Still, a friend of mine pointed out a few days ago that thirty-five is “the age when even the elderly don’t think you’re young anymore.” That kind of hit me.

I’ve spent the last couple of birthday’s a bit depressed or pensive or just sorting stuff out. I’m not really in that place this year. The year I turned 30 my marriage of 11 years fell apart. The year I turned 31 I ended up in the hospital. The year I turned 32 I was unemployed and struggling to find my way forward. The year I turned 33 my daughter moved across the country. And last year I took Sarah back to the airport to fly home after spring break.

Of those years, when I turned 32 (which feels like several blogs and lifetimes ago) I did something I don’t usually do, I made a list of things I expressly wanted to accomplish. I didn’t accomplish some of them because they were essentially abstract and therefore essentially unaccomplishable. But on the other hand, the more concrete ones, like get a job with a specific salary, buy a nice camera, use my passport, scare the shit out of myself…those I did manage to accomplish. In no small part because I wrote them down. I made them concrete. I had something to work towards and compare against.

There are 1827 days until I turn 40.

There are things that I believed would be true about myself before I was 40, things that I feel are now starting to slip away.

What follows is the list of forty things that I want to accomplish before I turn 40:

1. Be selected for and attend Viable Paradise.
2. Have a short story published in an SFWA qualifying publication.
3. Have a novel published by a SFWA qualifying publisher.
4. Join the SFWA.
5. Have a short story published in Electric Velocipede.
6. Have a novel published by TOR Books.
7. Visit the TOR offices in the Flatiron Building in NYC.
8. Meet PNH and TNH in person. Tell them thank you.
9. Meet Catherynne M Valente. Try not to go fanboi.
10. Meet Neil Gaiman in person. Get him to sign my Sandman #1 and Fragile Things.
11. Meet Russel T Davies. Tell him thank you.
12. Write a screenplay for an episode of Doctor Who.
13. Go to a sci-fi/fantasy related convention (ComiCon, DragonCon, etc.)
14. Buy a current generation Mac.
15. Buy a late model-year car/truck.
16. Buy a project car.
17. Buy the tools to fix up a project car.
18. Actually fix up a project car.
19. Take the project car on a serious, multi-day road trip.
20. Buy a motorcycle or officially give up on that long-held dream.
21. Buy a decent acoustic guitar.
22. Learn to play Fields of Gold on the guitar.
23. Learn to play Fragile on the guitar.
24. Learn to play Saint Agnes and the Burning Train on the guitar.
25. Learn to speak French well enough to understand a French film without subtitles.
26. Learn to read French well enough to read Dumas, Casanova, and Voltaire without a French to English dictionary.
27. Learn to speak Italian well enough to understand a Roberto Benigni film without subtitles.
28. Learn to read Italian well enough to read Umberto Eco without an Italian to English dictionary.
29. Visit France.
30. Visit Italy.
31. Buy L-series lenses: Telephoto lens, Wide-Angle lens, Macro lens.
32. Buy a Speedlight, remote, and diffusers.
33. Improve my photography skills.
34. Upgrade my camera to a level appropriate for my improved skills.
35. Run a 5K.
36. Run a Marathon.
37. Run a Triathlon.
38. Take Communion on Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, Easter, All-Saints Day, And Christmas in the same year.
39. Spend a school-year with my daughter.
40. Buy a house.

I might not do all of these things before I turn 40, but I’m not going to turn 40 without trying do do all of these things.

[Word Count: 695]

When I was sixteen, I didn’t think fondly of “my” van because it wasn’t even my van; it was my Grandma’s van that she had bought for her drapery business and taken all of the benches out of except the one in the back. It smelled like an old van. It LOOKED like an old van. And to a sixteen-year-old kid, it was about as cool as Dan Quayle. I was perpetually “borrowing” it, even though my grandma had no use for it and had her own little Subaru that she drove regularly, it never EVER was “mine” by any stretch of the imagination.

Yet, I had no reason to despise it. It never broke down, it never failed me, it never caused any issue that I can ever remember. It just trucked along like the old, true-blue trooper that it was.

Actually, twenty years later, I have only good memories in that van. We drove it everywhere. We camped in it, moved stuff into and out of dorms in it, it brought me safely home at 3:00 in the morning after a double shift at Rhodes Bake’N'Serv more than once, and it even saved my life when I spun it into a snowbank by being too damn big for the snowplow driver barreling down on me to miss.

Despite the cliché, to the best of my knowledge, no teenager (or adult for that matter) ever got nookie in that van. While I drove that thing across the western half of the country every winter in a seemingly endless ski-bum odyssey, my passengers were all dudes. Even though six could (and on dozens of occasions did) sleep uncomfortably with three on the floor, one on the bench and two reclined in the captain’s-chairs; none of us were interested in the others “in that way” (again, to the best of my knowledge) and besides, privacy simply wasn’t what the wrap-around windows were built for. A “Love Machine” it was not.

The title of this post might not be the funniest thing anyone ever said about The Smurfmobile, but it was certainly high on the list. Other choice lines were:

• Me: “I’ve ridden four-wheelers with wider tires than this thing.”
  Friend: “Dude, we’ve ridden MOTORCYCLES with wider tires than this thing.”

 

• Friend 1: “It’s like a skier delivery van. When the doors open, skiers just pop right out…”
  Me: “Are you saying I drive a delivery van?”
  Friend 1: “Aww, dude, ‘delivery van’ would be a step up. When you’re not driving skiers, this ride’s the lamest thing on four wheels.”
  Friend 2: “Really? You’re limiting it to four-wheeled vehicles?”
  Friend 1: “Well, it’s not a Honda Goldwing.”
  Friend 2: “Touché”

 

• Friend: “It’s not the wobbly steering that frightens me, it’s the cliff without a guard-rail.”
  Minor over-correcting almost causes us to veer into an oncoming truck.
  Friend: “No, on second thought it’s the wobbly steering.”
  Me: “Really? I’d have thought the lack of seatbelts would be scarier.”
  Friend: “…when Matt called it The Smurfmobile I thought he was talking about the color. Now I realize it’s actually a rejected deathtrap built by Gargamel; designed to lure in innocent creatures and then hurtle them down to a horrific death on the rocks below.”
  Me: “The repeated pounding as they tumble down makes the meat tender. If you weren’t a vegetarian you might have sensed my trap.”
  Friend: “That’s…that’s diabolical. And…believable…terrifyingly believable.”
  Me: “Papa Smurf won’t be able to save you this time.”

 

• Assistant Dean: “You drive that in the snow? Nick, stop listening to The Cure…life is worth living! You’re too young to throw it all away!”

While cartoon characters and ski bums are integral to my memories of that van, that last line brings me to the other thing I associate most with the Smurfmobile: the music on the radio at the dawn of the 90′s. I was lucky enough to have the optional AM/FM Radio in the dash, with giant chrome buttons for the five “preset” channels (these could not be changed) and two chrome twist knobs for volume and tuning. To the best of my knowledge there was only one speaker, smack in the middle of the dash, pointed at the windshield and stereo wasn’t ever a consideration in the design. Acoustically, that truck was heinous. The engine sat under a tin cowling between the driver and the passenger, and when you were driving the radio only had one useful volume level, all the way up.

Since relying on the in-dash radio was less than “a good plan” most of the time, and left you at the mercy of either the only local FM pop radio station or endless AM talkshow drudgery, I kept my trusty Sony Duel-Cassette AM/FM portable stereo right on the console next to me, blasting away every moment I was on the road. It ran on four D-Cell batteries, and I would go through at least eight a week. There were times I spent as much at my local Sinclare station on batteries for the tape player as I did on the gas to get me where I was going.

In the early 90s, burning your own CD was still essentially impossible from a consumer electronics perspective, and “portable” players were still exotic and expensive. While about half the music I bought in 1992 was on CD, I was buying that format because I had ready access to players that I could use to record the songs I wanted onto cassette tapes. Because the good old cassette was the end-all be-all of portable personal music.

Making a mix tape was a combination of two things, what you wanted to hear and what music you and your friends had to record from. I had a pretty good collection of tapes and CDs by the start of my Junior year in 1992; and I lived in a dorm with 100 of my “closest” friends…so my music selection for a mix tape was pretty good. All of which was evidenced a couple of weeks ago when I found a mix tape that meant a whole lot to me that year. Well, technically, I found the case and the liner-card with the song listings on it. I’d like to imagine the tape itself is still in that lost and nearly forgotten Sony cassette player, wherever it may be.

As I stared at that Maxell 120CR case, and ran my mind over the songs written in terrible high-school boy handwriting, I was drawn back to an event that stands out for me; not because some grave or significant personal revelation that came out of it…but because it was just a really good night. Since I’ve written about some rather weighty subjects and events that occured that same fall, I thought I’d pull out my little map of Memory Lane and walk down a lighter moment in my past for once.

Gem State Academy was about a mile and a half down Montana Avenue from the Deer Flat Wildlife Refuge along the banks of Lake Lowell in Caldwell Idaho. About another two miles down Orchard and around the curve of the lake was a recreation area with fire pits and a sandy beach by the boat dock. For the purposes of this memory we will entertain the polite fiction that a group of high school Juniors (plus two teachers as chaperons) would have intentionally traveled an extra two miles and not just gone to the bottom of the hill and lit something on fire in the heart of a game-bird and waterfowl preserve. Different people remember this differently. Friends of mine swear we went to the rec area; I know for a fact that wouldn’t have been physically possible, which will become more apparent as this story goes along.

View GSA to Lake Lowell in a larger map

Some other fun notes as background to keep in mind: There were 48 kids in my junior class, and if you go with an average weight of 145 lbs (which seems about right and adjusts for the difference between 6’2″ and-built-like-a-Mac-Truck Steve K and 4’10″ Sherylin who only weighed 90 lbs if she was carrying a backpack full of books, and Really Big books at that) and do the math, you come up with a total group weight right around 7000 lbs. The load capacity of a 1977 Dodge B-300 MaxiVan is rated at 3500 lbs; and that was when the springs and shocks were in a hell of a lot better shape than they were after fifteen years of regular use.

Side 1

On the Wednesday night before our first homeleave, each class had a “class night” activity somewhere on or near the school campus. The Seniors went off campus to the home of a classmember nearby, the Sophomores were in the Cafeteria, and I have no idea where the Freshman class was because they were utterly beneath notice, but if I had to guess I’d assume they took over the gym. Like locusts.

Anyway, our class sponsors (read “captive chaperons”) decided that we were going to head down to Lake Lowell and have an evening singing and sitting around, getting reacquainted after a summer apart. It was also the first time we started thinking about things like class elections, leadership and what direction we were going to have “as a group” in the months to come. As I’d been the class president the year before, I had a sort of defacto leadership responsibility, in the minds of our class sponsors if not in the minds of my fellow students anyway.

“Nicky!” called out one of our sponsors, the living embodiment of Hawaiian jovial good nature masquerading as a high school PE Teacher. “Would you mind driving Kari and the coolers down in your Van?”

“Uh, yeah…sure.” At that moment the cassette in the boombox finished rewinding and as I walked around to the sliding side door the first strains of Nirvana‘s year-old but still ultrapopular Smells Like Teen Spirit began to spill out of the speakers.

From the moment I started loading coolers into the back of my van, classmates began to walk up and ask for a ride. While it sort of started as a bit of a joke, it wasn’t sixty seconds before the obvious goal was to fit the entirety of my class into the Smurfmobile. At the same time.

Five guys were on the back bench, with five gals sitting on their laps. Kids kept piling into the space between the bench and the captains chars in front. I climbed back into the drivers seat, and Keri was sitting with her sprained ankle in the seat next to me. Eventually Sherylin ended up sitting in the seat with Keri, and Tami ended up sitting in my lap. I fired up the engine and said a little prayer. You know the van is full when the sliding door won’t close properly so someone is holding the handle “close enough to look legal.”

“Nicky, take it slow eh?” Coach said to me through the open window and a curtain of Tami’s hair.

“Yeah, well, I don’t think I can get going very fast.”

“…It IS downhill…be careful.”

For a coach, you’d have thought he could have come up with a better pep talk.

Right as the van eased into motion, the final strains of guitar and feedback faded out and the four harmonizing voices of Queen began the acappella opening of Bohemian Rhapsody. Instantly a dozen teenage boys began to shout “Wayne’s World” and “Party On” and “Excellent” and we pulled out of the parking lot and onto Montana Ave.

What happened next is exactly what you would expect with nearly fifty kids stuffed into a blue van slowly rolling down the road with a classic rock anthem playing on the boombox. We began to sing it word for word. Not well, not even getting the words right, but with enthusiasm. Deafening enthusiasm.

Even compared to your average ground sloth I was going very slowly. Crossing Karcher Road was a bit harrowing, but as soon as we got to the other side of the highway it was (literally) all down hill from there. We crept down the road, going no faster than about fifteen miles an hour. I noticed that every rock, bump and crack in the road seemed somehow magnified; and if the steering had felt loose before, it was barely a means of suggesting a direction now.

Right as we were rolling past the rock quarry the electric guitars began to crescendo and then the pseudo-opera bridge had everyone singing about Scaramouch and the fandango and Beelzebub’s son and “poor me” repeated three times…and then something terrifying happened. Forty-plus teenagers repeated a classic scene from a classic 90′s comedy and broke into faux-head-banging that caused the already questionable steering to completely flee from any semblance of my control.

The springs and shocks were completely bottomed out, the steering was barely able to marshal the bulging tires, and forty kids suddenly creating unpredictable side-to-side motions left us swerving across the road like a sailboat in rough seas. I went for the brakes, with Keri screaming, Tami giggling, and the other forty-five kids either singing, laughing, or praying for their lives depending on how closely they were paying attention to the motion of the van or the scene outside the windows. We slowed to about half our speed, but the downhill momentum of twice the maximum load weight was more than the spring-and-drum breaks could completely overcome.

It was one of the most terrifying minute and forty-five seconds of my life. It was also one of the most exhilarating. I will admit now that the newspaper headline “Entire High School Junior Class Dies In Senseless Van Accident” did cross my field of vision.

The van finally slowed and came back under my control when we got to the bottom of the hill, nearly fifty kids were singing the final refrain of “nothing really matters…to me…” and then one lone voice sang out “any way the wind blows…” and we all broke into the giggles.

After that, Van Halen began the piano and power chord intro to Right Now and several classmates were very pleased with the song selection. All the songs from that album had to be recorded off campus, as the album title “F.or U.nlawful C.arnal K.nowledge” with large block letter abbreviation on the cover was banned from school grounds.

Before the first verse was over we’d gotten to the refuge area at the bottom of Montana Avenue. I pulled off the road and onto the beach, and the tires immediately sunk down to the hubcaps in the soft sand. The door slid open and kids seemed to spend longer figuring out how to unpack themselves than they had spent trying to wedge themselves in in the first place.

Lake Lowell isn’t exactly the most beautiful spot in all of Idaho, but for proximity, it can be a pretty nice place to spend an evening.

After Van Halen we had a couple of songs that were standards, starting with the Red Hot Chili Peppers belting out Give It Away.

And then House of Pain performing what I have to admit was my least favorite song on the tape…almost entirely due to the heinous high pitched screech that punctuates Jump Around.

The next song was something I recorded off of a friend’s tape. Guns N’ Roses two album “Use Your Illusion” set was one of the most memorable things that happened in 1991. Another was “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” in theaters. The combination of those two things had pretty much shaped my last summer, and I think every male between the ages of 13 and 30 at the time knew every word of You Could Be Mine, even though the words basically made no sense. The drum and guitar intro remains absolutely ingrained into my brain, twenty years later.

After that came a song that everyone, and I’m pretty sure I mean EVERYONE in my class knew by heart. It was still a year before Aerosmith would come out with Get a Grip, the follow up to their utterly monstrous hit Pump, and the songs from that album were still playing strong on the radio three years after it was released. I swear every song on that album was gold, but it all started with Love In An Elevator. Essentially it was the entire story of Michael J Fox’s movie “Secret of my Success” in microcosm; it was also pretty much the air guitar and hair-rock anthem for the end of the 80′s.

The next song was special to me, as it was the first song I danced to with a girl at a party. U2 released “Achtung Baby” in 1991, with a desire to prove they could still rock like they did on “Joshua Tree” and “Rattle and Hum.” I’d say that Mysterious Ways proved that pretty nicely.

The next song was duped off of a doormmates’s tape, and got a pretty good number of cheers from the kids milling around the van. The Spin Doctors were still new to the music scene, and “Pocket Full of Kryptonite” was still just starting it’s climb up the charts when I copied Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong onto the mix tape.

The next song definitely came off of one of my favorite tapes…but I can’t even begin to explain why it was on this mix tape. I was a pretty big Information Society fan, and the album “Think” was my favorite (of the two that were out at the time) with a ton of great songs. The song on this mix wasn’t even in my top favorite songs on the album…so why it got included I have no idea. Years later though, I’ll say that A Knife and A Fork is a great dance tune, but still an odd choice for what had so far been a pretty rock-centric mix.

I wasn’t a huge Peter Gabriel fan before his album “US” came out. I knew he’d been the lead singer in Genesis before Phil Collins (and before I’d been born, but whatever), and his song “Sledgehammer” was classic; but it was Steam that really caught my attention. And a lot of people’s attention. I think I bought “US” at the same time I bought the blank tape this mix was on, and it probably had a lot to do with me putting together a new mix tape.

The next song was actually copied right off the radio. If Tom Cochrane‘s album was out, I didn’t know about it, but Life is a Highway was a great piece of fluffy driving music, which was perfect for a mix tape primarily listened to while commuting back and fourth to school.

The last song on the first side spooled out exactly as the sun was setting. I didn’t have the Mr. Big album, but I’d say half my dorm had the cassette single for To Be With You, so finding one to copy wasn’t eaxactly a challenge.

With a fire starting to build, we sat around near the open door to the van, singing along to the chorus and watching the sun set over the lake.

Side 2

The tape flipped over, and the second half was much more “my” music and less “popular” music. Don’t get me wrong, they were for the most part songs that charted (with a couple of glaring exceptions) or were otherwise notable…but some of them were hardly pop music by the popular definition.

The first song on the second side came from a disk I remember buying from the import section of Hastings for the absolutely exorbitant sum of $28. I had to use more than half of a gift card from my birthday to get it, based entirely on the one time I heard the first single play on the radio. The euro dance act Enigma had jumped out of obscurity with the 1990 release of “MCMXC A.D.” in France, and the first single, Sadeness Part I, started to chart in the US in early 1992. I remember how cool Gregorian Chant was for about a year after that album hit the air. I still like Gregorian Chant.

The next song was the first of two on this side from the “Boomerang” soundtrack, though I had bought the album it came from sometime in my Sophomore year (and about listened to it TO DEATH). While P.M. Dawn was supposedly a rap duo, they were about as rap as MC Hammer, which is to say, not much by modern standards. I liked a lot of their songs, but I’d Die Without You was my standout favorite.

When this song came on, I distinctly remember Keri leaning back and looking up at the stars starting to twinkle into the night sky.

“..I tend to dream you when I’m not sleeping…” she sang along with the music. She looked over at me, sitting in the open doorway of the van she had thought she was going to die in. “I love everything about that line.”

“Me too.” I said, listening to the music stream from the tinny little speakers. “If I have to take apart…all that I am…is there anything that I would no do…”

The next one was another song from the “Use Your Illusion” albums, this one from the second one, and it is probably Guns N’ Roses most memorable song from the 90s. Also, one of the longest. While I would like to say that November Rain was somehow a deep and significant song for me, I have to admit it wasn’t. I think the video is more memorable overall. In the words of Regina Spektor, “the solo’s pretty long, but it has a nice refrain.”

To my knowledge, the next song didn’t chart anywhere, ever. I will also say that in my circle of friends, it got a TON of play. Everything from “Pretty Hate Machine” got a ton of play, but half-way through Nine Inch Nails debut album came the haunting Something I Can Never Have, which basically created emo angst-techno out of nothing but a Moog syth and really bad day.

I remember everyone near the van quieted down and listened to the song, it was such an arresting piece of work. On one hand, I did take some flack from the sponsor for the f-bomb in the last verse; but on the other hand, I’d say that about a dozen people borrowed that CD over the next couple of months to copy that song to their own mix tapes.

The next track really segued in well, as the start of Areosmith‘s Janie’s Got A Gun is in basically the same key with the same vocal quality between Trent Reznor and Steven Tyler. And it’s also kinda sad and creepy…but in a much more “rock” kind of way.

And then the closer of the trilogy of sad songs on the tape. I was never a huge Metalica fan, and while the “Black Album” was a truly great piece of work, it wasn’t something I ever bought in high school. I just copied the three songs I liked onto various tapes and called it good. Of all the song’s Lars and Company have ever cranked out, I do think that Nothing Else Matters has touched me the most.

The next song is another one I can’t really explain. While I can say that I don’t know of a single mix tape I ever made that didn’t have at least one song by Sting or The Police on it…why I chose THIS song is completely beyond me. I might have been going for another sort of desolate, introspective song to keep with the theme; but honestly this is like my fifth favorite song from the “Soul Cages” album, and I have no idea why Mad About You made the mix.

I know exactly why the next song made the tape, as it was one of my favorite things ever recorded and I would listen to it so much that I could time the eighteen seconds it took to rewind to the beginning by counting one-mississippi, two-mississippi, etc. Don Henley wasn’t really a rock star, but man did I love “Dirty Laundry,” and “All She Wants To Do Is Dance,” and “Boys of Summer,” and “Sunset Grill”…so when his new album came out in ’89 I was almost as stoked as my dad was when he bought it, the first CD he ever bought for his brand new CD player that Christmas. I loved that whole album, but for my entire teen years The End of the Innocence was one of my personal anthems. I knew it word for word, and it crept into my subconscious at strange times.

As the song was ending we started gathering up our things and getting ready to head back up to campus. I stopped the tape and we started rocking the van back and fourth and using branches to give the wheels some traction. After about half an hour of pushing, swearing, pushing, digging, and more swearing, we finally got her free of the sand and rolled back onto the relative safety of Montana Avenue. There was no way I could carry everyone back up the hill, so everyone but Keri and a couple of other girls started walking in front of me in the glare of my headlights. In a moment of complete perfection, the other song from the Boomerang soundtrack (this one actually recorded from the soundtrack) started playing. I’ve never been a huge Boys 2 Men fan, but I will say that The End of the Road sure takes me back. It WAS the song of the fall of 1992.

We sang, as a group, loudly. All the way back up the hill.

As we got back to the school parking lot the last strains of acappella harmonizing perfection died away into the night, creating a perfect bookend to the sounds of that night.

As I helped my last passenger climb down out of the van, Miss V heard the opening bars of Tori Amos tinkling on the piano at the start of Silent All These Years. The look in her eyes as they met mine was a combination of surprise and bittersweet memories blending together. Shared history from earlier that year washed up around us like a warm wave on that chilly fall night.

“I haven’t heard this in months.” she said, still holding my hand and staring up into my eyes.

“It’s still one of my favorites.” I said.

“Sounds too much like a bad day. Like something I didn’t say to someone that I should have.”

“I’m sure they knew what you meant. What didn’t get said. What did.”

She gave me one more bittersweet smile before withdrawing her hand from mine and turning to walk away, back towards the girls dorm on the other side of campus.

I carried the boombox, still playing, with me back to the guy’s dorm. Though I wasn’t supposed to play music that could be heard outside my dorm room on campus, the soft sounds of the last two songs on the tape seemed pretty safe as I walked back across the lawn to the side entrance by the stairs. Enya was someone that my parents had been listening to for a while, since at least their last trip to the UK two years prior. Her new album, “Shepard Moons,” had the title track from the Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman movie “Book of Days,” but that was hardly my favorite song on the album. I was much more partial to Caribbean Blue, and that was what was gently playing as I walked into my room and closed the door behind me.

The last song on the tape was really just a short time fill that matched well with the song by Enya, probably because she was the cousin of half the people in the band Clannad. Their song Theme From Harry’s Game had been featured that summer in the Harrison Ford movie “Patriot Games.” I’d actually had it on tape for a several years by then, another artifact brought back by my parents from England, and the renewed interest in it just proved to me what a great song it was.

I listened as the last few bars finished out and then the tape went into that unique white noise that only cassettes that had reached the unrecorded end could make.

I thought about that night, about laughter and music, memories and sunsets, bonfires and starlight. At the time I had no capacity for capturing the important moments of my life as they passed by, but I knew that these had been some truly special moments. Not profound, not significant beyond a warm feeling and the smile on my face, but special none the less.

As those thoughts were running through my mind, the first notes of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” began again. I leaned over and stopped the tape, one time through was enough for one night. We had shortened classes the next morning, and then home for five days of rest. Of course, I had shifts at Bake N’ Serve and the radio station that weekend, and my friend Michelle was having a birthday party on Friday night. A friend of hers was coming up from California, and she wanted me to meet her. It wasn’t going to be much of a vacation for me, but I hoped that something good might happen.

Forty-Eight hours later my whole life would change; but the memory of that Wednesday night will always be good music, good times, good friends, and the anticipation of life laid out before us. The 90s were just getting started, we were half-way done with high school, and the whole world seemed like it was right there in front of us, ripe for the taking.

[Word Count: 5100]

For almost nineteen years I have been a liar. When asked about this, I have never told the truth about these events. Not even once. For about two months after it began, I thought about this all the time. After September 28, 1992, I have not let it cross my mind more than a dozen times.

Total.

Teenage boys spend a lot of time thinking about “First _;” “First Kiss,” “First Base,” “First Time,” …and we anticipate them in that order. I was no exception, but the summer before my Junior year of High School I still felt like I was a lifetime away from any of those. I’d had a couple of girlfriends in the “chaste hand-holding and going-steady when there’s nowhere to go” sense of the word, but nothing serious enough to even warrant a reasonable shot at that mythical moment of lip-locking that some of my friends talked endlessly about.

I constantly felt behind, which I know now is a pretty normal state of mind for a teenager. Personally, I had almost no first hand knowledge about “serious” boy-girl relationships; and all my second-hand knowledge was either bragging or hearsay, neither of which were particularly reliable even when coming “from the source.” Compounding that, in a private/parochial/conservative Boarding High School in the early 90s, no one who knew better was actually telling us “the truth.” It was like there was a big secret out there that we were all searching for, and none of us were smart enough to actually compare notes. How much we REALLY knew was a closely guarded personal secret, and discussing it put you at risk for exposing what you didn’t know, and the social tragedy that would ensue. Falling to the status of complete-social-outcast always felt like it was just one mistake away. No one makes a mistake if no one talks about it…so silence was the rule of the herd.

What is odd about this, is that I stood apart with a bit of a reputation. Not a reputation as a “ladies man” but as “someone who knew about IT.” This was due to a combination of two facts:

First, my mom wrote romance novels for a living with sex in them, and my family was pretty up front with the fact that we weren’t ashamed of that like the “great white fathers” in charge of our church expected us to be; and I had read those books. Essentially, what was an act of solidarity with my mom brought about an exposure to “it” that had the side effect of creating a perception that I was the only one of my peers who had “read the manual” so to speak.

Second, I had not yet learned to pull my punches or pick my battles. The most notable example (from an unfortunately long list) was that I argued for an entire semester of my Sophomore year the shocking position that the “Song of Solomon” was, in fact, about sex. Being willing to debate the merits of sex poetry as sex poetry vs. an allegory for the sacred passion God has for Christians (as opposed to say, “Jews” or even simply “humans”) created a group perception that I knew enough about the subject that I was confident enough to debate it. Sadly, that was not ACTUALLY true. I was simply a contrarian button-pusher and shit-stirrer without the good sense to know better; and I had enough speech and communication training (from working on-air at the radio station) to hold a reasonable position and debate it effectively.

Now, the perception of “knowing about sex” wasn’t necessarily an advantage. In this environment the traditional conservative values of “purity until marriage” and “waiting for your spouse” were not just recommended, they were in fact the rules. Any student who acknowledged sexual activity (of almost any kind) was subject to sanction up to and (usually) including expulsion. Which just doubled the taboo in both the risk and curiosity categories. Western culture is rife with references to things made more desirable due to their being placed off-limits: Pandora’s Box, the Golden Fleece, Helen of Troy, Delilah, Bathsheba, and of course the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (which is what was really at stake here); and teenagers are no more resistant to things forbidden than the heroes and demigods of old.

Which brings me to late July, 1992. I was working on the maintenance crew for my second summer, living at home, and commuting every day in the Smurf-mobile; a 1974 [Web Research, two phone calls and a three way debate plus insurance forms from the early 90's have revealed that it was, in fact, a 1977 Dodge Sportsman 220" 15-Passenger MaxiVan] Dodge van with two huge captain seats, a single bench seat twelve feet back, tires so narrow it’s a miracle the whole thing was freeway-legal, and a paint job that had originally been “Robin’s Egg Blue” but had faded to something more akin to powdered cartoon character.

I enjoyed working on the maintenance crew. I’d already learned journeyman plumbing, electrical, framing, drywall, automotive repair (if by “automotive” you mean a ford pickup truck and a GMC Garbage Truck), plus dozens of other skills; and had access to power tools, a fully functional shop, the privilege of driving on and off campus, and a relatively high level of autonomy as long as the needed work got done.

And there was a lot of work. Teenagers are particularly hard on the dormitories they spend nine months in, and the maintenance crew often felt like we spent the entire three months of summer break just trying to put them back together. I’ve patched holes with a clear imprint/outline of a freshman, replaced something like a thousand screens and windows and at least several hundred doors, fixed countless sinks, used sulphuric acid to melt the copious amounts of hair that a dorm full of girls wash down the shower drain, and rewired something like ten miles of wiring and replaced more circuit breakers and fuses (and fuse boxes, and breaker boxes, and…) than I care to think about.

Which is exactly what I was doing on a sunny Thursday afternoon when she flounced, as only a sixteen-year-old woman-child can, into the corner dorm room I was putting back together.

“Nick!” she squealed as she half-hopped/half-skipped up to me, “the dean said you were up here working! I’m so glad you’re here!” and then she threw her arms around me and stood on her tiptoes to give me a hug that barely came halfway up my chest. A hug that I returned with a level of force that surprised me. She was staring up at me with a huge grin and I found myself staring into her eyes for so long that our hug began to come perilously close to turning into an embrace.

I was confused, and I think it showed on my face. We had spent a lot of time in the same clique last year, but I had thought of us as being two bodies in a similar orbit without any direct gravity to each other. As far as I knew, she had spent most of the year mooning over my roommate, and I had just been one of the guys who gave her an excuse to spend time in his proximity.

She broke our hug, but only stepped back a half step, keeping her hands resting on my arms. I didn’t pull away, I didn’t want to pull away, but I didn’t have any context for this conversation, or this level of contact. My eyes were on hers, but my mind was on her lips…just mere inches from my own.

“When I got home from the hospital Jamie told me Toby wasn’t coming back this year,” at the mention of my former roommate I’m sure my face clouded with suspicion, “when she told me that, I was so afraid you might decide to go somewhere else too! If you’re working here this summer, does that mean you’ll be staying for the year?” she asked.

“Yeah…” I was so busy trying to figure out if I should still try to lean in for a kiss, or if I had already missed some kind of invitation during our extended hug, that I couldn’t manage to come up with an answer and instead just latched on to the first bit that had processed, “…I…uh…I didn’t know you were in the hospital! What happened?” as smooth subject changes go, this one was horrible.

She laughed softly and looked down for a moment, “I had my appendix taken out. I started feeling sick on the drive home and we ended up going straight to the hospital in Reno. It was an extra week before I finally got home and slept in my own room.”

“Oh!” I said, “I’m so sorry! That really sucks!”

She looked back up at me, and there was a distinctly naughty gleam in her eyes. “It’s ok, it’s been more than a month now. Would you like to see the scar?”

“Uh…sure.”

She whirled away from me and shut and locked the door. As she took the two steps back to me, a part of my brain immediately began to sound warning sirens and emergency alerts. *DANGER* *DANGER* *DANGER* Being alone behind a locked door with a co-ed was grounds for suspension at the very least.

As she unbuttoned her shorts and slipped them down over her slender hips and dropped them in a pile around her ankles the warning sounds became much more distant. As she slid her pastel polka-dotted white cotton panties down below her hips the sound of blood rushing in my ears drowned out everything.

The scar went from about an inch above her hipline down at a slight angle halfway to the top of her thigh, still concealed by her lowered panties. I have no doubt that my face portrayed a perfect mix of shock and desire, and it was all the encouragement she needed.

“Would you like to touch it?” she asked as she stepped closer and took my hand in hers. Without waiting for the obvious answer she guided my fingers from the top of the scar down below where it ended.

She giggled. “That tickles” she said with pleasure as she continued to slide my hand lower. Once my fingers slipped below her panties and found their intended destination, my brain largely shut down and instinct took over. What little practical thought process that continued, only worked through a haze of confusion. I was still trying to process my chances of kissing her, and this was rapidly taking an entirely different direction and I wasn’t quite able to keep up.

Without waiting for encouragement or finding any resistance on my part, she unbuttoned my jeans and put us on an equal footing.

Pulling me forward, she slid her underwear down and sat on the thin mattress behind her, never breaking our mutual contact. Then, in what was a rather clumsy and inexperienced effort on both of our parts, she guided me to that part of her and we began to do what instinct dictates.

I was incapable of saying anything, or asking anything, or even forming a single syllable of speech; but my brain was screaming that something was wrong. This was out of order…this wasn’t how this happens…this…this…this was not right!

My eyes refocused and I looked at her face. Tears were falling from the corners of her eyes. I didn’t know if something was wrong, if she was upset, if I had done something wrong. I must have done something wrong…I had no real idea what I was doing.

Her continuing tears unnerved me, and I stepped back, breaking contact.

Her eyes flew open and she was stunned. “Why?” she whispered.

“WHY!?” this time it wasn’t a whisper. She looked angry and confused and hurt. I stepped back again, completely befuddled and speechless, my mouth opening and closing but not a single sound coming out, like some idiot fish transported to the heart of a desert without a drop of water for a thousand miles.

She dashed off the bed, pulled up her underwear, pulled on her shorts and then dashed out of the door, her crying becoming sobs as she dashed down the hallway.

No sooner had I buttoned up my pants than my best friend and fellow maintenance worker leaned into the doorway. “What was that about?”

“I…I don’t know.”

He gave me one of his trademarked incredulously-raised-eyebrows, but didn’t pry any farther. “Boss wants the front lawns mowed before the end of the day. Do you want to do it, or would you rather finish up here?”

I didn’t want to be anywhere near there, so I gladly took the mowing job. I replayed the entire thing over in my head countless times while I rode the John Deere over a couple of acres between the parking lot and the campus buildings, including the dorm I’d just been in. As I was coming back up towards the Administration building on one of my passes back and forth, one of the yearbook photographers snapped a shot of me just trying to finish my day so I could drive home and hopefully puzzle out what had happened. I didn’t think about that photo again until the end of the year when it showed up in the yearbook with some corny caption about my “calm hand on the wheel.” I assure you, I was anything but calm.

I drove home that night and collapsed into bed within minutes of finishing dinner. I didn’t get even five minutes of sleep. I didn’t know what had happened, but whatever it was, I wasn’t saying a word about it to anyone. Round and round in my head ran the whole scene…and even though I knew I had made a mistake, I couldn’t figure out what it was.

I had clearly done something wrong, and honestly, I really didn’t want anyone else to know. And I deeply wanted to apologize to her for whatever I had done wrong.

One thing still puzzled me, in the world of teenage boys becoming “men” (at least by one questionable definition of the word), I wasn’t sure where I stood. On the one hand, important bit A had been inside important bit B…but on the other hand, neither of us “finished” the process…and the whole thing had come off like some kind of cosmic joke. It was out of order, and I still had to have a first kiss, and get to first base…and…

And I decided if one thing was true, it was that “that time” did NOT make me a man. It just left me feeling more like a confused little boy. A confused little boy who just wanted to say he was sorry.

Unfortunately, it would be another month until school started, and more than a week after that before I finally spoke to her at all. And I was nowhere near being any less confused. In fact, I was just getting started.

—

She actively avoided me for the first two weeks of school. I’m pretty sure she even cut a couple of classes to avoid being in the hall at the same time, and I know she skipped meals to keep from meeting in the cafeteria. All of which managed to make me feel even worse. Whatever I had done wrong, I would have performed almost any act of penance to earn her forgiveness.

Which is why it surprised me when she came up behind me in the Library and whispered in my ear, “can we talk?” I wish I could say I was even somewhat controlled about it, but honestly my neck snapped in her direction so fact our noses bumped and I think I had whiplash.

“I’m…I’m so…” I began but she shushed me before I could even begin to apologize.

“I thought Matt and Hauss and Chris would have known everything. But you didn’t tell them, did you?” she asked.

I just shook my head no, my face showing my complete lack of understanding.

She looked at me for a moment and then sadness broke into her eyes again, “I’d never…never done…” she began to whisper, “I didn’t want anyone to think…”

“NO,” I said too loudly for a library and several people turned to look at us. I waited a few moments for the attention to move on. “No, I wouldn’t…I didn’t…I’d never…I just wanted to kiss…”

She looked down, “Sorry…”

“No, that’s not what I meant…I liked it…a lot…I just…”

Her eyes flashed back up, hurt again on her face, “then why did you stop?”

“You were crying…” I couldn’t explain that I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was just scared. “I…I didn’t know…”

“Sorry” she said again, and looked away, out towards the glass wall that separated the library from the main hallway. “Look, would you do me a favor?”

I had no idea what she wanted, but I’d have cut off limbs at this point if it would clear things up between us.

“My cousin…my roommate isn’t doing so well. She’s having a hard time. I’ve talked about you some, about last year, and she would like to go out with you. Would you do that for me?”

Now, I was officially confused. And a little deflated. A small part of me had hoped to “fix” things with her and try for a real relationship. One that went in the right order. Or any order. But clearly that wasn’t what she had in mind.

“Sure. I’d…I’d be glad to.” I owed her, and there are certainly worse ways to make something up to someone.

“Um, who’s your cousin? I don’t think I’ve met her.”

“She’s out in the hall. Her name’s…”

—

Let me stop and explain some context here. My high school had a pretty high attrition rate for new students. It takes a certain type of person to attend classes for six hours, work for six hours, have a break for lunch in the middle, spend the early evening at intramurals followed by vespers, and then study period. Every day.

I’ve heard it compared with Juvenile Detention and Boot Camp more than once, and while I don’t think it’s quite that rigid, there are certainly those who disagree with me.

While exclusive co-ed romantic relationships were “officially” forbidden, and PDA of almost any kind would get you placed on Social Probation (at a minimum), there was an unwritten understanding with the faculty that some students needed extra incentive to adapt to the school environment. Usually, that was a boyfriend or a girlfriend. Life is always a bit easier when the routine included something that made the heart beat a little bit faster, and as such, “going out” (in a place where there was literally NO WHERE to go) was more a social status declaration than anything truly serious.

This was not an exceptionally unusual request. She wasn’t trying to make a lifetime romantic match, she was trying to help her cousin figure out how to integrate into the school, and she wanted to have some input on WHO her cousin ended up dating in that process. It should also be pointed out that her cousin was a Sophomore, and still three weeks away from turning fifteen.

The cousin and I were not built to last. A year-and-a-half isn’t a lot of age distance, but between fourteen and sixteen it’s a rather wide gulf. Add to that the fact that she was more…aggressive than I expected and you don’t have a good mix. Our relationship reached its natural conclusion on the Saturday morning following her birthday, when she had received a Polaroid Instamatic Camera and promptly took polaroids of herself wearing only a lace bra and panties. I couldn’t deny that the one I received was “hot,” but I was not ok with the fact that she gave similar snapshots to three other guys.

That wasn’t the act of someone who wanted to be in our particular school environment, and it was no surprise that on the following Sunday afternoon her dad helped her pack up her things and drive her home.

I did take some mild ribbing for dating “that crazy Sophomore,” but nothing that lasted more than about 48 hours. Just in time to run into the girl who had set us up in the first place while I was moving chairs into the band room from the Small Gym via the back hallway.

“Hey,” she said through the doorway that led out to the main entrance, opposite from the way I had just brought in another set of chairs. “I’m sorry for how that turned out.”

I chuckled and unfolded the chairs I had just brought in. “I don’t think I was exactly what she was looking for in a boyfriend.”

She cocked her head to one side, “uhhhh, no. She thought you were a prude. She gave up when she couldn’t even make you jealous.”

“Oh, I was a bit jealous, but…well, she wasn’t exactly taking it slow. I just wasn’t able to keep up.”

“Yeah, I appreciate that. I wouldn’t have set you up with her if I thought you would rush her.”

“Me rush her??? Um, not the problem” I said.

“Sorry, I didn’t know that when I was telling her about you.” It was her turn to chuckle. “She might have misunderstood some things.”

We were now well past my understanding. She was the one who had set us up, for reasons that were becoming less clear by the second, and the fact that it didn’t work out seemed to upset her less than I had expected.

She looked up through the glass windows at the piano practice rooms a floor above and behind us. “I have to practice before my lesson. Can we talk later?”

“Sure, I’ll be moving chairs and then working in the Small Gym for the next couple of hours. Or we can talk at dinner.”

She smiled and then walked off to the stairway and up the stairs. I watched her as she walked the length of both hallways, finally going into the furthest practice room down the back hall. I had no idea if she had an hour or two booked, so there was no point in waiting around. I trudged back through the back door, down the back hallway, and across the Small Gym to grab another stack of folding chairs.

I had been working for no more than 20 minutes, perhaps three more sets of chairs at most, when she stepped out of the back doorway and into the back hallway, right as I was walking up in the opposite direction, blocking my progress.

“I thought you had to practice for your lesson?”

“I was too distracted” she said.

“Sorry if I was making too much noise, I have to get this all put away before heading to Bake’n'Slave for my shift.”

She was looking up at me in the dim light and the shadows hid her facial expression, “It wasn’t the noise that distracted me. Put those down and come with me, I need to talk to you.”

I leaned the chairs I had in my hands against the wall and she took me by the arm and marched me down the back hallway, into the Small Gym, up the small stage stairs and behind the curtains. She spun to face me as soon as the curtain had closed behind us, and I could see her eyes looking up at me in the near pitch black as my vision adjusted from the glaring sodium lights that had been shining on the other side of the velvet barrier.

“Did you want to? That day? Tell me, did you WANT to?” her voice quivered near breaking.

My brain processed slowly, a part of me had anticipated this topic as we walked down the hallway, but actually talking about it and not ignoring it…I struggled to put words to the hurricane of thoughts spinning in my head. “Yes! More than I could tell you. More than I could ever tell you!” I said. Her eyes narrowed, so I charged on, “Look, I was surprised, and then you were crying…and I didn’t know what to do!” I said, frustration at not being able to explain what I meant was filling my voice.

She put her fingers on my lips and stopped me from continuing to dig another hole.

“Then I only have one simple question, do you want to…” her eyes implied there was an obvious rest of that sentence, but I was so confused about everything that I honestly had no idea where that was supposed to go, “…again…you know, not stopping this time?”

A part of my brain now registered a trap. I’d just gotten accustomed to “nothing happened, nothing was ever going to happen” as I saw it, and this was absolutely the complete opposite, and completely out of the blue.

“I…are you…” I began, but she pressed her fingers against my lips again, silencing me once more.

“Yes or no. What do you want?”

Her face was no more than four inches from my own, and I tried to lean in and kiss her as a response. First Kiss, First Base, First Time…all at once.

Her fingers stiffened against my lips again and she turned her head away from me. “NO. I’m not your girlfriend. That’s not what…” She looked at me again, “was that a yes?” I mutely nodded my head, more confused than ever.

The next few moments were completely detached for me, like I was watching through my own eyes but someone else was controlling my body. She led me over to the stack of folded gymnastics mats up against the wall, undid my pants, and I pulled her skirt up above her hips. She wasn’t wearing panties, and I let out a startled “oh!”

She smiled, “You were distracting me, so I came down prepared.” And with that explanation she laid back on the mats and once again we fumbled with mutual inexperience as she guided me to where she wanted me to be.

In the darkness I wouldn’t have been able to tell for sure if she cried again, but I was absolutely not going to stop before she was finished. Unfortunately, that led us to the next point of complete confusion: I had no idea how to know when or if she was finished. In fact, I had only a romance novel perspective on the female conclusion to sex, and it wasn’t remotely helpful in this situation. Aside from Meg Ryan in “When Harry Met Sally…” I’d never heard even a remote approximation of an orgasm, and as she wasn’t making even the slightest noise beyond heavy breathing below me, I began to worry again that I was doing something wrong.

Her voice, out of breath like she was running laps, startled me “Tell me when you have to finish. So you don’t…” her voice trailed off.

This, is the worst thing you can say to a sixteen-year-old boy. Coming from a culture where “self-abuse” was a complete taboo, my grasp of my point of no return was basically non-existent. Predicting when I was going to finish was not a skill I’d even considered until that point, which was about two heartbeats too late.

“Uh…” and then I shuddered from head to toe. I wanted to keep going, but after a few more moments my ability began to disappear. I rolled over and sat back on the mats next to her, and she sat up with her legs crossed in front of her. She sat there for what felt like forever, and I had no idea what to say now.

Then she did the one thing that I didn’t expect, but probably should have; she put her head in her hands and began to sob. I sat up to try and…I don’t know…console her or something. This had a very negative effect, she turned in a flash and pushed me back with both hands as hard as she could. Then she got up, grabbed something out of her book bag on the floor, and began to wipe vigorously at the fluid between her legs.

She stood upright, walked over to me and leaned in just inches from my face and yelled “Don’t. You. Ever. Tell. ANYONE!!!” And then she threw the wad of cloth in her hand in my face and stormed away. I didn’t move until after I heard her footsteps go all the way down the back hall and then the back door slam closed behind her.

I pulled on my pants and slipped out between the curtain, into the glaring lights that left me as blind as I had been on the darkened stage. When my eyes finally adjusted I looked at what she’d thrown at me. It was a pair of white cotton panties with pastel polka-dots. I doubted that was coincidence, but I had no idea what it was supposed to mean. I had no idea what had happened at all.

I wrapped the panties in some paper towels and tossed them in the trash in the guys locker room. I splashed some water on my face and stared at myself in the mirror. A scared little boy looked back.

I walked out the door, climbed in my van, and drove home. I called in sick that evening for my shift, and spent another sleepless night trying to figure out what I had done wrong.

There would be no rescue this time, she didn’t avoid me, she completely ignored me. From that day on it was like she couldn’t see me in the halls, or in the caf, or when we sat next to each other in class.

Two weeks later, I met someone at a birthday party. Someone I ended up marrying three years later. Someone I had a relationship with. A first date, a first kiss, and eventually my first time. I kept the secret of that afternoon on the stage in the small gym for nearly two decades. I didn’t tell friends, or family, or even spouses. As far as anyone has ever known, my first was with the girl I eventually married.

Teenage guys want this moment to be awesome. We expected it to be this incredible moment where we became men. That was not what it felt like for me.

About six weeks after I met my future wife, about eight weeks after that afternoon on the stage in the small gym, she talked to me for the only time for more than a year afterwards.

Once again, I was sitting in the library and she walked up and simply said “Hey, I’m back.” She’d been feeling sick for a couple of weeks and ended up going home for a week. I must have been the first person she looked for on that Monday morning. “I’m better now,” she said, and her hands reflexively crossed in front of her stomach.

“I’m glad” I said, “we missed you.”

She reached her hand out and ran her fingers down my cheek, and for a moment I knew that whatever had passed between us, that “thing” that had left her crying on the mats, was forgiven. She smiled faintly and turned and walked away. We would be half-way through our senior year before we spoke again; forgiven is not the same as forgotten.

As I turned back to my books I saw Miss V sitting behind me, staring at me with an unreadable expression.

[Word Count: 5262]

[<- Line 12]|[Line 14 ->]

See, not dead! (and I know some of you suspected different.)

Ok, so this isn’t a post per se, just a quick note. I’ve watched several people visit this blog recently from my GoodReads profile and They tend to start with my navigation section on the left, hitting my Author’s Note, the Preface and Prolog, and then they start in on some recent posts. They usually find one of the last “What I’m Looking For” posts and then peter out. Mostly I blame the ridiculous length of my average posts, but I also realized (ok, someone emailed me and told me) that navigating within the larger sections is pretty much impossible.

So, I’ve added a top page for the “What I’m Looking For” series and stuck it in the Navigation Pane, and also put some line by line links in the posts. I’ll try to keep up with that as I add more.

Which brings us to the next point, i.e. adding more.

I’ll be honest, I’m struggling with this right now. Not because I don’t know what to say, or I have a hard time writing the next few lines…it’s because I don’t like what the next few things say about me. So far the sequence has largely followed events from my youth and teen years, and while I’ve really learned something from writing some of them, for the most part they don’t make a statement about who I am now. Mistakes or victories that happen when you’re a teenager (or younger) are meaningful, but they’re not necessarily indicative of who a person is as an adult.

I just finished reading an autobiography, and I was reminded of a quote a college professor once passed on: “Autobiography is when we tell the story of our life the way we want to remember it. Biography is when someone tells it like it really was.”

So far I’ve tried to be relatively true to my personal history, even when I don’t look particularly “cool” or “suave” or “with it.” Not being “with it” isn’t something that is particularly bad, or even particularly unusual; especially for teenagers and young adults. But what comes next is largely bad. And ugly. And I don’t get to hide behind the “I was just an awkward teen” defense anymore.

I once started to draft a post about all of this titled “The Lesser Angles of My Nature” that never got past paragraph one because I’m terribly disappointed in myself when I read back through it. But, I’ve started to recount my past, and what makes me “me,” and that means being true to the history, even when it’s not the Autobiography I wish I could write.

Bare with me, the next few lines are coming. Perhaps slowly, and with stops and starts, but they are coming.

[Word Count: 466]

A couple of things make it uncomfortable for me to talk about Playboy magazine:

First, I grew up in a conservative world with a lot of focus on “moral values” and “pure thoughts” being pushed pretty much from kindergarten until I graduated from high-school and entered the real world.  Any of the secular things that might have been seen as salacious or risqué were not only prohibited, they were generally treated as though they didn’t exist at all.  I doubt I had an educator or pastor from K through 12 who would admit to having ever seen a movie in a theater, as “theaters were the devil’s playground” according to Ellen White.

Second, I consider myself a feminist.  An actual, “equality for the sexes” true believer.  While I accept that there are some (physical) activities that are inherently more well suited for the average member of a particular gender’s physical build, muscle mass, and bone density; I’ve met women who could do any physical job a man could do including roughneck, work cattle, shoot things, and play american football.

Also, both of the women who readily come to my mind as examples happen to be perfectly straight and hardly “masculine” as an overriding feature, so don’t think that I’m making some kind of exception for the mythical “bull dyke” model of “not-really-a-women” that some guys want to use as the exception to their otherwise complete “men are bigger and stronger” model.  Normal women, regardless of sexual orientation have as much physical and mental toughness as any of the guys I know working in “manly-man” jobs, including construction, truck driving, police work, fire fighting and soldiering.

I also know plenty of very smart women.  I work in technology, which still has a sort of “boy’s club” mentality lurking under the surface.  That club is an endangered species.  Some of the smartest technical minds I know are women, and I have every reason to believe the number of women in tech is just going to keep growing.

Guys who think men are inherently superior to women are dinosaurs, and all that’s left of the dinosaurs are the fossils of their desiccated bones.  Which I think is a pretty prophetic analogy really.

There is a strong strain of opinion in modern feminism about pornography and the objectification and commoditization of women.  Of course, like any issue, that strain of opinion runs a pretty wide gamut.

So let me explain my own opinion on pornography, the sex industry and how a reasonably enlightened (or at least one who tries to be enlightened) man can approach something that is seen as both empowering and enslaving by very smart people on both ends of the feminist spectrum.

I have no problem with the concept of an adult industry where women are paid a fair value for the product they are selling or the services they perform.  Which is exactly how I feel about a male dominated military or a transgendererd androgynous-mime circus.

I have no problem with strip clubs where women are independent contractors who work on their own time and negotiate their own charges while the house takes a door charge and sells ridiculously expensive drinks while providing overhead and a level of security for the participants.

I have heard tell of brothels in Nevada that function on a similar premise, but I have no first-hand knowledge one way or the other.

On the other hand, there are things I’m not ok with.  Sexual slavery is alive and well in the world and there are elements of the adult industry that are built and sustained purely on the…backs…of women (and by “women” I mean female, because age is a real issue) who are trapped into situations and trafficked with less humane care than Michael Vick gave his fighting dogs.

I realize that one arm of the industry is held up by the other, and vice-versa.

Which is why I’m not much of a consumer of porn.  Part of it is just point one above; my parents didn’t consume porn, and I have no frame of reference for porn consumption outside of a college dorm or the occasional link that shows up in an email from “a bud” from work.

And part of it is that the current crop of porn seems to tend towards behaviors that I don’t care to watch.  There’s an implied violence in a lot of porn that makes me uncomfortable.  Does that make me hopelessly “vanilla”?  I don’t really care.  I don’t put my standards of taste up for critique any more than I claim the right to critique other’s.

I’m not talking about spanking or light bondage or what have you, I’m talking about the simulated choking and spitting and implied threat that seems to seep into a lot of the stuff coming out of San Fernando Valley these days.  I don’t find degrading sexy, and a lot of porn pushes the degradation envelope, vis-a-vis I’m not much for porn.

But that doesn’t mean I’m opposed to pornography at a moral level.  As a parent of a little girl, I’ve had to consider this in a very real and personal way.  Since I have a daughter, and I know every girl in porn is someone’s daughter, I have to ask myself how would I feel if that was my daughter on the screen?  How would I feel if she wanted to “work adult” and was open about it?

Sure, it’s easy to assume that all strippers and porn starlets are the product of tragic homes and broken families and are desperately trying to fill some approval void left by father figures…but I know better.  I went to high-school with a girl who went on to be moderately famous in the porn industry, and her parents were sweet and her home life seemed fine to me (as fine as anyone else surviving Adventism in the 90s).

It’s much more realistic to assume that some people (male and female) find themselves down a sequence of events that led them to work adult.  I never thought I’d be a tax software consultant, so it’s safe to assume my daughter might have a similarly strange path through life.

How would I feel?

Probably, I’d ask a LOT of questions (because my prejudices would bubble up to the surface) and I’d try to sort through her decision making.  Mostly I’d be desperate to make sure she didn’t feel trapped into something she didn’t want to do…which means I’d have to be prepared for the fact that just maybe she wanted to take off her clothes for money.

Ultimately, my puritan past means that on some levels, I’d be uncomfortable with it.  Such is the nature of being a father.  And based on that, I have to respect the women who work adult because somewhere, they have a father and I hope he respects her decisions.

What does this have to do with Playboy from before 1975? And why 1975?

Well, the second question is easier, 1975 is when pubic hair became common and full frontal nudity became the norm.  Before that Hugh Hefner spent a lot of time pushing a boundary without quite giving away all the goods.  There was just something more tasteful about the magazine before it won the sexual revolution.  It was more earnest about what it was and what it was selling.  Also, the women had curves (and I don’t just mean boobs and butts) which hasn’t been the case since at least the mid 90′s when I started reading.

Playboy, before 1974 especially, was about women entering the workforce, and the clubs, and the places where adults gathered on their own terms.  They took charge of their bodies, their pleasure, and they didn’t decide who to date purely based on the babies they’d make when they got married.  Certainly, that has happened throughout time, but Playboy was the cultural barometer of the time when those things stepped out of the shadows and back alleys of America and into mainstream workplaces and churches and living-rooms.

Playboy, and the image it projected of confident women in charge of themselves, was as influential for women at the dawn of the sexual revolution as the pill and Helen Gurley Brown.  Not because it changed women’s minds (although it certainly might have) but because it change the minds of many men.

I have to believe that the majority of the women who posed for Playboy did so because they wanted to.  I would argue that despite simple assumptions, Playboy was an inherently feminist magazine.  Sure, it was the victim of some horrible failures of taste, and bawdy humor is often insensitive (I would argue the cartoons were often the most sexist element of the magazine), but overall it’s impact was profoundly positive for the women’s movement.

As someone who loves history, Playboy is like looking through a window into the heart of culture.  Articles by Henry Kissinger, fiction by Arther C Clark and Ian Flemming, interviews with Robert Kennedy and Cassius Clay (before he became Muhammad Ali).  Every month the powers that vied to change America came to millions of men through the doors of Playboy’s offices in Chicago and met a gatekeeper who refused any that wanted to conserve the old status quo, the old restrictions, the old conventions.

Today, I think Playboy is essentially irrelevant.  They won.  There is little for them to battle, and a hero without a villain is essentially just another Joe.  They have no more envelope to push culturally, and the internet is far far ahead of them in the salacious imagery department, never to be caught by old media again.

But to someone who loves the past, and history, and really great writing (not to mention some of the most artistic photography of it’s time) early Playboy is a treasure trove of incredible things to read and discover.

Even for a puritan-raised feminist.

[Word Count:  1777]

I haven’t felt like this in a long time and I guess I wasn’t expecting the depression to hit quite so hard.  Sarah, my eight-year-old daughter, has gotten on a plane and flown back to her mother.  She was here for her spring break, and I was lucky that it coincided with my birthday on the 14^th.

We took her to the airport Friday and she completely and utterly didn’t want to go back.  I understand, we have chickens and goats and horses and 20 acres of woods to explore and a giant house to ramble about in; but, never the less, we took her up to PDX and I sat in the gate as she walked to the plane and then waved once more through her tears before climbing the stairway and disappearing for another long span of months.

Now, I find myself in that dangerous place, the place where I have trouble balancing the world “as it is” with the world “as I wish it could be.”  Right now, it would be very easy for the dragon to grab me by the throat again and squeeze me for all I’m worth once more.

Which brings me full circle back to writing and blogging and whatever.  There was a time when I wrote things that I was proud of having written.  I have not felt that way about something I’ve blogged in a long time.  At one point I felt that anonymity was the key; that by being behind a veil of self-defense, I had the freedom to say things in a way that wasn’t filtered and ultimately made for better writing.  Now, I think that’s just crap.  I think that for the last year or so I’ve just been too damn cautious in my writing, and that it has suffered for it (when and if I even bothered to post it).  It wasn’t the anonymity that made it better, it was the confidence to just write and let the chips fall where they may.  I used to be the kind of person who “did” first and “worried” later (if ever).  Now, I calculate everything.  I analyze, and measure, and contingency – until I don’t act at all.

The downside is that I recognize that depression is affecting my reasoning, and now I don’t trust my inner voice to have a monologue that isn’t overshadowed by my negative emotions.  I’m in a bad place, doing my best to not be in a bad place, and that’s a bad place to write from.  What troubles me, is that when I was writing things I’m proud of, I was enmeshed in a deep and consuming depression.  On the surface I was doing “OK,” but underneath I was seething with frustration and drowning in my own dark waters.  Is that my muse?  Is that where I draw inspiration?

What’s odd, is that at the same time my personal/blog writing has dried up, my professional/fiction writing has improved in both inspiration and output; which is a tradeoff I’ll gladly accept.  I’ll start posting more of that on Serial Storyteller in the next few weeks, so at least there will be something to show for all the effort.

After a lot of thought, I realized that the difference is how I perceive “critique” of the things I write.  I cringe when someone who “knows” me critiques my personal writing, or my personal writing process, or the meaning behind the things I have to say that are personal to me.  It strikes a nerve that was safely hidden behind my anonymity.  I realize that if I’m going to write things that ARE personal, then I have to give them up the same way I give up my fiction.

I grew up with a fiction writer in the house.  From the age of six until long after I was out of college, my mom wrote genre novels for Pocket Books and St. Martins.  Some won awards, some were “not her best effort,” but every last one of them left the house, went to an editor and reviewers and readers, and had to be given up.

Writing is both an art and a business.  If you do it for a living, there’s money involved; and where money is involved, emotions had better be checked at the door.  Editors and agents and reviewers and readers ALL wield sharp swords and they take no prisoners.

You start with an idea; you give it form and purpose, breath and wings.  You raise it up; you feed it and make it grow.  Then, you take it out into the world, and you give it up.  Either it flies, or it fails.  The chips fall where they may.  The most horrible moment is watching the people you trust take a sharp sword and attack your precious thing.  It hurts you; in your heart, in your soul, in your confidence and faith in yourself.

When I was eleven years old, my dad got an album for his birthday that I probably listened to more than a hundred times before I turned twelve.  The lead track was something so powerful it was probably the most significant single song that defined my pre-teen and teen years.  I wore out two cassette copies of that album before I was fourteen, and I’ve had a copy on CD ever since.

The album “…Nothing Like the Sun” by Sting isn’t really something you would expect to be defining for a teenager in the 90’s, but if you want to have a little insight into who I am, that album is key.  Every single second of it is specifically meaningful to who I am, and how I perceive the world.  As much as I love the whole thing, the first track is absolutely integral to who I am and how I perceive the role of parents, the acts of creation and protection, and the process of sacrifice and forgiveness.

I think the lyrics are some of the most beautiful poetry ever set to music, and I’m quoting them from his book “Lyrics by Sting” to have the line breaks and spacing “as intended” for the printed page.

The Lazarus Heart
-by Sting

He looked beneath his shirt today
There was a wound in his flesh so deep and wide
From the wound a lovely flower grew
From somewhere deep inside
He turned around to face his mother
To show her the wound in his breast
That burned like a brand
But the sword that cut him open
Was the sword in his mother’s hand

Every day another miracle
Only death would tear us apart
To sacrifice a life for yours
I’d be the blood of the Lazarus heart
The blood of the Lazarus heart

Though the sword was his protection
The wound itself would give him power
The power to remake himself
At the time of his darkest hour
She said the wound would give him courage and pain
The kind of pain that you can’t hide
From the wound a lovely flower grew
From somewhere deep inside

Every day another miracle
Only death would keep us apart
To sacrifice a life for yours
I’d be the blood of the Lazarus heart
The blood of the Lazarus heart

Birds on the roof of my mother’s house
I’ve no stones to chase them away
Birds on the roof of my mother’s house
They’ll sit on my own roof someday
They fly at the window, they fly at the door
Where does she get the strength to fight them anymore?
She counts all her children as a shield against the pain
Lifts her eyes to the sky like a flower to the rain

Every day another miracle
Only death could keep us apart
To sacrifice a life for yours
I’d be the blood of the Lazarus heart
The blood of the Lazarus heart

Every time I create something this song is ringing in my head.  When I taught my daughter to ride her bike, this song was ringing in my head.  When I talk to my dad on the phone, or IM with my mom, this song is ringing in my head.

We give life to something, and then we hope we’ve given it everything it needs to survive and flourish and fly away.  I know that I’ve done this with my daughter, even when it hurts so much to realize what I’m doing.  And I don’t regret it.  She’s a beautiful girl with a strong heart and a brilliant imagination, and she will overcome the failings of her parents.  I know that someday she will have the strength to fight the birds that no longer sit on my own roof, I know that my blood has given her the heart she will need.

I have to start giving myself and my writing that same level of confidence, that same freedom to fly.  I need to trust more in the blood that I’ve given and the heart that it creates.

I am also supposed to list seven things about myself I’ve not mentioned before.

Seriously?  I wrote out “101 Things About Me” twice already with no overlap…I’m tapped out people!

Oh, OK.  Fine.  How hard can seven things be?  Right?

1. The last movie I saw was “Alice in Wonderland” which qualified as “being stoned by proxy” for two hours.  Also, the movie was good but the ending sucked like a starving man at a crawfish feed.
     
2. I saw the band Train in concert in a tiny town in southern Oregon.  Sort of an outdoor music festival type thing.  They KILLED.  Then they resurrected the bodies and KILLED THEM AGAIN just to prove their unending awesome.
     
3. Speaking of music, the other day someone said a song on the radio “sounded like high school” and it made me think for a while.  High school for me sounded like a combination of Van Halen, Def Leopard, Bryan Adams, Damn Yankees, Enigma, Richard Marx, Madonna, Michael W Smith, and Amy Grant.  Probably all played at the same time.
     
4. I am a manly-man; I like football, baseball, Sportscenter, beer, fast cars, scantily clad women, and all the other manly-man things in the world.  Conversely, Pride and Prejudice remains both my favorite book and favorite movie.  So sue me.
     
5. While I’m not much of a cologne wearer, my favorite is Armani.  Not the new Armani, but the original classic Armani Cologne.  The one my daughter said smells like old people (I disagree, I say it smells like a fine men’s store).
     
6. Video footage of me doing stupid things can be found on the interwebs, performing the following general activities:  Skiing, falling off the roof of a building, launching a potato more than a mile with a cannon made out of irrigation piping, smoking a cigar while golfing without pants (it’s not a detail captured on film, but rest assured that alcohol WAS a factor).  No, I will not tell you how to find them.
     
7. For years (decades actually), I was far more recognized for my artwork than for my writing.  I have literally hundreds if not thousands of dollars in art supplies, a wonderful drawing desk, and a significant investment in digital tools as well.  I won awards, my art was published multiple times, and I was probably a strong enough illustrator to work professionally full time if I’d have wanted to go that route.

   Then two things happened:

   When I started my divorce from wife #1, I ended up giving away 95% of my portfolio stuff and only kept the really awful painting starts that I didn’t want her to destroy out of spite.

   Around the same time I had a series of neurological issues that have left me with minor and intermittent dyskinesia (yes, the same dyskinesia that TB’s wife named her blog after, and which is often seen in Parkinson’s patients after years of Levodopa use) of the limbs and acute focal dystonia (like super powerful writer’s cramp plus spasmodic muscle twitches) in my right hand.

   And about a 70% reduction in my ultra-fine motor control in my wrist and fingers.  Fine motor control is pretty OK, I can type and write notes in handwriting that doesn’t look like mine, and use a screwdriver, etc…but the ultrafine control, the sub centimeter precision movements are gone.  It’s like the brain sends the message but the hand just never gets the delivery.

   Two MRI scans, plus two neurological specialists and a series of medical trials later, and I can officially say “I’m ok, it’s very rare and I just have a loose wire somewhere above my shoulders and below my brainstem.”  No big deal, doesn’t happen more than a couple of times a year, and it doesn’t keep me from working or driving or golfing or rocking out the Guitar Hero or gunning down splicers in Bioshock 2.

   But it does keep me from doing art.  At all.  I struggled with it SO HARD four years ago that I’m too afraid to try again.  I don’t want to KNOW that I can’t do it anymore.  I’d rather just keep setting up my desk, making my workspace ready, keeping all my supplies at hand and pretend that I’ll actually do it again someday.

   Otherwise it’s admitting that the one thing about me that I used to think “made me special” really is dead.

The latin is taken from the Roman Catholic Common Mass.  If I were to translate it myself, it would start something like:

Father of all things, existing above and beyond in a place outside of our dimension, we hold sacred even the invocation of our feeble human attempt to describe you.  May the entirety of creation come to know unity, and a transcendence of our mortal existence through an utter and all encompassing surrender to the perfection and peace that is your intent and plan for all creations in every shard and facet of the universe.

As a child asks for food at a grand dinner table, laid out with delicious things to eat, so do we ask for that which you have already prepared for us.  The request honoring the offer to provide that you have already made to us.

We ask that you will actively and personally forgive and redeem us from the failures we have stumbled into; both failures with the holy and infinite, and failures with others here in our day-to-day experiences.  As you forgive and redeem us, so do we seek the knowledge and grace to imitate and repeat that forgiveness with others who have failed in their relationships with us.

Guide us away from those things which will cause us to fail you and others, and when we begin to go down the wrong paths and blind alleys, we ask that you would lead us back to the best roads and the safe harbors that will help us continue to improve ourselves, our families, our communities, and our world.

That about covers the first paragraph, from “Pater noster” down to “sed libera nos a malo.”

The current Missal translates that paragraph as follows:

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.  Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.  And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Yes, I realize my translation is more “wordy” but there’s just so much more poetry to the actual latin (and even more so with the actual source Greek, but that’s another post for another time).

For Lent, I’m giving up Agnosticism.

(That line KILLS in the right circles.)

What follows is a quote I’ve spent a lot of time reading over and thinking through.  For all three of my readers, I realize I’m the only one who can read it as quoted.  Sorry about that.

Pater noster, qui es in cœlis, sanctificétur nomen tuum: advéniat regnum tuum: fiat volúntas tua, sicut in cœlo et in terra panem nostrum quotidiánum da nobis hódie; et dímitte nobis débita nostra, sicut et nos dimíttimus debitóribus nostris: et ne nos indúcas in tentatiónem. Sed líbera nos a malo.

Líbera nos, quæsumus Dómine, ab ómnibus malis prætéritis, præséntibus, et futúris, et intercedénte beáta et gloriósa semper Vírgine Dei genitríce María, cum beátis Apóstolis tuis Petro et Paulo, atque Andréa, et ómnibus sanctis, da propítius pacem in diébus nostris: ut ope misericórdiæ tuæ adjúti, et a peccáto simus semper líberi, et ab omni perturbatióne secúri.

Per eúmdem Dóminum nostrum Jesum Christum Fílium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte Spíritus sancti Deus.

Per ómnia sæcula sæculórum.  Amen.

I promise: not preachy, just personal. To each his own.

254

That’s more than twenty lbs.  I haven’t even DONE ANYTHING yet.  I gave up Soda…big whoopie deepie doo.  Well, and started tracking my calories.  Again.

Now, this is exactly what I don’t want to get into this time around.  No focusing on the scale, no pouring over every missed opportunity, no berating myself every time I eat more than 2000 calories in a day.  The number on the scale is just a number.  It’s not me, it doesn’t say ANYTHING about how healthy I am, what I look like, what I FEEL like…just how much resistance a pressure pad dispersed when I stood on it.

I will not be posting regular weigh-ins here.  In fact, I doubt I’ll weigh myself again anytime soon, it doesn’t help me.  In fact, it does the opposite; I generally either feel bad about not losing enough, or I slack off because I think I’m ahead.

But not this time, no weight goals carved in stone.  My only goal is to dive into the water at the breakwater docks and swim under the Hawthorne Bridge on August 22nd; swim, bike and run like a man possessed; and not stop until I cross the finish line in Waterfront Park.  750 m in the water, 26 km on a bike and 5 k on my feet.  I don’t have to “win”.  I don’t even have to do well.  Just finish in less than four hours.

If I train well enough to survive, then weight loss is possible.  But it’s not about the weight loss, it’s about finishing.  I just want to finish.

And tonight I took the first steps down that path, litterally.  I stretched, warmed up with a slow walk for 3 minutes, walked at a fast pace for 10 minutes, ran for 2 minutes, walked at the same fast pace for another 10 minutes and finished with a two minute cool down.  Nothing spectacular, it’s my first time on the treadmill in a LONG time and my first time ever in the new shoes…so I took it easy.

One down, four more days to go.