Tales From The Crypt
Looking back to elementary school, middle school, and high school, one thing remained constant. Gym teachers were always given a crypt for an office.
I couldn’t tell if they were protecting the gym teacher from the rest of the school or the school from the gym teachers.
Their offices never had a window that let them see outside. The best they got was some glass that would peer out into the gymnasium its , covered in incandescent lighting. Other than that, it was feet upon feet of cement brick walls that made their bunker Phys. Ed. office more secure than the Oval Office.
If you got summoned into the gym teacher’s office, it was on par with Clarice Starling visiting Hannibal Lecter’s cell. A uniformed individual awaiting you on the other side of the glass. Making your palms sweat and clam up. You not wanting to get too close to their dank, crypt-like cell; just wanting to get out before you squirmed right out of your skin.
But now as an adult, I often wonder what it’s like to by a Phys. Ed. teacher. I don’t know any in “real” life. All I can do is put myself and my own neurosis into their shoes. There must be some sort of animosity bubbling just under the surface between gym teachers and the rest of the staff, even if it isn’t a conscious thing. It’s just human nature, when you’re the excluded member of a group.
And do the gym teachers worry that when they leave the gymnasium, whether the smell of sweaty pubescence and locker room still lingers on their own clothing … unbeknownst to them the way farmers no longer detect that of manure on the farm?
I rarely saw my old Phys. Ed. teachers associated outside of the gymnasium with other faculty members. Maybe the Shop teachers, but that always seemed a little forced, like the boyfriends of two best friends awkwardly conversing with one another for the sake of their significant others, even though circumstance is all they really have in common. For gym teachers, if they want to chat with other faculty members, they really have to make a conscious effort to do so by seeking out the other wings of the school. It isn’t as easy as a math teacher who can step across the hall and pop his head in to the room and see how the other math teacher’s day is going.
I would love to spend a week in a high school, shadowing different faculty and departments each day to watch how they converse and survive, rather than the students. Not writing a story about what it’s like to be a student. Not what it’s like to be a teacher after hours, dealing with papers and budget issues, etc. But the day-to-day dynamics of teachers and the connections they have or don’t have with one another. That’s the story I don’t hear enough of, and am fascinated by.
Rooster and Hen Record Again: An Anti-Valentine Vignette
Note: over on Tumblr, “inthefade” posted this image and challenged people to write a poem, limerick, haiku, song or story to this image. But it had to be Valentine’s Day-related. And so this is what I came up with 20 minutes later.
Rooster and Hen Record Again
Rooster:
“I’m sorry, I keep clucking up. I promise, I’ll get it this time.”
Hen:
“You said that twenty takes ago.”
Rooster:
“I know, I know. Just keep playing. I’ll get it this time. Promise.”
(voice over the intercom: “The Anti-Valentine: Take 21.”)
Rooster:
(singing)
“I see you flappin’ round the coop with the chick I love and I’m like,
Cluck Youuuu. Oo, Oo, Oo.
I guess the feed in my farmhouse
wasn’t enough,
and I’m like,
Cluck You! And, cluck her too!
I said if this cock was bigger,
I’d still be with ya.
Well ain’t that some chicken shit? Some chicken shit?
And although there’s pain in my chest,
I still wish you the best with a … Cluck You!”
(voice over the intercom: “CUT! You nailed it!”)
Rooster:
“Speaking of nailing … whaddya say you and me …”
Hen:
“I’m incubating right now.”
Rooster:
“You’re always incubating.”
(cut to:)
THE END.
Wherefore Art Thou [ *-* ]
In what year will cassette tapes become retro and cool? I’m asking for my friend, who just happens to be a cassette.
Every weekend morning, I awake and put on a pot of coffee as I listen to old albums on vinyl. My parents and grandparents gave me much of their old vinyl collection. And I like to stop at record shops from time to time and buy $1 albums to add to it. Now that we have the option of jumping to any song on an album digitally, it’s nice to force myself to listen to an album in the exact order the band wanted me to do so. And hearing a sometimes tinny sound, with hisses and pops takes me back to a time when I used to listen to albums as a little kid on my record player. After all, isn’t the experience one of the big things that makes us like music? I was a child in the 80s, yet I listened to my parents’ 45s on my record player. Elvis. The Beatles. Electric Prunes. Bee Gees. Charley Pride. They also bought me 45s of (then) current artists, too. Michael Jackson. Foreigner. Prince. New Edition. Suddenly, my current musical proclivities make total sense. The fact that I was raised on a wide array of musical genres and time periods has directly impacted me as I still listen to every genre from every decade.
It isn’t just records, though. People still listen to CDs. Stores still have CD racks to buy the latest CD from any artist. People burn mix CDs for road trips. While everything’s moving digital, there’s still a need for albums.
But it seems like people have completely leapfrogged and forgotten about the cassette tape. I don’t even know if they sell blank cassette tapes anywhere. Boomboxes and stereos rarely have them built-in. Yet records, which were the musical medium well-before the cassette, are still a commodity. People actively collect vinyl. People like me. Yet, you rarely hear of people actively looking for a cassette of something to add to their collection.
Nostalgia fuels many of our retro trips down fad resurgence lane. So it’s only a matter of time before people want to revisit those old cassette mixes we made from the radio where you hear the DJs talking over the beginning of New Edition’s Cool It Now. I recently found a stack of mix tapes from the early 90s and plan to spend the first rainy Spring weekend playing them from start to finish. Forcing myself to go on the musical journey that 14-year-old Bruce established. Because let’s be honest, fast-forwarding and playing and fast-forwarding some more and then playing and then rewinding … that’s too much like work.
Cassettes will make a temporary retro comeback sometime over the next decade. They have to. Some band will get the idea to release some of their material on cassette-only format as a headline-grabbing gimmick and to fuel interest in something that fans will have to work at in order to be able to listen to it.
This Idea Is The G.O.A.T. (Greatest of All Time)
There is a breed of goat known as the Fainting Goat. When this goat gets scared or startled, its muscles tense up for ten seconds and essentially paralyzes the goat, making it fall over. It appears as though the goat is fainting.
We were on the subjects of these goats in the office, this morning. And we had an epiphany.
We should teach people how to master the art of the Fainting Goat. Just as you can be a black belt in six sigma and become a scrum master, why not a Fainting Goat certification?
Just think about it. If you’re in a client meeting, and things aren’t going well or they ask you a question you don’t want to answer, wouldn’t it be nice if you could stiffen, lock your body, and tip over? The client would be utterly confused and distracted so after 10 seconds when you come out of your stiffened state, they would have forgotten what they were even talking about. And then you’re free to shift the conversation to where you want it to go.
Oh yes, this certification could be one of the most important you ever learn and instantly be placed on ones resume alongside “Proficiency in Microsoft Word” and “Ability to multi-task.”
In our course, we will teach you how to jut your arms out like Frankenstein searching for his bride, locking those arms, as well as your legs, and then dropping sideways – still fully locked. We begin teaching you to drop first in the arms of your trusted classmates. Once you’ve mastered this, we move on to “fainting” onto a bed. Then “fainting” onto a couch. Followed by “fainting” onto a yoga mat. And finally, you’re ready to “faint” onto carpeting.
Only our most gifted students will ever master the Fainting Goat onto tile floor.
Are you that gifted student?
(this is where you’d lock up and faint)
The Taste of the Universal Taco Bell
This time I have a handful of gray hairs that have moved in with the brown – the recession bad for follicles, too, who find themselves subletting out headspace even to the undesirable grays, just to maintain maximum occupancy.
Then, I turned the pages and took in the words not by choice but by the decree of a college professor. Fourth Genre is the title of the memoir and essay compilation from Spring of 1999.
What is the fourth genre, anyway? Essays and memoirs were still hit or miss for me. A genre I found myself warming up to when done right, but not one that I found myself comfortable writing. Which is funny, considering it became the genre to define a generation. After all, isn’t this what blogging is? The self-publishing and promoting of ones essays and memoirs? Blogging, tweeting, it all is a form of the fourth genre.
Who’d have known that, then?
This collection was assigned reading as one of my writing courses a couple of years later in the spring of ’01. I turn the pages now, a decade later, revisiting the underlines and notes of my two months shy of graduating self. I remember sitting in the campus cafeteria, in the back behind the fireplace. The remnants of empty taco bell wrappers next to my JanSport backpack as I underlined powerful sentences from the opening paragraph and scribbled “grabs interest” in the margin, as though raising my hand and telling the author I see what you’re doing, why, and that it works.
Though now with the same collection opened in front of me, I sit on my couch with a sleeping cat next to me and the tandem sounds of the clothes dryer running and the pops & hisses of an old country album on vinyl, type-scribbling notes onto a laptop where I tell my former self, instead, that I know what he was doing, why and that it works.
That younger guy was trying to develop his own craft, amongst the noise and styles of his influences, while at the same time, having to then prove to his professors that in the immediacy of this class he was doing the readings assigned, by pointing out the tricks of the trade that he noticed here and there. No matter how elementary it may sometimes have felt. It’s understandable. College professors can’t grade you five years later after they’ve finally learned whether you really did take something from the readings, fine-tuned said-skill, and actually used it. They need the “now” of knowing you at least did the reading, even if it sometimes is at the expense of you then being able to actually be productive with that new knowledge due to said-busy work.
I skip ahead in the compilation and take notice of another entry I highlighted.
“For instance, when we consider the hypothetical example of the ‘first apple’ — whether or not we can remember biting an apple for hte first time and whether it was soft, mushy, crisp, tangy, sharp – it seems that ‘first apple’ just may be a compilation of all the apples ever bitten. Instead of one particular apple in our memories, we have the generic experience of apple: the taste of the universal apple.”
By highlighting it, this entry must have meant something to my college self. I have to chuckle reading it now, as 30-something me who has just written about his experience a decade ago in the cafeteria with this same book. Was college Bruce leaving a note for future Bruce, somehow knowing that he would come back some day and should he do so and decide to write about it, that he remember this possibility?
Maybe this fireplace session didn’t happen after all, with this book? This could be a First Apple situation – or more appropriately, First Taco Bell, as it’s just a compilation of all of the reading and note sessions ever experienced over my cafeteria visits. Which is ok. Because this did happen. Maybe not over this book. It could’ve been another book. During a different semester. But it still opened the flood of memories, regardless.
And defeated the almighty blank page and blinking cursor.
Confessions of Nerdery
I dig Algebra. It’s my favorite form of math. I aced Algebra I and II.
3x + 4 = 12 … Solve for x
I like problem solving stuff and answering questions where you can go back and verify, knowing immediately if your answer is right or wrong. When a test was over, you basically knew if you were acing it, or if you were failing it. You can plug what you think your answer is, and see if the number on the left side ends up equaling that on the right. Yes? Then you got it right. No surprises.
I guess for someone who always was more of the creative type, writing stories and scribbling drawings, it’s somewhat unconventional to also have a giddiness about algebra.
But even to this day, though I haven’t done Algebra in over a decade, I find myself wanting to go to a used book store and look for an old high school Algebra book to buy.
Just so I can go back and try some of the problems in it and see if it all comes back to me.
The Buck Starts Here
I’m nostalgic and more sentimental than a 30-something dude should be. And like your memory, the older you get, the worse it gets. Unfortunately, just like your memory, the older you get, the worse it … wait, I just said that, didn’t I? Man.
A random song instantly makes me think of that time I was riding with my parents in their Ford Escort as a six-year-old kid. And suddenly that mundane thought feels like I’m reliving the best day of my life … just because I’m six again.
Or I’ll come across a picture of my brother and I in elementary school and be suddenly reminded of a time when I was mean to him and it makes me now want to call and apologize all these years later. I was in fourth grade and he was in first. Being his older brother, I would always walk him to his class on the first floor of the school and then I would walk upstairs to my classroom. He was doing something that morning, as little brothers are known to do to their older brothers, to get under my skin, so when we got off the bus and into the school, I made him walk to class by himself. Without my assistance. As a consequence. I went up the stairs and to the fourth grade class room. Halfway up the stairs, it already bothered me that I was doing it. But I needed to teach him a lesson for being a poopyhead!
My brother and I are best friends to this day. So I always mean to ask him some time if he even remembers that. But I never remember to bring it up when we’re hanging out. Yet it still bugs me when something makes me think back to it, and it feels like I’m reliving that.
Or there’s the sentimental dollar bill.
Every birthday, within the card that my folks give me, my dad always includes a dollar bill. It’s just a running joke similar to grandparents who tend to do so, thinking they’re really doing you a favor with that whopping dollar bill. In 2009, I was out of work during one of the worst economic times we’ve known. I was living mostly off my savings, which got smaller with every rent and utility payment. My birthday came, and again, my pops included a buck in the card. Just as he always did.
I went back to my place after visiting with them, and took the dollar bill out of the card. I decided not to put it with the rest of the money in my wallet. I set it in my drawer, by my watch and other items I sifted through every morning. And I told myself I wouldn’t touch that dollar.
It was like the dollar bill you see framed in restaurants. That first dollar of the business venture.
But this one would be my last dollar, if it came down to it. I decided never to spend this dollar, that it would symbolize something bigger. Something of a carrot on a stick for me that even though I had been out of work for a few months and it seemed like no other job would come along and that I would run out of money, have to give up my apartment and move back home … at least I’d never be completely broke.
I’d always have one dollar to my name.
It helped me chuckle some mornings as I’d reach to put my watch on, and see this crumpled dollar bill looking back. And reminded me that it all could be much worse. That I still had a family who was behind me. Even if it was only for that dollar. As hokey as it may sound.
Well I did land back on my feet before any of those worst case scenarios played out. But I never had the heart to spend that dollar. To this day, I keep that dollar in the same drawer as before, and on certain days, its mere appearance makes me laugh. But also reminds me where I’ve come from. In every sense of the meaning.
The older generations claim that the current one doesn’t appreciate the value of a dollar, anymore. And that may be true. But this nostalgic, sentimental fool does, at least. However, the older you get, the worse … awww crap. I’m doing it again, aren’t I?
My Social Endeavor
I’m trying this crazy thing for 2011. It’s an online cleaning of the closet, if you will.
I follow so many people on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, etc. Many of them, I follow on all platforms. The problem with this, is we begin to see the same things over and over. Twitter updates mimic Foursquare entries which appear as photos on Facebook which turn into blog posts, etc. I can say this because *I* am guilty of the same thing. And there’s nothing wrong with this, inherently!
But because there’s so much chatter, we sometimes miss out on important things from those who we only follow on one platform. Just because they aren’t the squeakiest wheel. And I don’t want to miss out on what they have to say, or what they’re feeling.
If I follow people on a particular platform, it’s because I truly care what they have to say. It isn’t just so I can pad my numbers.
And because I truly care what the people I follow say, think and feel, I’m going to unfollow a number of them.
Let me explain.
If I follow someone on all platforms, in 2011 I’m going to weed out a couple of the social platforms that I follow them on. This way, I can still follow what they’re up to in Facebook, for example, but maybe not on Twitter or Foursquare. Or maybe I’ll follow their tweets, but no longer need to see their Facebook stream.
I know this may hurt some people -but I hope that they realize that I haven’t severed ties with them across the board. I’m still following them on a platform, and in the long run, I may actually interact with them more by the unfollows, because I can actually get through my social media streams rather than merely scanning or worse, ignoring many updates.
I’m sure that some will be hurt by this, and some may unfollow/ban, etc. in retaliation. I hope this isn’t the case. Consider this my “Please don’t be offended” post if we “break up” on one of them because it doesn’t come from a place of judgment on your updates. As you’ll see, we’re probably still friends on another platform, so let’s take advantage of that and catch up properly.
I Have This Move
When I’m in a group and someone in the group asks if anyone’s seen movie “X”.
If I haven’t seen movie “X” I will immediately attempt to distract the conversation with some form of an observational question of one of the group’s members. It comes off as a side conversation, but the group tends to join in and it doesn’t look rude because it seems like I’m asking because I’m interested in something of someone’s.
But in actuality, I’m only doing so because 10 out of every 9 people (yes) thinks “No, I haven’t seen that movie!” actually means, “No, but tell me every funniest joke/scariest moment/biggest surprise/the entire ending of the movie!”
And I fuuuuuucking despise spoilers of any sort when I intend to watch a movie, tv episode, or read a book.
So my conversational trickery is warranted.
Order Over Chaos
I’m a little neurotic. A bit of a neat-freak. And probably borderline OCD at times. I like the comfort of having routines. Routines feel safe. They give order. Which, ultimately, allows you to make it through portions of your day on cruise control. Y’know, basically the same governing principles of the zombie genus.
For this reason, I’ve been known to alphabetize my movie, music, and video game racks over the years. Order over chaos. Even as a kid, I preferred this sort of system. It allows me to scan the rack and immediately find whichever title I’m seeking out, rather than having to focus on each title to see if it’s the one I’m looking for. All that happens in that scenario, is you get distracted by another one along the way and veer off in another direction.
But they’d throw you a curveball, sometimes. Because you have to make a decision very early on – do you file them by the title/name that appears on the spine of the case or by what you know it as?
This. Is. Huge.
Take the Nightmare on Elm Street series, for example. I prided myself on owning the entire collection. The problem is, the sixth film in the series is actually titled Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. And the next one – which is already humorous, considering I was just talking about the “final” nightmare supposedly – was called Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Decision time. Do you break the rules and place them all together still, despite the spines breaking alphabetical order when scanning, because they’re part of the same series? Or do you place Freddy’s Dead with the other “F” titles, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare with the “W” titles, and thus splitting the series apart from one another? It was, well, enough to cause nightmares.
When I owned a Sega Genesis as a kid, the football series started as John Madden Football and eventually just dropped the “John” to become Madden plus its year. File them all under “M” for Madden, or split them up? I need to call a timeout and think about this.
Tupac under “T” or 2Pac under the numerical artists?
You get the point. Something that is meant to simplify and eliminate potential stress of not finding, becomes a dog chasing its own tail of insanity. Speaking of, don’t even get me started on Snoop Dogg versus Snoop Doggy Dogg and how I choose to organize that in my iTunes library.
This is my blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My blog is my best friend.
