.

10 things I hate about Des Moines

Daisyfae's post showing off her Scrap Award reminded me of when I lived in Des Moines for about 18 months in the mid-80's, right before I came down here. It definitely seemed like longer than a year and a half. Almost every move I've ever made has turned out well for me in one way or another. The only good thing I can say about moving to Des Moines is that it felt really great to leave. And before people start jumping in to defend the Jewel of the Des Moines River, here are a few tidbits of my personal experience.

1. It is really, really dull there. And cold. And dark. I spent two winters and one summer there, which may have influenced my opinion. The locals used to say that there was nothing between Des Moines and the North Pole but a couple of barbed wire fences. They thought it was funny.

2. I was working as the assistant manager of a waterbed store. I almost got fired for failing to keep my manager from playing fast and loose with the store's finances, even though I had reported everything she was doing to her boss a year before and been told not to worry about it.

3. My soon to be ex-wife was unemployed and depressed almost the entire time we were there.

4. One of my employees became obsessed with me and started phone stalking me. It took almost a year to figure out who it was. She left the store a short time after the whole thing came to light and claimed she joined the Army, but that was a hoax. As far as I know, she was watching me until we left the state.

5. The place we lived in West Des Moines was small, dark and crappy. Our landlord was a total douchebag, and we ended up having to send a lawyer after him just to get out of town. The lawyer was also a douchebag, but I'm not here to make lawyer jokes.

6. Okay, maybe just one lawyer joke. This is the only one I know that most lawyers will laugh at.
Q: What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 75?  A: Your Honor.

7. I had a big car accident -- my fault -- and totaled my favorite car I've ever had, a 1982 Subaru Brat. Yep, just like the one Joy drove in My Name is Earl, except mine was tan. I was a nervous driver for years afterward.

8. All my hair fell out. Well, all of the hair on my head, and a good deal of the hair elsewhere. I looked like that kid Henry from the old Saturday Evening Post cartoons. We never did find out why, though this list is giving me ideas. There are also a lot of agri-chemicals in the water, which could have done it. A dermatologist gave me some experimental apricot goo that made my head itch and turn purple and we switched to bottled water. Most -- though not all -- of the hair eventually grew back.

Me in Des MoinesImage from here

9. My parents divorced while we were there. The worst part of that was having to listen to my father tell me things about my parents' sex life that I still haven't been able to wash out of my brain.

10. Did I mention it was dull? I didn't get the people at all. I mean, they were decent, hardworking sorts and all, but they would watch a good time pass them by and just say, "Yup. There it went." There was only one parade the whole time I was there, and no one threw anything. I made exactly one friend the whole time I was there, and he joined AA not long after I left. True story.

It was about 10 degrees F when I left Des Moines in late January. When I got down here it was about 55, with a low expected of 27. And everyone was freaking out because it was going to be so cold. I knew I was in the right place.

Old Apartment

This song came up on my iPod yesterday on the way to the grocery store, and I listened to it three times in a row.



If you're not familiar with The Barenaked Ladies, I would recommend watching the video over reading this post. While probably currently best-known for writing and composing the theme song for The Big Bang Theory, they have a long history of really fine music with intelligent and often humorous lyrics. This particular song has been a favorite of mine for a long time. It's a wonderful reminder of the intensity with which love can sting, and how quickly that pain can take us to a dark and bizarre emotional place. This is especially true when we're young.

I have been cruising memory lane a good bit lately, what with recent Facebook activities and talk of various reunions, and this one took me straight to grade nine and LC. Not LC specifically, but to the breakup of our relationship. I had met LC at church camp the previous summer, and we dated through most of ninth grade. The bulk of this time was spent in her parents' basement trying to wear each others lips off. The intensity may have been enhanced because this was all happening in the shadow of her father's very impressive gun collection.

As I recall, LC decided sometime in the Spring that she was done with it. I couldn't tell you why. I doubt I ever thought to ask. All I knew was that it sucked more than anything had ever sucked in the history of things that sucked. I pleaded and railed. I walked in the rain. I punched walls and telephone poles. I made ill-considered phone calls at inappropriate times. Surprisingly, none of it worked. We stayed broken up forever. I knew I would never recover. And I didn't. At least not until I started dating Red a few months later.

It's not that we don't feel pain when we get older. My father's death hit me harder than I thought anything could at this point in my life. And I really hate to imagine what it would do to me if The Wife and I broke up. It's just that we (hopefully) eventually gain a tiny bit of perspective, and come to realize that what is happening to us is neither unique nor probably fatal, and that we will live to play/love/work/whatever another day. The lack of inertia in teen emotions is entertaining and dangerous, and a significant part of what makes it the time of our life we often remember best, at least in terms of minor triumphs and tragedies.