An Accumulation of Days: August 2013

Some Crazy Underground Movies and Music

With all of my summer girlfriends winding down and my plate back to empty I started dating a girl who seemed pretty cool. She was not. Her older brother had been my co-host on the morning announcements the year before and was considered by myself and many others to be a pretty cool guy. She was riding on the coattails pretty hard and if you only knew her for a little while you may well be, as I was, tricked into thinking that she was a pretty original and interesting person. My friend who had just recently been elected to student government with me had dated her for a few months at the end of the last year and that was endorsement enough. The first couple of times we hung out we were with a group of friends and we watched movies and did other hard to get to know someone things. Her family and friends were huge fans of a independent comedy called 'Ruben and Ed' which was actually fairly funny in an acid trippy kind of way.

However, their weird ownership of the movie made it less funny, as we were trying to watch it they kept pre-laughing jokes and then reciting funny lines along with the movie. It was an experience very similar to watching Monty Python with a super fan who wants to show the people he is with, especially Python virgins, that he gets it and loves it deeply while he ruins it for everyone else. That type of person loves to watch the joke unfold as they help it along and keep looking at your face to make sure you are getting it the same way that they are. All in all a delightful way to watch anything. Besides independent film her family was into borderline mainstream stuff that they felt was very esoteric and thereby made them cool by just knowing about and appreciating it. It was not that at all. It is best summed up in her claim that her favorite music was underground stuff, I asked which bands she meant and she said without self awareness or irony, the multi-platinum recording artists Cat Stephens and Simon and Garfunkel. I think that for a while there in the seventies, eighties and nineties every movie was required, by law, to have a song by one or both of those artists. I at first thought she must be joking but she was sincerely ignorant and was mad when I had laughed involuntarily. I told her that those artist were among the most well known in the world, not Madonna or the Beatles but right up there. She argued with me and said she had never met anyone who even knew who they were. Well, maybe so, but that little exchange should have put my ears up that I may be dealing with someone not entirely on speaking terms with reality.

Pageantry

I really hate pageants. Besides being demeaning to participants they are pointless and boring. That doesn't change when you are dressed as a knock-off Mickey Mouse. The evening started for me about four when I had to suit up and learn what my job was. I was to escort every other girl out for her cat-walk turn and then over for her question and then back. The other girls went and did the same with my cute neighbor Minnie as their guide. At five we started with the little girls who were being trained at a young age that their bodies were their most important assets and they were about to find out who had the best one. The little girls when incredibly smoothly with not a single chicken out, or panic attack. As the best cutest girl was crowned and the others put in their place of lesser beauty the next age group came to be judged and sorted. These girls were much more nervous and more ridiculously made up with big magnificent hair and makeup rarely seen out side the crack-whore industry. I had gotten into the routine of sweating inside my suit and taking girl after girl for her promenade when as we got to the eleven and twelve-year-olds things started to go bad. There was some boundary in social anxiety presented by puberty and these girls were much more nervous about looking good and winning. There were some criers, some hyper-ventilators, and even one garbage-can-puker. I was feeling bad for the girls now as I had to drag some of them from one position to the next as they locked up with fear on the stage. A girl or two were giving some over-sized high heals a spin and more than one fell off the side of their shoes and twisted an ankle. The next group was even worse they were the girls 15-17 and they were nervous wrecks that looked like they had been jumped by a gang of deranged hair dressers armed only with the tools of ratting-up and hair spraying hair in to big splendid concoctions of hair. They were plastered in make-up and had their strapped down and tied up to make their bodies more appropriate for public display. One girl in particular was so nervous that she took the planned grip of my wrist and tricep to a hematoma inducing extreme. She was holding on so tightly that she cut off all the circulation to my hand and it was becoming quite painful as I came to the point in our walk where I was supposed to turn her loose. She wouldn't let go and walk her solo turn until I broke her grip with my free hand and both of us stumbled a little. She walked out and then back to me but when she came back I fended off her grip and I held her hand at a distance to save the rest of my tender tissues. The next day my arm and hand had several distinct finger shaped bruises. When the last girl was judged they sent everyone home and I got to take off my stinky head. I was talking with some friends when a girl from the audience came to talk with me. She and I hit it off and we decided to go out when I had a chance to get home and wash the dirty, dirty Micky funk off of my body and change.

A Micky Mouse Beauty Pageant

When I got to remembering about beauty pageant winners I remembered I forgot about the worst beauty pageants of my life. A cute girl who was a year older then me and lived right through the block asked me if I would like to co-host with her at the city 'Little Miss' beauty pageant that year. I did because I thought she was hitting on me. She was not. She was more looking for a co-host for a local low-rent beauty pageant than anything else really. Once again my over active libido and imagination had written a check my body wouldn't cash. Dang, stupid puberty.

The costume looked like this but after a six week meth bender.

The first step was to ride up to the costume shop to get fitted for a suit and costume because the night was going to have an unlicensed Disney theme. They told me I was going to go as Mickey Mouse which I thought was fine because my face would be hidden and no fuss, no muss. Well that was not the Mickey costume they had in mind I was going to wear the Micky black leggings, big yellow shoes, red oversize shorts with two inexplicably huge buttons a tight black shirt and a massive Mickey head. The head was designed to allow my face to replace Mickey's like I had killed and skinned him and was wearing his head like a great warrior might wear a lion, bull or bear. It looked so incredibly cheap and rip-offish that I was embarrassed for the organizers who were putting this on. All of the women who took me up to get fitted love, love loved it and finished the look with the massive four finger mittens that were supposed to make the outfit complete. It was complete. A complete cluster-cuss. We didn't rehearse anything and they just told me to be at the school ready for the show at five o’clock that coming Saturday. That is where I learned the true meaning of humiliation, for myself and others.

Horse Breaker

Okay, now horses and I have had a spotty history. I like them just fine and think they are just fine they just have some deep and abiding need to try and murder me. When I was four I had a Shetlandpony try and assassinate me and when I was 13 a friend's horse scraped me off on a fence and cut my leg pretty good. When the beauty queen girl called and asked me to come over for a date and she had horse ride in mind I was ready to go with the caveat that I was not lucky in equestrian pursuits. She laughed and said I would be fine, she was an excellent rider and her horse was very well behaved. Lies, all lies. I drove down and we got saddled up and on the road and all was well, some beautiful weather and great company and the horse was really good. We rode to a local pond had a picnic, a nice stroll and chat. When the time had come for us to go we remounted our horses and were walking back at a leisurely pace when my horse reared up and I slid off the back and down to the ground badly spraining my ankle. The horse bolted away and started limping. My date rode over to see what was wrong with the horse and determined that he had somehow split his hoof and was in lots of pain. She came back and picked me up and We slowly walked the other horse home as we went tandem. I was in quite a bit of pain and felt really badly about the horse. We got back and my date's dad took a look at the hoof in question and determined that the horse and not been shod properly and when he stepped on a rock it had split the nail. He glued it back together and wrapped it up and called the vet to come and have a look. I stood around awkwardly expressing my sympathy through dumb looks until I knew the horse was okay and then I excused myself to go and do some home doctoring on my badly sprained ankle. I said goodbye my date and restrained myself from telling her so about me and my horse luck. She was more worried about the horse then seeing me off so I walked myself to the car and drove home. I called later to check on the horse and she said it was fine. We talked obligatorily for a few minutes but something had changed and we never went on another date. I saw her one more time years later and she had done well for herself. more power to her.

Jack the Pumpkin King

I spent a few more weeks pursuing the beauty queen hoping to pick up where we left off. One day my friend and I rode down to the high school she went to to drop in on her play practice and to see if she wanted to hang out. When we arrived there was just a few minutes left of practice and the lead in the play was a goofy looking bugger. He was unreasonably tall and skinny with a perfectly spherical head. He looked exactly like Jack the Pumpkin King from Tim Burton's A Nightmare Before Christmas.

Like this, but only more so.

For some reason his preternatural look was paired with the lurching movements of a stop motion animation that really sold the Pumpkin King comparison. My friend and I joked back and forth for the half hour we were waiting about what the real life Pumpkin King might get up to. We were killing us, when the girl was done she asked what we were laughing about. We told her our previously hilarious joke and she looked at us completely stoically unsmiling and unamused. There is no faster way to deflate some jokers then to look at them steadily with a look of mild disgust. She told us that he was a really nice guy and was very talented. We tried to explain how we were not jerks, even though we most definitely were. She collected her stuff and we asked if she wanted to go do something. She gave it an overly brisk and non-negotiable no and said we could do something another day when she had more time. The way she said it I thought that was code for 'piss-right-off-and-never-come-back'. That was not the case because she called me the next day to ask me out for a date.

My Spurned Friend Thinks That it is Funny That I Kissed a Girl

The friend who was with me when I met the beauty queen girl thought he should have been included in the dating of her, or her friend, or something. He was a little distressed that I had gone on a date with her without inviting, or even checking with him. So the next Monday when I was talking to him at school and I told him about the date and the apology cake he was visibly agitated and he started asking me questions about what we did I told him about dinner, the movie and the duck-feed-walk and he was getting more flustered. He didn't talk to me the rest of the day and the next morning when he saw me he told me that he had talked to the girl last night and she told him that she got into trouble because we were out so late, I knew that and didn't get his point. Then he tried to mock me because he asked her if we had kissed and she had said yes. I had left that detail out because I didn't think it was his business but I really didn't care if he knew. I mean, bottom line, I kissed a girl - a cute girl, she had liked it and I had liked it so I didn't see the issue. I was also 17 and not 12 and since I was not still stuck in the pre-to-early-pubesent shame I was actually proud of my wickedness and unbowed. He kept trying to shame me by making fun of how I kissed a girl but it was literally just a little confusing as to what he thought the effect would be. In retrospect, I know he was just jealous and trying to embarrass me but maybe he had a different idea of what would be embarrassing to a typical 17-year-old. After his attempt at public shaming he was distant and cold for a couple of months, either mad at me or paying me back I am not sure either way I was not too concerned, I got the girl.

I Take Her Out and Have to Make Her Mom a Cake

That night I went the ten miles south to pick up my beauty queen date and take her out for a night on the town. I took her to an upscale restaurant that I knew impressed women. She was impressed. I took her out to a stadium style movie theater which was a quite new concept at the time. We watched something and during the movie I made my move to hold her hand and she held back. That is to say she participated willingly in the hand holding without any of the colloquial connotations of the idiom 'to hold back'. The date was going so well I decided to take her out to a river walk park and feed some ducks and go for a walk and talk about cute stuff until she fell for my tricks and kissed me. We went and bought some day-old bread and went to the park and walked and fed and walked some more. We were laughing and talking and not paying too much attention to the time. I knew it was late, I assumed close to midnight which was her curfew but I didn't check the exact particulars until we got into the truck. When I started the truck the dash clock read 1:45 in the ante meridian and that was not good. She started to get really nervous about being that late and still being 30 minutes from home. I told her I was sorry and we drove back quickly. There was no hand holding on the way home and a good night kiss even seemed like a distant possibility. When I pulled into her driveway at 2:10 she leaned over and told me she had a good time and kissed me, then I tried for some more kissing and a little tongue action and she was not really in the mood for that so she pushed back and headed in. When I got home my normally not even up to care parents were both up and pretty mad. They asked what had taken so long and where we had been because my date's parents had been calling every 15 minutes since midnight to try and find their daughter. I tried to calm the situation but when my dad who normally had little to do with me had a stranger involved he had to show good face and punish me ignominiously. The punishment he chose was that I should bake her family a cake and go and apologize personally. I don't know how common the 'I am sorry I kept your daughter out late' cake technique of discipline is but I can tell you if making me feel awkward was the goal then mission accomplished. After church the next day I baked and decorated a cake and then drove down with my dad to there house and asked to speak with the lady of the house. I gave her the cake and told her I was really sorry that I had lost track of time and kept her daughter out so late. She was as embarrassed as I was and had no idea what to do with the cake or the apology and just said, 'Okay, thanks'. I walked back to my dad's car and her then laid in with some very special message or another while I mentally squirmed in post embarrassment embarrassment.

I Pick Up a Girl Off of a Beauty Queen Float

The city celebration for the town my high school was in was a few weeks after school started every year. They had a little parade and carnival it was actually the same one where I earned myself a Marky-Mark poster and some homoerotic mockery. Not this year though I would be participating in the parading as a member of the student council. We put virtually no effort into our parade entry and just rode down on children's bikes with some signs that said who we were and some crepe streamers woven through our spokes. The final touch was a baseball card taped to flippy-flap as it brushed the spokes to simulate the sound of a motorcycle to people who had never heard a motorcycle. We were right in front of a float that was the transport for Miss Juab, or Miss Nephi or something either way I kept flirting with the queen of that hillbilly borough and by the end of the parade I approached her to get her number. She was walking away with her parents but her mom told her that I was cute and she should give me her number. I got the digits and my friend who was waiting to take me back home with my child's bike thought for some reason he should be included in the dating potential. I thought that if she had a friend who was available there would be no harm in that but there was no way he had first dibs. When I got home I gave her a call to ask if she wanted to go out that night and she did. She didn't have a friend so we were going solo and my friend was not happy with that. I consoled him by telling him 'tough tit' and that made him feel better. I may be remembering that wrong.

An Awesome Welcome Back

As school started for the fall the members of the student body presidency were expected to put on a welcome back assembly. We had met a few times in the weeks leading up to the day to plan and rehearse. We had some things that we had to fit in and do but we did have the time to make an intro skit which we decided should include Healthriders, and the song 'Eye of the Tiger'. I know, I know they are a natural pairing but we were pioneers. Healthriders were a fitness fad that had, for the most part, come and gone by the time we were putting on this skit. They were a a fitness machine that worked by having the user sit on the seat and push down on the pedals and pull the handle to their hips. Imagine an 'air-hump' motion or better yet acquaint or reacquaint yourself with this awesome fitness innovation of the mid nineties with this workout video.

The point of using Healthriders is that they make everyone who uses one look idiotic and vaguely incompetently sexually suggestive. The skit went like this, The lights went down and the 'Eye of The Tiger' Started playing as the curtain came up to show five empty Healthriders. Wearing our student council customized hockey jerseys we all drill marched in time out to our machines and mounted them and then started pumping them in time to the 'Tiger'. As each of us were introduced we would have the spot light move to us while we did a trick on our 'Rider. My trick was to put my hands on the seat and invert my hips to make a rather overtly sexual hip thrust with each pump of the beat. Our duly elected secretary was the only girl in the group and she had a different style of knock-off Healthrider that had a resistance piston that didn't allow for smooth and quick returns which meant she was struggling to stay n time already but her trick was to pretend to fall of of her machine. Combined with being out of time it just looked like she couldn't figure out how to ride at all. I don't know if it was memorable for the audience, many laughed at the time but most were just confused. I definitely had a fun time and I thought it was hilarious, but then again we would all like to write our own reviews.

Climbing Advice For The Champ

There are a few reasons that it is better to be a man than a woman; same work more pay, pee standing up (this is not strictly a male ability but it definitely is better aimed), not menstruating or getting pregnant and many others. The best thing about being a guy though is that you are not constrained by society, or cultural mores, or good manners to listen politely to random dudes, dates and lots of men in general lay down some sweet unsolicited wisdom on you. It is one of my favorite hobbies to go to restaurants, museums and other date spots and eavesdrop on guys wading into the areas of their expertise, or their pretended expertise, and trying to impress a girl. It is often painfully awkward and hilarious. Now that I have set up the background for why I think super-genius guys are pretentious bumbling a-holes let me tell you how I got my self in deep being trying to be smart, when I was talking to a rock climbing legend. After I had fallen from about seven mighty feet from the ground and was disentangling myself from rope and harness a girl who looked a few years older then me and cute but not sexy said it was too bad I had slipped because she thought I did really well on the intermediate wall. Well, yes I did, thank-you miss and may I compliment you most astute skills of observation. I thought that, I didn't say that. I could have taken the condolence and compliment graciously and talked to her about herself and saved myself some embarrassment but what I did was take her passing comments as an invitation to make a complete idiot of myself. I got out of my gear went and stood by her watching the other climbers and then I started holding forth on the various techniques and holds I had used to make such an impressive run. She was beyond gracious and attentive while I recounted my exploits for a good two minutes before she said she regretfully had to run off to get ready. What she had to get ready for was to win the women's professional competition. Her name was Robyn and she had already won the world cup of climbing and basically every other major competition in the world and I stood there like a idiot telling her about climbing because I didn't take ten seconds to ask who she was because I was so excited to impress her with my vast knowledge of the sport. I was so embarrassed that it helped to push some of the falling near the bottom shame to the side. It was time to go home and stop being lame for one day.

Good Showing and Then a Worse Showing

My mountain biking friend got right to work and had his race in and done before we even got through the registration line to pick up our id cards and tee-shirts. My rock climbing friend and I were both in the very full amateur division so there was a long wait to even get on the route so we had plenty of time to sit around and hassle the local proto-celebrities. There are some dj's for a local alternative radio station that were handing out stuff but wouldn't give me any after I made a comment about there status as the reason I didn't listen to X96 in the morning because they were the type of people who like to laugh at their own jokes and congratulate themselves on their great knowledge and wisdom. For some reason they didn't like that. When it came time to climb I harnessed up and headed up the side of the 80' foot tall building with the plastic rocks bolted to it. It was not a terribly difficult climb but 80' is a pretty long way to climb without rest. I Along with about 12 of the other amateurs finished the harder amature route and just then organizers realized they had no way to differentiate our performances so after a little ad hoc-ing they decided that we would all climb again on the professional wall. The pro route was still very tall it just had smaller holds and sloped backwards and had a roof which all but two of the pros had fallen off of so far. They took a break from the pros to let us all have a go at it to weed us out quickly. I was third or fourth and when I went I was doing really well for the first seven feet or so when I stopped on some what I though were some pretty good holds to reposition my feet and I slipped and fell. I was embarrassed at my pathetic attempt I was by far the worst showing of the remaining climbers. Most of the rest made it up the forty feet or so to the roof before falling off. I don't know what place I got because for some reason they stopped at 4^th place. I was so disappointed because I had fallen not because my strength or skill gave out I had just been careless and thinking about how to make it over the roof. It sucked and it was embarrassing but I was able to top my performance in just a few minutes.

The beginner and intermediate routes are facing and the pro wall with the roof is on the right.

Climbing Competition Car Wreck

A few of my friends and I decided to try our hands at some rock-climbing and mountain biking competition before the summer was out. To that end we met up early one morning and I drove them up to the Snow Bird ski resort. When we got up there we realized that parking was going to be a problem because there were cars jammed into each and every nook and sometimes two to a cranny. I drove around for a bit becoming increasingly concerned we were going to be late and I let the mountain biker with his bike out while we tried to find any spot. We finally spotted one, or at least the notion of one between a Hummer and a Jaguar. The space looked like we could probably fit in there if the angles were just right. That was a incorrect assessment. As I turned the corner to try and ease my vehicle in slow and gentle my front bumper scraped the side of the Jag about most of the way down. I must of turned the wheel the wrong way in my panic to escape because it made it worse on the way out. I was almost paralyzed by fear, that car was worth more than my whole life's earnings, savings, and what my pieced out organs could fetch on the black market. . .combined. While I was contemplating my fate the owner of the car walked up and asked what was going on. He was a young man with a very expensive euro-trash look to him. I don't mean that in a negative way he just looked like he was a little svelte for an American and had a lot of some sort of lubricant or binder slicking his hair his hair strait back. He was also wearing some strait legged slacks and a button up shirt, what I knew as church clothes, for a day up the canyon so he just didn't fit in. He looked at the damage to his car and looked unimpressed. In his heavily German accented English he told me it was a rental for which he was not responsible and therefore did not care that it had been damaged. He jumped in and drove off leaving us plenty of room to park. I was so drained from the near brush with certain financial ruin that I was not in the mood to even go climbing but seeing as we had paid twenty five dollars for the opportunity I felt compelled to at least try.

Catching Up With the Home Girls

When I got back I needed to catch up with my more local girlfriends. The night I came home I set up a movie date with the most proximal girlfriend and we went to see Time Cop at the dollar theater. Time Cop was a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie that would need some serious reworking to be gawdaffle. We went to the show and to a park to feed ducks and it was nice to be in a place that cooled off after dark. That weekend I set up a date with my medium distance girl to comedown and go rock climbing with me. She wanted to bring her friend who had gone out with us before and I reset her up with the previous blind date guy. She came down that Saturday morning and the four of us headed up the canyon near my house to one of my regular rock climbing spots. One of my friends who knew we were coming up to that spot but had not been specifically invited was up there already sitting on a ledge about ten feet off the ground playing his harmonica. He jumped down talked with us a for a bit and then headed off. I felt bad he had been excluded but this was kind of a double date thing and a fifth wheel just makes everyone uncomfortable. We had the pretty standard day of rock climbing for those who have never gone before. I go up first and show them how good I am at it and then they all try in turn and see how hard it is so they are even more impressed by my god like skill. Then we went up to a little spot across the river and had a picnic. I took my girl up a steep trail that lead to a little flat spot in a shallow cave that was perfect for the romance. I had previously brought up a radio fully loaded with batteries and a mix tape with all of the best-est slow jams that could be recorded off of my cd collection. I set up the mix tape to play for two songs and then get to 'Wonderful Tonight' by Eric Clapton and then my plan was to ask her to dance with me. If you are not familiar with 'Wonderful Tonight' then you have not ever experienced the pure uncontainable power of romance that can be packed into three minutes and forty-five seconds. She was a little confused about why I wanted to dance instead of just cuddle but that was my romantic plan so we went with that. Oh, this next bit is so cringe worthily cheesy that I am having a struggle to write it because of the shame of it to this very day. Once more into the breach, I guess. My plan had been to dance with her in that romantacular spot and then when he got to the part of the song where he sings;

“. . .And the wonder of it all

Is that you just don't realize

How much I love you.”

I was going to simultaneously whisper that into her ear. Which I did. She liked me okay but I think that this was a little much for her and instead of melting she stiffened a little and the mood got measurably awkward. We stopped dancing and sat down with her keeping a little more distance then I had hoped and after about another twenty minutes she decided it was probably time for her to go. We hiked down and rejoined the now less bind daters and went back down the canyon. She headed home and we wrote several letters and talked on the phone some but we never went on another date. I am romance's fool. We tried to go out one more time but she got in a car wreck on the way over and I had to call off the date to go see her in the hospital. Some girls will go to extremes to get out of a date. Besides that school had started and there was no real free time to run up to Ogden to date a girl. We never saw each other again.

Some Leading On Goes On

After I went home some leading on went on and I may have been somewhat responsible for that. To be fair, that 'somewhat' up there on the last line should most likely read 'totally'. The problem I had was that I really liked the feeling of being wanted and I assumed that there would be no harm in keeping up a long distance relationship for a bit and enjoy the attention. To be clear, as an adult I realize that this was a horribly egocentric thing to do and to this day feel bad for what a jerk move it was. I do that a lot. Well, now that the mea culpa's have been mea culpa-ed I can get back to what it was I did wrong. It started with a letter from my southern love interest. I responded in a way that any sensible person would interpret as an escalation of the romantic feeling which, I think at the time, I really meant. I was even making plans for a return trip to Florida to see her. The letters got more intimate and more regular. I should have done the mature thing and told her that it was probably not practical for us to keep up an exclusive relationship but if the opportunity for either of us to move a little closer we might start from there. What I did was keep the fires burning until the letters slowed to a trickle. Things were left unresolved until she came out to visit some people and me in Utah the next summer. We talked and decided to go rock climbing I didn't tell her even at that last chance for dignity that I had a girlfriend and when I showed up to meet her in a halfway parking lot and I got out of my car with my girlfriend and that was when she realized what she should have been told. We did go climbing still but there was an understandably chilly feel to the activity and I felt like a huge idiot for letting this thing go unresolved for so long. We parted ways and have spoken again. Better for her to not associate with people like me anyway.

A Southern Warning and Farewell

The cop saw us walking on the side of the road in the dark and burned his reds and blues to get our attention and we walked over to him to see what the story was. He asked us our names and where we were from and what we were up to in the night. My southern girlfriend told him where she lived and then they engaged in that very southern pass-time of do-you-know? Do-you-know is a social game where the contestant mention people they know from an area and then where they live and who they are related to. There are many regional variations of this social dance but unless you have seen the sheer majesty of the art as practiced in the deep south then you have sampled a pale imitation not worthy of mention. After we had figured out which old boy's cousin lived in the house two down from her we got down to business. He launched into a long and convoluted reason why we should not be walking on that stretch of the road. He told us'all that in through this area there were a lot of criminals driving up and down looking for an opportunity to rob, rape or beat some young nice folks like us. He appeared uncomfortable with how he was trying to explain what the exact threat was so he kept finding different adjectives for us and different more specific one's for the potential criminals.

'On through here, nice folk like ya'll may find yourselves in trouble from, um, less nice elements in this here community.'

He went over the same basic formula for his cautionary sentence plugging in those more specific terms like a politically correct Mad Lib. After ten minutes of struggle he finally just said what he had wanted to the whole time, that a couple of nice young white kids like us were in danger of being assaulted and robbed my a roving gang of black marauders. He offered us a ride to a safer area for white folks and we politely declined siting the two blocks or so until we would be back to my cousin's house. He re-warned us by telling us he was serious and then drove off. We finished walking home and told everyone how we had a run in with the law. The next day my aunt drove us to the airport in the morning and my cousins and my sister and I cried and hugged some goodbyes and before long we were in Texas and then home.

A Few Too Many

If you have read this blog for a while you may think that I have left some different romantic threads unresolved. What happened to that girl from the Pearl Jam concert and follow up? What ever happened with that girl from UASC? A reasonable assumption would be that I, outside of the scope of these stories, had broken up with them or otherwise drifted apart. That would not be entirely accurate and I will tell you why, because I am a massive jerk. As far as those two girls knew they were still my girlfriends, my exclusive girlfriends. In between camps and trips that summer I had been going out on little dates and hangouts with my local girlfriend, then at other times I would run up and go on dates with my long distance girlfriend. You may be under the impression that two girlfriends is one too many, and that is absolutely correct. If you do feel that way the next bit might not improve you opinion of me or at least of the 17 year-old version of me because I went on and made it three. I have briefly mentioned a girl who was friends with my cousin that hung out with them quite a bit. I had been more or less running a pretty steady flirtation with her because she was cute and cool and the only girl that was around that I was not related to. We hung out almost every day of the almost two weeks I was down there and were starting to really hit it off I thought but nothing much was coming of it. That was until the last night I was in Florida. My Floridian love interest and her sister, whom I remember somehow being romantically linked with my cousin, although that may have been a vague and unrequited thing I am not sure, came over to hang out with my sister and I before we headed back home. She was a little more flirty and touchy for most of the night and when we both sat on the ground side by side to get our equally long hair done she put a pillow on her lap and reached over and pulled my hand into her lap to hold it. I thought that was nice and so I kept on with it. After the hairs were did she suggested we go for a walk, just the two of us. I knew what a girl suggested walk meant and I was a little nervous as I always was before a first kiss. We walked down the shoulder-less side roads in the smothering heat and humidity of a southern night, holding hands and talking about life and what-have-you. We walked according to her direction because I had no idea where we were. She stopped on a little hill that was on the side of the road and we walked over and sat down, talked a little and kissed a little too. I was torn between trying to enjoy the moment and thinking what a turd I was, now a two-time two-timer. I made a motion for a little more then kissing and was stopped in no uncertain terms and we called it a night and started to walk home when we were stopped by the local central casting old-boy southern sheriff and given a warning.

A Horrible, Horrible Trip To The Beach

Just south of where my cousins lived was Panama City and just south of Panama City was where they were keeping the Gulf of Mexico. I had been to the beach and ocean many times but had never had such an eventful and horrifying trip. The city was nice and touristy with lots of cool gift shops and even an alligator farm themed one where you could buy real alligator body bits. I, of course, did that. I still have the head of a little alligator in my house. Tacky? mayhaps – Awesome? Indubitably. After I was taken in by the glitz of the glamorous trade in preserved reptile limbs we went to a squeaky sand beach. The sand squeaked like a chewed balloon as you walked across it which was neat at first and then for those that hate that sound it got a little annoying. When we were at the beach bathrooms to rinse off the sand is where the day turned into a memorably scarring reminder of the importance of personal grooming and appropriate clothing. The first jolt came from a very pregnant forty-something Hispanic woman who was wearing the most minuscule of bikinis and had not been overly diligent in keeping her personal fur within the bounds of the garment. It was a good taste massacre that made me a little queasy. Not ten minutes later in the same area while waiting for the girls to do whatever it takes girls forty-flipping forevers to do in the bathroom a dude that looked like he was in his sixties, over tan and over hairy, walked out of the men's side wearing what looked an awful lot like nothing. I gave a quick double look to make sure I had not seen what I thought I had not seen and sure enough there it wasn't. I engaged in an involuntary triple take to discover why if he was naked his private parts were so oddly colored and it was revealed that my free spirited friend was not entirely naked, he was wearing a green condom and was carrying his shorts in his hand. I think this would be one of those times that you would kind of want to know why a guy like that was thusly attired but then when you heard why you may be horrified and want to un-hear it, but it cannot be unheard. In fifteen minutes waiting for the girls I had seen much too much and spent the rest of the day joking about what had assaulted my visuals that day on the beach. In many more trips to the beach in my life I have never in that span seen the equal of those specimens let alone in a quarter of an hour.

How 'Bout Them 'Noles

One day my cousin and I rode into the local big city with his dad to drop him off at work and then take his car for a little exploring for the day. The city happened to be the state capitol and the home of the Florida State University Seminoles. When we dropped his dad off my cousin noticed that someone had written 'How bout them noles' in the dust on a sign under the porch in front of the business. My cousin walked up and wrote, 'They Suck!' underneath the original inscription. Southerners take a few things very seriously, they love sport, sports, and watching sports - in that order.

Thou shalt not take the name of the 'Noles in vain. - That's from the Bible.

The response to a silly retort on the dust rallying cry was almost instant and much more fierce than I would have expected. A grown man saw what he had written and ran over to ask him what the hell he meant by that. My cousin said he was just joking around and that he didn't mean anything by it. The aggressive old man was riled up pretty good steaming for a fight when my quite mellow uncle came back outside to see what was the fuss. He figured out the story and began apologizing for his son and he instructed my cousin to erase his inclusion and to apologize. That turned down the flames of rage but the red hot coals of injured pride still simmered and festered as the old canker spent the next five minutes explaining how much the 'noles meant to that region of Florida and the nation. We listened politely and humbly until we could reasonably break away and get on the road and away from the offended football fan. We laughed about almost being killed but I think we were both a little more rattled than we admitted to each other. Just imagine what kind of intellectual juggernaut the American South could be if they put that kind of passion into academics.

All the Porn and Booze I Could Have

Down in Florida there lives the black sheep of my dad's family. It was not the uncle I was staying with but another brother who looks exactly like my dad just with a mustache. That is the universal shorthand of how to know the wild version from the buttoned-down one. In his youth he had been into various crimes, biker gangs and real legit stuff including onetime getting his residence shot up in a drive by. Like I said, real legit stuff. When I met him he was a little older and a little mellowed down but still a lot more worldly than my absolutely conservative parents. He only lived a few miles away and one day He took my cousin and I on a canoe trip down a river to his cabin and it was lots of fun to see the local deadly snakes and alligators on a leisurely paddle down what may very well be the most cliché metaphor for growing up there could be. When we got to his cabin on the river and were waiting for our ride back to civilization my uncle invited us to have a couple of beers, or some booze or pursue his porn collection. These were all well outside the line of what I was invited to do on my family outings and I was a little uncomfortable. He told me that he wouldn't tell our parents so we didn't have to worry about that. I opted for playing some pool which I thought I knew how to do but I was wrong my uncle had a pool shark level of unbelievable skill and it was not fun to play against him so we decided to just watch him make a series of trick shots. I was not tempted in the least by the beer or the booze, I had never found alcohol that appealing, I was however a little intrigued by the possibility of perusing some adult literature. I was too shy to do that though and I was embarrassed for my cousin to know I would be in to something like that. Therefore, thus resolved to not be observed taking a peek at the lusty ladies of playboy magazine I only indulged in a couple of quick and fervent glances into the one magazine left in the bathroom. I could only look as long as would not be a suspiciously long time to be in the bathroom which was usually two minutes or so. We spent the the couple of hours waiting for our ride watching a VHS copy of Smokey and the Bandit 2 and I taking a couple to many trips to the bathroom. Then we went home without partaking of any more of the available carnal pleasures. Bullet dodged.

Slang a Gator Up Against a Tree

There is a cave and nature trail kind of state park not far from where my cousins live and we went there one of our days there for the tour. The cave tour was pretty cool and then we went for the walk around the boardwalk that wound through the swamp and we stopped with the ranger to look at an alligator. There was a teenage hillbilly on the path in front of us and he was telling the group he was with that he was 'fixin' to jump down there and snatch up that li'l ol' gator and slang it up against a tree to bash its head in'. The ranger, who judging from her accent was not from these parts, grabbed him and informed him that he would not be slanging anything up against any trees. The kid was startled and said he was just kidding, but once he got enough distance between us to recompose his bravado started loudly proclaiming how few vulgar words for excrement that he gave about some stupid old ranger. It was such a funny slice of the redneck life that I have often in the years since claimed that I was about to jump down somewhere and slang something up against a tree and dash ts brains out. This is usually when I am experiencing some wonder of the natural world - a seal, a manatee or something else that is living so peacefully that it just begs to be slung up. For some reason my decade old inside joke which is meant to be an ironic commentary on the culture of violence endemic in the hillbilly ethos is misunderstood as just a regular threat of violence and people are offended. Come on people, try and keep up.

Graduation and Segregation

There was a casual racism in the town I grew up in that allowed for jokes and name calling but I never saw any kind of segregation or violence. That could have been because there were only really two races and the non-white race, Hispanic, was segregated. There was one black girl in our school and a girl I thought was black that turned out to be Indian the from India kind. Maybe we were not that racist because it was not all that possible. Now is the part where I establish myself as not-racist legit – My best friend in elementary school was Mexican. Sweet, now I am beyond reproach right? I also thought that there were some cute Hispanic girls so there is that. I establish a general ignorance about race relations in the United States because it so thoroughly blew my mind the constant humming of racial tension that was just under the surface. My cousin's friend that I thought was cute was graduating as Valedictorian or Salutatorian and was speaking at her graduation so we all went. She read Oh, the Places You'll Go!' by Dr. Seuss, which has since become required by law to be read at graduation as a right of passage.

It is not a bad book for graduation the first 13 times you hear it and then you start to think maybe people are just mailing it in.

At the time I had never been to a graduation and thought it was a pretty cool thing to do. That was not the thing that drew my attentions however, it was the fact that in this high school gym filled with maybe couple thousand people there was no one sitting out of their de facto race section. I had never seen anything like it a bleacher full of black families, a little gap and the Hispanics and then the white families made up the rest. I searched the crowd and didn't see one person out of place. I commented on it and my aunt, who is southern proud, said that was not racist it was just where people felt most comfortable sitting. I wondered aloud then what would happen if a black family went and sat in the middle of the white section. She said they could go sit wherever they pleased. That I thought may be have been a lie. On my trip I got to see a couple other indications that miscegenation may not be as free and easy as she claimed.

Of Journals and Jam Bands

As I got reacquainted with my short lost cousins it became evident that we were living in very different realities. The cousin closest in age to me had an odd and time consuming hobby which was hilarious. He was keeping an imaginary journal in the persona of one of his goofy neighbors. He would write comical musings that he imagined that kid would have and as I remember the project was quite extensive stretching over several notebooks. That was some insane dedication to a joke. The next difference was that my cousin was very tall and was actually on the basketball team for his high school which contrasted with my perpetually being cut from the tryout process. On a team of mostly black kids my cousin joked that he was the token white guy. The most dramatic difference in our lives and culture was probably that instead of mocking the band a venerable and cherished tradition in my school, they actually thought it was cool. Whoa. They talked about band in practical terms, they told stories about band and had friends over to jam a little bit on band instruments. I am not talking about the universally cool jamming instruments, such as the guitar, lute, lyre, bass and drums. I am talking about horns. I am absolutely not musically talented and this strange and wondrous paradigm shift was creating internal conflict as a struggled to not try and give into my culture imperative to make fun of the band and what just about everyone called 'band fags'. I just had to accept that we were just a little more advanced as a culture out west and like an anthropologist visiting the deepest jungles of Brazil and encountering the isolated and backwards natives living at one with nature - I needed to pity them not mock them. I think I was polite and didn't make fun of anyone's band related skill, desires, or aspirations and chalked up the behavior to a certain deep swamp delirium brought on by the heat, humidity and the incessant drone of insects.

Off The Road

The roads in swamp Florida are thin strips of civilization that must constantly be defended from the constant press of nature pressing to take it back. They are generally winding, thin and absolutely without shoulder. They are often on a berm to keep them out of the wettest and lowest of the bog and the result is that you drive on the tops of long hills with little to no margin for error. The first night of our visit the cousins their friend and I jumped in the miniature van and drove the few miles to the junior college to go and play racquetball. On the way we were overtaken by an ambulance, lights and sirens and my cousin, quite correctly, pulled over to the side which meant into the sloping vegetation which made up the non-existent shoulder. When the ambulance had passed my cousin tried to pull back onto the road but with the wheel turned too hard just succeeded in sliding down the embankment and down into swamp territory. He tried a couple of times to drive up but with too aggressive an attack the van just slid around and deeper into the bayou. A little nervous and frustrated he turned the van over to me to try and get out of the mush. With a few kids pushing to get it started I took a nice gentle line back up the hill and onto the road and soon we were back on the way to play some racquetball. My cousin's friend mentioned that she was impressed at my driving ability and I had to admire her excellent judgment of character. That is when I think I decided she needed to be pursued so I turned up the full force of my over-eager seventeen year-old charm and was a little louder and more trying-too-hard-to-be-funny then even usual.

Floridians

My dad's family was from Florida, not fun Florida – swamp Florida. It is a strange place which is rotting into the ground and the infrastructure and social conventions seem like they got frozen some time in the ambiguous past. Even at night the heat and humidity is oppressive. The huge sounds of the bugs from the swamp is deafening and barely masks the 'Deliverance' banjos that seem to echo in the steamy darkness. Most of the family had moved out west permanently, intermittently, or occasionally but there was a core of the faithful that maintain a base of operations. One of the families that had moved out to Utah for most of my life had moved back for a couple of years and that summer before my senior year my sister and I flew out for a ten day or so visit. It was the first time that I flew anywhere by myself and in charge of my little sister to boot. We made it just fine and my aunt was waiting at the airport in a minivan with two of my cousins in tow. The oldest cousin from that family was a boy six months younger than me and a foot taller. After we got into the van with our luggage my cousin started talking to me about some of the people of color that I may have noticed here in Florida that I may not have noticed in Utah. He started rattling off a rather impressive, for its width and breadth, list of rude or common nicknames for African-Americans. I didn't really know what to say but my aunt bailed me out by telling him that was inappropriate and we should never repeat such terms. He lightly argued that he was only informing me what I might hear in the wild from people not as classy as us. She told him to shut up nonetheless. We got to their house and settled in got to know everyone again and met some of their intriguing lady friends. We decided to head off into the night to play some racquetball and that almost cost us, if not our lives, some major inconvenience.

Do You Like Piña Colada?

After Freedom Academy I was spending a fair amount of time traveling the hour and a bit north to take my girlfriend out on a date. She was returning the favor and coming down for a couple of dates and a dance. It was clear that it was not sustainable but it was a lot of fun. I went up there late one evening to go to a party with her after I had worked all day with my dad and then went climbing. It had already been a very full day and I should have gone to bed but any hint of a possibility that I might get some loving was too much to pass up. I showered up and tried to pop an unsightly zit on my chin, that went badly. It was a gooey swelled mess but instead of taking this as a further sign I should just call it a night I cut out a tiny circle of band-aid and covered it up. It looked like I covered a zit with a band-aid but that was better then that festering monstrosity that was the alternative. I drove up there already starting to fall asleep and when I got to the party I was really tired. I hung out, uncharacteristicly quite and calm and ran into the couple of kids I knew from UASC and Freedom Academy and then I went out onto the porch with my girlfriend and fell asleep while I was cuddling her on the love seat swing. She was trying to wake me up because it was only about 11 and there was plenty of party left but I was unconscious with fatigue. She went inside at one point and got some piña colada mush in a little can and she tried to feed me some. It was one of the most miserable feelings of my life being kept out of deep sleep into a half conscious world filled with force fed piña colada. I was trying to tell her to stop but I was too out of it so I had to eat and was so scared that I formed an aversion to the flavor of piña colada that made it impossible for me to enjoy it at all for ten years. Ghastly. I slept the night out on the porch and in the morning I had to head off before almost anyone was up so I woke my girlfriend, kissed her and she walked me out to my truck for one more hug, one more kiss and a farewell.

Sister, Sister

After the talent show the last day was just a goof off situation and that night there was going to be a dance. Most of the day my new girlfriend's sister who had been friendly the whole time started ratcheting it up on past friendly. I was sitting and talking with some kids when she came up and said she wanted to talk to me. I said that would be fine and we went for a walk. She started telling me how she was always being left out while her sister got all of the best things. I said that could be rough. She told me that her sister had more friends and more fun. Yeah, it's a hard knocks life. She stopped a little way down the path when we were out of sight and grabbed my hand to turn me around. She told me that her sister had the attentions of all the best boys and that she didn't even properly appreciate them. Not like she would. Oh-kay now I knew what was up she was not venting but trying to move in on her sister's spot. I kept up with the 'yeah, that sucks' feigning ignorance and I tried to keep walking when she took my captive hand and used it to pull me down, she was a bit shorter than me, and kiss me. I think I instinctively kissed her back for a second and then stopped. I freed my hand and wrapped her up in a hug and tried in the most gentle way I could formulate to tell her that I did like her quite a bit but that it wouldn't be fair to her sister to pursue this any further. She said that she knew that but she just liked me so much and that her sister wouldn't care as much about me as she would. I told her I was sorry but that was how it had happened and it was too late now. We finished our walk and she went away to be with her other friends. I didn't see her at lunch, or dinner but she was there at the dance. I asked her to dance with me and she did. We had a nice time and I told her I was sorry that we couldn't be together. She laid her head on my chest which was easy for a girl of her stature and she squeezed me a little more firmly then a standard dance hug and we finished up our time together and after that we were cordial but cooler when we met in future.

A Poem

I think poems are not unlike a penis in that if some one loves you very much they will pretend that yours is awesome and that they like it very much but most everyone else would prefer you kept it to yourself. To extend the metaphor, there are poems that are so magnificent that they can make a living for the author in the public sphere but those are few and far between. With that in mind I had a delusion of grandeur surrounding my poetical skills, I started writing some pseudo-deep surly and self-righteous offerings when I was a junior. Sometimes I would rattle off several poems and format them and print them out to put in a binder. I would bring my binder around with me and to extend the metaphor even further, show it to girls to try and impress them. Almost to a woman they feigned interest and would leaf through the binder and make the appropriate interested hums and make the necessary head nods. With the benefit of hind sight my confidence in their quality and profundity has faded in re-reading them as a new, older and more mature person. To answer the begged question – no, I don't think that my current writing is sad and pretentious. I will know that in ten years. I rode into Freedom Academy riding some unreasonable confidence in my literary prowess and signed up for the talent show. When the night came for the recital I found out that friends and family as well as local celebrities would be in attendance and my confidence was shaken a little. To top it off I was short of clothes and only had a tee shirt and cut-off shorts left to wear. When I saw the other kids ready to go up on stage dressed like it was time for church I was a little more embarrassed. Right before my turn I looked out in the audience and noticed that my new girlfriend was in the audience as well. I was cold and shaking with a sick stomach but I went onto the stage and read my heavy-hand and preachy poem that chided the listener for being a bigot. I got some polite clapping when I was done but something in my mind connected and I realized that what I had written was not that good and I knew I was not going to be in the running for an award. After the last performance and the awards I got to go talk to my girlfriend and she was very sweet about my writing and I was circumspect in my personal distance with her as she was there sitting with her dad. I never recited poetry again.

I Think I Am An Elitest Because I Don't Know What That Means

Based on a misunderstanding of what the word elitist meant, I decided I was one. The official definition is that someone believes that because of their money, status, intellect or social standing they should be entitled to additional benefits and rights. I never bothered to look that up and thought that it meant that I thought smart and charismatic people should be in charge of making the world a better place for everyone as a responsibility of their talents. After spending a week with democratically elected students at UASC who were in general very smart, attractive and nice it was a half step back to reality to be with students selected by school officials based on their leadership ability. The mood was much less friendly and cooperative and sometimes overtly Machiavellian. The sense I got was that many of these were aggressive type-A(-hole?) kids who were leaders because people were intimidated by them and the teachers who selected them thought that was a good thing. In the week at UASC I never heard any sniping, or even sarcasm and everyone was always trying to make things go smoothly and that was bizarre to me. I was used to any group activity having a couple sassers and poop-pants wearers. At Freedom Academy everyone was also very smart and talented but with their 'something-to-prove' attitudes made for some picked fights and some bullying. I was only a few days removed from Elysium and I wanted back in. Sadly, no man can step into the same river twice and so I took up telling people that I was an elitist and obviously to anyone who knew what that meant I sounded a little arrogant or especially clever in my wry social cometary. It was not until I was in college debate when an assistant coach started laughing when I told someone that I was an elitist. He said that was one of the best jokes he had ever heard in that context. It wasn't a joke but my misunderstanding was so great that it had come back around so far as to sound like irony. I looked up what the word meant and realized I was not actually an elitist.

Prison Is Not Cool, Prison Sucks.

As part of the camp we got to head a little way up the road to visit our local penitentiary for those men in Utah that we in need of maximum security supervision so as not to harm themselves or even others. We got a tour which convinced me further that I was far too pretty for prison and was in no way cut out for the rigors of resisting the amorous propositions of men not very good at impulse control. It was scary for me and more so for the girls in our group who were getting quite explicit offers for companionship. One of the girls in our group had on some tiny white shorts and they had attracted more than her fair share of cat calls and propositions. They were yelling out 'white shorts' and then saying some sort of thing that they would like to do with or to her. She was trying to hide among a circle of boys but it was not working. It only stopped when we went into a conference room to talk with a few prisoners one on one. We were briefed about how charismatic and manipulative the prisoners could be and told not to believe them or talk to them alone. Three guys came out and told us how they were misunderstood, sorry and changed. One guy said he was in prison because he accidentally killed his friend with a brick. When he was pressed for details it turns out that we had very different ideas about what constitutes an 'accident'. He had hit his friend in the head with a brick 43 times but he swore he didn't intend to kill him. Yeah, bad luck. I came away from prison with that lesson stored firmly in my rules of thumb: never more than twenty hits with a brick if I didn't want to kill my friend.

A Survivor Among Us

I generally try and keep peoples names out of my blog in case they would rather not be implicated in my crimes against good sense. This post is an exception because the girl is quite public and nationally known for what happened to her. When we were divided up into our groups they just did it in more or less a round robin fashion and each student got placed randomly-ish. By that random grouping I was placed with the sister of the girl I met at another camp across the state and with a young lady named Yvette Rodier. She was beautiful, smart and cool which made her the focus of lots of proto-masculine showing off and wooing. Liberated by the knowledge that my new girlfriend's sister was with us at every moment I was spared the obligatory flirting that I was generally compelled to do by my chemically sodden teenage brain. I was then free just to hang out with and be friends with the rest of the girls there and that was nice to have girls that were truly my friends that were not being classed as family, friend-pre-conquest, friend-too-ugly, or - God forbid – post-conquest-bridge-burned. After I hit puberty I think those were the only categories that I had for women. I know it is shallow and sad but if you have never been a teenage boy trying to navigate the treacherous internal world foisted upon you by hormones then pump your judgmental breaks. The kids in our group got to be pretty good friends and spent free time as well as structured time together. I will tell you a little more about some of our experiences in prison and whatnot in the next post but what is important to know here is that we were good friends and then camp ended and we went our separate ways promising to always be friends and too always keep in touch in the sincere and fervent manner of summer campers the world over. As per the same tradition we didn't stay in touch. I saw her one more time at a debate tournament and then I finished me senior year, graduated, went to college and was coming home from classes walking through the living room where my roommates had the news on and heard her name out of the corner of my ear-balls and I stopped and asked why she was on the news. They said her boyfriend and her had been up at a lake and an escaped convict came up to them randomly and shot her boyfriend to death and had shot her many times but she was still alive. I was terrified for her, sick and sad. In those days it was so hard to get additional information on a story and the papers were not coming out with more info until the next day. I went to my room and cried a little and prayed fervently that she would be okay. I was too nervous to sleep very well but there was literally nothing I could do to help so I walked around the streets until the police told me to go hole about 2 in the morning. My girlfriend at the time was in my first class in the morning and as we were going to class I told her that a friend of mine was shot several times and was in the hospital but I didn't know if she was going to be okay. She waited for what she thought was enough time to be respectful of the gravely injured woman to ask me if I had been dating her or if I had a thing for her because I seemed more upset then I should be. I told her to go to hell and left class and went home to sleep. Yvette lived and now is a lawyer and victims rights advocate and I have never seen her in person since.

Her Story.