My safety valve.
A few friends and I are starting a new political debate forum called Crapola Rex.
posted by Vernarial @ 10:25 AM
3 comments
I'm not left, and I'm not right. I'm just me and thats outta sight. I hate big business and all the crap that goes along with it. I hate lies. I hate corruption in government. I am not full of hate, but I am full of contempt for the path my country has taken. I love my country, but right now I am not proud of it. Oh yeah this was supposed to be about me.
3 Comments:
Monday, March 20, 2006
Here goes nothing....
Current mood: contemplative
I really wanted to leave something, but, am in no mood to write friend friendly material...
I was riding home on the B train, and decided to pull out the ipod. I wanted to listen to something 80's, but not in the 80's dance party CD sense. (You know, the cliche tunes, the stuff you'd hear at any "gag me with a silver spoon" party, where most of the guests are in their early to mid twenties and getting there rocks off to Prince or the B52's.) I wanted 80's 'remind me of when I was a kid' kinda stuff. Personally memorable stuff.
The train started over the Manhattan bridge. The yellow and red signage clinging to the boxy buildings of Chinatown gave way to the East River. A tug boat appeared from underneath me. I wondered how big those waves were. How wide the river really is between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Had I been in New York so long that I was desensitized to views like this? That seeing this so regularily, made me a New York working zombie? How can I recapture the life out of living, rediscover the passion that I used to feel? Can feel? I let that thought gestate for a few seconds, then decided to change the channel.
I felt a need to escape to an earlier reality. A seperate state of mind. So I put on the Cure. Again, not 'dance party CD' cure, (Just Like Heaven, Close to me, etc.), I rolled around the dial to 'Pornography', (no....the cure album, not "big booty mamas...."), and closed my eyes. I found myself listening to songs that are so well known that they are built into the base of my skull, an extra layer of grey matter meant to hold a few gigs of musically triggered memory. Anyway, here I am mouthing this shit, and getting lost, escaping, I guess...
When we moved outside of Parma, Bill, (Mom's new husband), put us up on a hill. Bill was an ex-Raider and 49er. He was all fifty something years old Mormon man-chismo. In Korea, he shot people. I mean, he was a sniper. And the dude had post dramatic stress oozing out of his untamed and scarily irrational ego. He had a career as a mobile x-ray technician, (the only one in Salt Lake City, apparently), and made decent bank cruising from one retirement home to the next in his little red sports car, picking up old ladies to plop them down between his plates. "got another fractured pelvis, Mrs. Smith!" He made a solid effort winning over us kids. (I was fifteen, barely. Older brother Jimmy was just about to graduate high school, and wouldn't last the summer in Idaho. He felt, and rightly so, that he should graduate with his life long buddies in Kansas. So he moved back and stayed with Dad up unto his graduation. Big Sis, Jessica, never made the move from Kansas. She was a year out already, and though she is still bitter to this day, in regards to mom's move out west, has been the most solid one of the five of us. She has had the benefit of keeping with the familiar, and the disadvantage of missing out on years of life experience with the younger siblings she helped raise. With Jessica and Jimmy all growned up, that left me as the "man of the house" with younger Josh and Erin....There are five of us, if your counting.
Anyway, back to the 'Bill' thing. This particular story takes place the summer Jimmy was really leaning toward moving back to finish school with his ol' buds. The trailer was a double wide, with a chandelier, ...seriously. The hill, on top of some property Bill owned,-a steep, sage brushy, couple mounds between two irrigation ditches. He had wooed my mother with the promise of building a family friendly ranch house that the Ingalls would consider a frickin' country mansion. Bill had hired a builder, and had plans to prove it. (But the castle was never to hit bedrock. I still wonder if it was ever really in the making.) That got us up on that hill, in that double wide, in Idaho, waiting for the good country life to raise from the brush...in case everybody ever asks how a Kansas boy ended up in Idaho.....alas.)
Yep, Bill made a real solid effort winning over us kids. However, at fifty something years old, his idea of family and kids was a bit antiquated. (keep in mind, this is 1989 or so.) He expected to throw the ol' pig skin in the backyard, watch the game, have turkey, EVERY day. I swear his imaginary "family" lived all thanksgiving all the time. With us, with the Travis kids, that's not what you got. You had a group of introverted, self conscious, awkward, semi intellectual spazoids. We were pretty much nerds, flat out. Bill's all american hoo-rah didn't quite connect with us. He may have thought we were all nuts. But, we thought he was ridiculous.
Before I get back to the Cure, I have to tell you about this trailer we lived in. It was top of the line, Grade A, (yes, Bill did his research), which means diddley squat to a fifteen year old who has to run down a hill every day to catch the bus to school. And it was windy up there. One fall, with winds over 70 miles an hour, I had to climb onto the roof and position cement blocks on the sheet metal as it groaned and flapped up, threatening to gouge me, as I blinked the dirt out of my eyes. One winter, well below zero, I found myself with a blow torch and not enough layers to protect me from the cold, as I attempted, successfully, after seemingly three hours of pointing, to thaw the water pipe peeking up out of the hard ground, so we could shower a luke warm shower before school. (Look at that, I have my "up hill both ways" old man stories already planned and I'm only thirty two!)
So, anyway, it was in this trailer that I shared a room with my older brother Jimmy (or Jim as he's now known). Jimmy introduced me to the Cure. And he was introduced by my cousin Vern. Vern had moved to Salt Lake City with his family, (much the way I would end up doing, before moving to Idaho, again in the same kinda way).
Vern was the "cool" cousin. Athletic and handsome, he fit in with the popular crowd when he got to Salt Lake, but he preferred a more rebellious group. He hung with the wavers. As in New Wave. Soon to be known as Alternative. There he discovered the Smiths, Social Distortion, The Connells, the Cure, New Order, Depeche Mode, Front 242, Jesus and Mary Chain, Echo and the Bunny Men, Oingo Boingo, Erasure, The Thrill Kill Kult, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Sugar Cubes, Dead or Alive, INXS, Midnight Oil, Ministry, Camper Van Beethoven and a bunch of others. All this knowledge came to his eager teenage sensibilities through a combination of a local radio station, (KJQ, 'the Cow'), and his fellow "fuck the Mormon church" friends.
It was a different time and place. To listen to this stuff, to wear the T shirts and hair, that was going to put you in a real small category, a pretty unpopular one, at that, and set yourself up for ridicule that could measure from anything, from social rejection, to physical confrontation. I had people calling me 'fag', throwing rocks at me, slamming my locker on my fingers, daring me to do...anything. I didn't. Keep in mind, contrary to popular belief, 80's music wasn't, at the time, all Prince and B52's, let alone radio play for the smiths or the cure, it was mostly Bon Jovi, Tina Turner, Expose, New Kids On the Block, Janet Jackson, Guns and Roses, Cinderella, Billy Joel, Motley Crue, Aerosmith, Bryan Adams, ACDC, Paula Abdul, Debbie Gibson, Genesis, and Def Leopard. there was a little bit a rap leaking in, as well, Run DMC, LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, Erik B and Rakim, Ton Loc, Sir Mix a Lot, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, The Fat Boys, and at the end, Public Enemy and Ice T.
(Side note: There is a reason that early skate boarders were so clique-y and aggressive. A: There is safety in numbers. B: Fuck them before they fuck you. C: We are all we have. That was the defense and the draw to these little subcultures, when they were subcultures.)
Anyway, The Cure. 'Pornography'.
Late one night, a summer night. My older brother, Jimmy, put a tape in and turned off the lights in our room. Our room at the end of the trailer on the hill. At that end, our window allowed us views of the barn, (in the foreground), and a quilt of farmland at the foot of our hill. It was dark, as we were going to bed. Every single night, we would always listen to one tape or the other, on repeat(at a low volume) when we went to sleep. Against the wall, I looked out the window, low, dusty light in motion through the curtains. Jimmy was asleep in his bed. Where I lay, he had become part of the dark corner were his bed was. I layed there, in this crazy double wide trailer, on the top of a hill, somewhere in Idaho. I sat up in my bed to look outside. There was a lantern on top of a post that served as a beacon for travelers coming up our driveway of dirt and tire tracks. The light it provided was subtle. Outside, it served a purpose, to keep you from rolling down the hill when parking. From within the trailer, it was a little like moon light. Like the silhouette of horses and clowns that antique night lights gave mobiles for babies, the dust and dirt coming off the hill laid shadows on my face. Jimmy was asleep, I decided. Everything was still. If the tape player wasn't playing. There would have been nothing to hear. But it was playing. And the music drifting out of our tape player was really giving me the creeps. All alone. Brother asleep. Listening to those songs.....my mind wouldn't stop. I think I literally shivered myself to sleep that night.
That's what I thought of on the train home.
The Cure, 'Pornography'.
One of the best albums of all time.
Download it. Turn your lights off. Turn it on. And go to sleep. I dare you. No peeking.
WOW. That was excellent. I learned a little something about my good cuz today. I wish I would have read this sooner.
howdy vern!
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