1998ables

*

I remember.

Disconnected moments.

1998 summer vacations.

Now I exhume the eulogies:

I was following a Haisidic guy. It was New York City. He was like an exotic bass I'd caught in mid-stream of a 52nd street. He was wearing dark clothes, absurd in the heat for they must've drank in the sun and multiplied it's effects. He wore a heavy beard, graying in random areas, and a funny hat that looked positively stove-pipe.

I was gutting a pizza. It had been delivered from Pizza Hut for a national debt-type number. I didn't care; I was on vacation. I was sitting atop an expansive bed with a gurgling Smoky Mountain creek outside sliding glass windows, incongruously watching the final Seinfeld episode.

The smell of woodsmoke and Tar Hollow pines filled the air. We hopped aboard the back of a pickup and spied the most grotesque human ever seen - it was man left to nature, man gone to seed. He was big, huge, of gargantuan appetites, a hurly-gurly man with a huge bucket seat that showed over the top of his jeans. He had filthy gray hair that grew fecundly around his body. He was as startling as a ghost.

Virginia had recently seceeded. The Civil War had begun in earnest. The North was hesitant, fearful and lethargic. Stonewall Jackson was disciplined as hard steel and an amazing devotion to God. He wanted to take the battle north, to fight an offensive war, change history. "It is our only chance," he prophesied. As I was reading, a rogue Atlantic wave came in, so I moved a few yards west.

*

I remember duck-hunting with old Uncle Coot, a lifelong Norwegian bachelor who, upon hearing of my impending nuptials, gave me the keys to his old Ford and said, “run, son. Run like the wind.” I didn’t take him up on it, due to the sedation of my 401K drip and the near-vesting of company medical benefits. He said it wasn’t that I sold my soul that bothered him, it was how easily I’d sold it. A tear came to my eye the next morn, when in the ebullient May light I could see the charred edges of our magnolia bushes, and a big patch of blackened vegetation just beyond the welcome mat. Coot had been a little tipsy the night before, his imagination a bit overtaxed, and I reckon he thought he was out west again, where you can have campfires in your front yard since your front yard’s normally a hundred acres. The maple by the sidewalk had a bottle of Wild Turkey stuck in the Y, and there in the well-cropped yews was his old Bandera, Texas bandana. Uncle Coot didn’t have a social security card or a birth certificate or anything reeking of beaucracy, so no one knew how old he was when we celebrated his birthday. He always used to sneer the lyrics to a Merle Haggard tune: “....so keep your retirement, and your so-called social security.....think I’ll walk off my steady job today”. Coot never held a steady job, or any job really, so it was kind of ironic when he sang it, although no one ever pointed that out to Coot. I thought it was really cool that he could have a blind spot that big, but then everything about Coot was big.

*

My funny neighbor, he come over with some giddy-up when he saw me trimming my trees. He was like a kid, gape-mouthed that someone was having "fun" without him. "Hey, I'll get a ladder and trim my side!", he said with a triumphant smile. "Fine, you just do that" I said, only slightly concerned that my trees would look like 3-foot bonsai's after he got thru. Here's a guy who lives for yardwork - he's cut my side-yard grass for years. It's kind of an understood agreement, since neither of us want that awful line demarcating long-tailed grass from his short-clipped Ross Perot side. It's win-win. I'm still trying to think of how to ask him to cut the whole yard. It would certainly improve his view. Anyway, you can imagine how provocative it was of me to get out the clippers and begin preening the extravagant growth of a bunch of 15-foot hedge elms without him. Shame on me - I was trimming without a license, in broad daylight. >p>  Pittsburg 2000!

a dream

It was a cavernous bascillica, a sort of coronation hall - with endless red carpet leading to the altar. I was in the very last pew. Behind me, in the exit rotunda, was a sign that said "God's meal is done." I walked up to Communion late, and fought the urge to run up the long aisle since the 97-year old priest in the bright, heavy straining vestments waited on me. He smiled patiently, his posture stooped. At last I reached him and he gave me a huge wafer and said 'take and look at it through the light'. I did and could plainly see a maple seed imbedded in it! 'May you grow spiritually as a tree,' he said. I ate half the wafer and immediately the other half became a steel ingot depicting the Crucifixion. I ate that too, despite it's seeming hardness.

*

A Short Story

MTV blared in the background like a child who wouldn't shut up. "WAAAAAAA" it screamed at me, accompanied by heavy guitars and skinny guys with tatoos partially concealed by hair. I was watching it for scientific reasons, for a research paper on the effects of MTV on one's attention span. This masochistic exercise had begun promptly at 1 pm, after an appropriately fast-food lunch of Big Mac's and fry lards, and would end either when my sanity ended or 4:00, whichever came first.

I underestimated the influence the kids would have on me. At 30, you figure if maturity hasn't arrived yet, it may've missed you. This being the case, I found the rhythm of binge drinking and binge studying an easy rhythmn to fall into. The music still turned me off, probably due to the fact that it was about 3 beats faster than my heartrate, no doubt due in part to a rapidly falling-off metabolism. Julie Kale was my lab parnter & her MTVathon was Tuesday's, Thursday's and Saturday's, a task she found most enjoyable since her metabolic rate still rivaled a rabbit's. She was 23, reed thin, and disappeared in profile. I marveled at her energy, though found it ultimately exhausting since I couldn't react to her speech quickly enough. I blamed it all on MTV.

"Multi-sensory disillusionment may be the most apt description of what MTV stands for. A degraded picture of humankind is depicted thru multiple senses, i.e. the sight of "grunge" rockers who dress as unasthetically as possible via holes in the clothing and flannel shirts soiled with week old sweat and grime, and through hearing, by way of heavy, aggressive guitars tantamount to screaming children. It's quite fortunate that smells and tactile experiences aren't possible through the television," I wrote as Nirvana threw instruments. It was getting to me. I needed a break. I rang Julie. Julie to the rescue, the only person I knew on the large and rather impersonal campus. The only place I felt truly comfortable was amidst the stacks of newly minted books at Long's bookstore. I'd open up the latest Updike novel and bathe in the nostalgic fumes of the binding, my personal glue-sniffing experience.

"Julie! I'm dying, hep me, hep me!! I'm rapped out..and I can't take another zit commercial!"

"I can tell your attention span has shortened already!"

She was right, my attention span had shortened inexorably, and not just courtesy of the M-word station. Even baseball, the infallible game, seemed to drag. Don't throw over there again! OH GEESCH, he's going to go to a full count again? I took baseball like tonic, hoping it would slow time down.

"We've evolved to this huh? From ears used in hunting that could mean the difference between eating and starving, to ears used and abused by amplified screeching. But you know it does have a good beat to it Terry."

"Indeed I go to bed with that beat."

In the background I heard fresh screams.

"Gotta go- they're playing my song."

Julie loved to tease me, though she wanted more to date me. Men like me were shallow, men were boobs. What are boobs but fat anyway? I felt a bit sheepish at my history of bowing before the Looks goddess. The goddess who determines who one dates. I heard the 1:00 bells and put on a Mets hat to hide rack hair - hair in an advanced state of entropy due to a recent nap - and wonder how excruciating today's lecture could be. Thoreau, living a celibate life in the woods said SIMPLIFY! But then he wasn't a grad student studying communications, currently MTV, which delights in throwing as many images and sounds at you in a given nanosecond as your mind can uncomfortably handle.

My route to back to school was circuititous enough. My first venture involved working as an accountant in a sixty-story building. Actually I was more of a glorified bookkeeper and, given my nuturing nature concerning statistics, this seemed a good fit. Unfortunately not all statistics are created equal, and I soon deemed memorizing batting averages a far cry from totaling claim figures for a huge insurance company. Walking in one morning, the weather cold and quite dark, I noticed the shrill lights of the lower 50 floors; cold, florescenty and somewhat menancing in their examination-room brightness. I glanced up and saw the warm, glowing top floors - the executive floors where the rich and powerful met other rich and powerful people while bathed in lamp-shaded gold tones. I imagined people enjoying high-balls amid jacuzzi's and revolving faux bookshelves. I didn't find out, as I quit after five months. MTV started looking better. I fell into a rhythm of days spent in classes slightly buzzed from the sophoric sounds of professorial voices, and watching soaps and playing the harmonica. It reminded me of a National Enquirer article I'd read about how everyone talks and moves to an invisible rhythm, and that when someone breaks this rhythm it's upsetting. Not that I'm a regular reader of the Enquirer understand, I only get it for the pictures. Julie dropped by to discuss the paper. We had five weeks left to complete the experiment and write about it, but so far all we could report was how boring MTV really was. It was ironic. Music that tried it's hardest to be stimulating was in fact the opposite; the images all seemed the same after awhile, and the "music" was often three chords played ad nauseam. We'd each been writing during the trial-by-Van Halen, and today we'd agreed to show each other what we had.

"Modern music is to American young adults what igloos are to Eskimo's. It is at once their protection, their cocoon, a barrier to the cold, outside world, a carefully built house of understanding. MTV has changed the face of mankind, a bigger force and threat than the Soviets ever were, a challenge that the founding fathers could never have foreseen. It's lyrics and pictures denigrate women, cheapen the fabric of society by unraveling the social discipline that once unwound can never be wound back up. It is the cause of famine in East Africa, the cause of the terrorism in Northern Ireland, the reason that American children grow up without being able to read or write..." So Julie's paper went.

"Hmmm...might you've gone too far?" I asked.

"Where? You mean MTV as the cause of the Iranian Revolution?"

"Uh, this is tongue-in-cheek right?"

"Of course! I'm making the point that MTV causes our children to see everything as exaggerated, as black or white. You know, bigger is better and why not use an axe when a penknife would do?" There is no room for subtly or subtle thoughts or intellectual or metaphysical inquiry."

"Yeah. Yeah I guess. This is what university researcher's do isn't it? They take innocent stuff like the resurgence of country music and decide the real reason people are listening is due to racial reasons, or that it's a complex reaction against the welfare state, when it could be they like the slower beat?"

Julie decided we wanted to go out, so we headed to a campus bar. After a game of pool during which I pondered the difficultlies in letting her win but not having it appear so, we headed to the newest campus bar, "Kafka Karoke" and sang "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Cheeseburgers in Paradise" while sipping warm Riunite. It was romantic; singing about food has that effect on me. We watched a ball game on TV afterwards.

The Reds were tied after five innings with Morris at bat. He hit a sharp liner past third and Bip Roberts scrambled home. Ahhhhhh. I'd run into MTV's direct opposite - baseball - with its slow pace and largely unchanging images. And except for Haray Caray's "Take me out to the Ballgame" it's easier on the the ears as well as the eyes. I reached up the bar rail for the old copy of "Who's Who In Baseball" while Julie used the restroom. It was there to settle barroom arguments, though I'd never seen anyone get in baseball argument at this bar.

Ortiz, Javier Victor. Born: Santa Cruz, New Mexico. Hit .277 last year. A perfectly reasonable entertainment as a kid was spending hours quizzing my best friend on RBI leaders. Purity as a box score away. My Ted Williams rookie card was like a St. Anthony medal, at home carefully placed in a glass case like a saint's relic.

You may be wondering my marital status or lack thereof. I was married for 2.3 years and lost the dog and cat in the custody battle. They threatened to have Fido testify by placing him midway between us and calling him. I packed my pockets with meat before realizing the idiocy of it and gave Fido and Fedora to Sheila on the condition I got the La-Z-Boy. Julie, not lacking the appetite for food or songs about food, stopped by for lunch the next day before our MTV marathon. We planned on 36 consecutive hours and would need each other's vigilance in staying awake. This was Julie's idea, and I wasn't sure if we would be studying sleep deprivation or the MTV saturation point; maybe both. Either way, this would be our last gasp before finishing the paper and going our separate ways.

We discused our approach to the MTV marathon. Luck was on my side, as this was a special "classic" MTV weekend. Classic in an unintentionally oxymoronic way. We drove to the store to pick up coffee, Cheeto's and plenty of Swisher cigars, a habit that, surprisingly, we shared.

I turned up the volume and we heard our first song, apparently in praise of women with oversized rears. An hour went by and we talked little, since our purpose was to gauge our personal reactions to the music. The music seemed to work against my natural rhythms; my pulse and blood pressure began racing. Suddenly a cold sweat gripped me. I looked at Julie in shock - she was turning multiple shades of purple during the Prince video. She was also moving, as was I, towards the screen. No force of will could prevent it; I grabbed hold of the carpet, my hands soon clinging to only disengaged strands. The song became louder and louder and louder, the lyrics growing ominous: "if you didn't come to party, don't bother knocking on my door." In the background I saw a the corners of a baseball field curling up and then disappearing. I looked over at Julie, still purple, as we commingled into the screen and blended with television components. A V-J screamed in the middle distance. Trapped forever, inside our MTV.