Rorschach Test

Melancholy Bridge - Kacy Crowley (mp3)
Lonely Boy - Andrew Gold (mp3)

An old man lives there. His clothes are raggedy, and he wears a moth-eaten sportscoat over torn white pajamas. His hair and overlong beard are more salt than pepper. And overalls. He has overalls on, too. But not a dog. His dog died many years before. As did his wife. She died many years before the dog. And he didn’t have any children. Or maybe he did, and they left him. They gave up on him. Maybe he wasn’t there enough for them, and now it’s irreparable.

It’s quite possible I have crossed over Thrasher Bridge a thousand times in my life. The bridge, which crosses over the Chickamauga Dam in Chattanooga, looks out to the west upon a railroad bridge some 300 yards away. Atop that old, bronzed and rusted metal structure, in the middle of the water’s width, sits a once-white house now gray from time and pollution. The house has no yard. It has no porch or deck. It barely has room for a front door and a walkway wide enough to stand outside.

I first remember seeing it when I was five or six. No telling how long it had been there. Must’ve been a bitch to build.

In railroad-speak, I’m sure this house has a very specific and vital function. In fact, it’s probably not called a house at all. Probably has some railroady name like “overlook station” or something. But I formed my story on this one early in life, and I’m not about to go let an education get in the way of my imagination in this particular instance.

Because this house has been the focus of my attention off and on for more than 30 years, how I see it and the characters I’ve invented to live in that structure have become an undeniable Rorschach Test on where I am at a given moment.

As a small kid, I remember thinking that house must be awesome. It’s so high up you could see practically anything. You had this awesome pool surrounding your house. You could dive in right off the front stoop. You could hop a train as it passed underneath and travel practically the whole world. Anything was possible.

In my teenage years, I thought more about Rapunzel. The house was a prison, and some teenage boy had been locked away up there. His job was merely to observe and report on all he saw from his perch. His punishment was to be limited in his interactions to merely that: observing and reporting. He could never actually do. Only see.

In my 20s, I thought the house would make the perfect location for a superhero base. He could get anywhere in the city quickly by way of rail, water or roadways, and the metallic column supporting his house could easily hide vehicles specific to each need, because no one looked that closely. He could have a secret drop that went alllll the way to the bottom of the river -- kinda like the firepole Batman would ride to his cave in the TV show. It was both the perfect Fortress of Solitude and efficient gateway to anywhere.

Lately, I’ve seen that sad old man. Loved ones have died. He’s living up there by choice, a prison of his own choosing. In some sense, he’s similar to the Rapunzel character of my teenage vision, but now he’s his own warden, his own captor, and the only reason he doesn’t come down is because he doesn’t want to, or can’t find the courage, or doesn’t see the point.

Prior to this latest version, the house's primary resident has always been some direct version of myself. The wild and fancy free version of childhood. The trapped teenage prisoner. The superhero atop a world of possibility. But this last one, the old man, I try to imagine him as someone else.

At times, I think this is because I’ve grown wiser, that I've begun connecting the house and its fancied inhabitant with the people around me, with circumstances beyond my own self-absorption. Other times, I’m pretty sure it’s because I’ve memorized that scene from The Empire Strikes Back, and I know if the light saber slices off that old man's facade, the face emerging from the smoke just might perfectly reflect my own.

Anyways.

Anyways, it's a cool house to stare at whilst driving across the bridge.

Pianoless Man

The Load Out - Jackson Browne (mp3)
Fred Jones (Part II) - Ben Folds (mp3)

I quit piano in the spring of seventh grade.

It was cutting into time I thought was essential to my becoming an athletic success. Would that I were being sarcastic.

In the final two piano competitions I entered, I received “superior” ratings at both. Dunno what that meant exactly, but my teacher and parents acted like I was months away from Carnegie Hall.

“You’re going to regret this for the rest of your life,” my father told me when I said I was really really quitting. He’d told me this twice before, because I’d wanted to quit twice before, and his words had made me afraid to quit. Not because I thought I would regret it --  what 12-year-old worries about potential future regrets? -- but because I was so afraid of disappointing or angering my father.

My teacher insisted on classical music. There I am spending nights and ceaseless hours with my two best friends listening to Synchronicity and Grace Under Pressure and Jump. I’m watching hours of MTV (well, it's usually playing in the background while we’re enmeshed in one role-playing game or another). Nothing about Beethoven or Brahms correlated in my peanut brain with the music I loved, or I might have been more motivated to stick with the lessons. That she never even tried to connect those two worlds or even saw a reason to try is a fatal flaw I put on her. Pre-adolescents can’t predict regrets, and we can’t necessarily connect 200-year-old music with David Lee Roth without a little help.

Is it the job of a teacher or the job of a student to connect their passions and interests to the lessons at hand? Discuss.

I don’t regret quitting piano, but I regret never making a connection between my interests and my learning. It didn’t connect with the Thompson Twins, and I didn’t connect with Billy Joel.

When I hear Patty Griffin’s piano-centered songs, when Ben Folds shuffles into my earphones, when my Keane collection lands in the mix, nothing about those songs pull me into memories of my piano-playing childhood.

If I had remotely enjoyed Joe Jackson or Bruce Hornsby, maybe... but no. “Lonely Boy” and “I Don’t Like Mondays” were two of the 45s I played until they practically disintegrated, both plentiful with piano, but I doubt I ever really made the connection that the instrument I was learning was the same thing they used to make that music.

Ultimately, nothing about my own musical piano journey could have conceivably led me into an alternate future where I became Ben Folds and Ben Folds ended up some random NTAC blogger who just really really loved music.

I regret that I never connected all the dots, that I never quite found a way to marry, in my own hobbies and my own life, my love of music and my love of writing into anything symbiotic.

Fortunately, I’ve in most ways been a better cheerleader than one to earn the spotlight. (So what I mean is, cheerleading not as team sport but as something extant to support and encourage other teams.)

Regret requires, it seems to me, the ability to see an alternate reality, some better-seeming version of events that with one slight change in wind direction feels so real you can envision every moment of it. Fortunately (I think), I have never seen a version of events, an alteration of decision-making, that results in my being a successful and happy career musician, much less a rock star.

Sorry Dad. On this one you were wrong. But maybe one day, in the sweet by and by, we’ll get a chance to continue dueling our pianos.

Petit Mal

The Body Says No - The New Pornographers (mp3)
Until I Wake Up - Dishwalla (mp3)

The modern phrase is "absence seizures." They are very brief seizures that often resemble "spacing out." They usually last a matter of seconds, but in more extreme cases can hit closer to a minute. Often these seizures have no outward sign, but sometimes they include a few ticks, like the shaking of a shoulder or stuttered blinking. Often this illness limits itself to childhood and early teen years.

One of the girls on my daughter's soccer team had an absence seizure in the middle of the game. A teammate passed it to her, and Sylvia (not her name) just stood there. Ball rolled right past her. It was totally weird.

So of course myself and a couple of other parents made some quick initial comment like, "Hellooo! Wakey wakey!" And then Sylvia's parents shoved the cold and calm dagger into our consciences with that little reply: "Actually she was having an absence seizure, but she's OK now."

My wife had just bought me a new pair of North Face sandals a couple of weeks ago, and I hadn't yet had the opportunity to savor their taste, so that was my moment to learn they taste kinda tart and sandy.

Sylvia's parents were totally cool about it, which helped. And naturally I tried making up for my ignorant insensitivity by engaging them in a too-long interrogation about it. How long has she suffered with it? (4 years) Will it last? (They hope and expect it to pass by the early teen years) What's the average duration? (About 15 seconds, sometimes as much as 30, and rarely as long as a minute) Is it genetic? (In this case, not from the parents directly) If it doesn't go away...? (Lots of potential problems but nothing they're not prepared to deal with. No driver's license was the quickest response)

The experience haunted me the rest of the day and as I lay in the hotel bed on Saturday night. I got up and read up on it while my girls slept. Having recalled "Bridge of Sighs" main character Lucy struggling with something between a long-form absence seizure and a fugue state, I went back and listened to an NPR interview with Richard Russo and read another interview looking for information.

We all have moments that remind us of our blessings and help put our own problems in perspective.

"Petit mal" means "little illness." This is anything but a small problem. Milk and peanut and grass allergies, or mild vision issues, or other issues with which my family wrestles, suddenly seemed palatable.

When I woke up at 4 a.m., still a little freaked out by it, I wondered if some people have petit mal phases where they just kind of zone out for a fraction of their lives rather than a fraction of a minute. Maybe an inexplicable day or week of behavior that goes counter to everything normal about them.

My mom started smoking cigarettes to cope with the death of my father and the unthinkable stress of having to raise her little son-creature. Maybe those three or four years -- years she has trouble remembering with any clarity -- were her life's own little absence seizure.

Henry Hyde had an affair when he was 41. Maybe his "youthful indiscretion" was his own little absence seizure.

No, I don't really believe that. But isn't it pretty to think so.

In recent days, every time I've found myself gazing into the distance, distracted from the world around me by a thought or a feeling, I wonder what it must be like to have no choice in the matter. To have something outside of yourself push your pause button while the world continues moving, and you merely disappear from time for a short span.

I'm not a control freak about much in this chaotic life, but that thought frightens me half to death.

The C 'n' S Club

Free - Marie Wilson (mp3)
Running Up That Hill - Kate Bush (mp3)

My two daughters each got to have a friend sleep over the other night. Nary 20 minutes of the gathering had transpired before my eldest and her pal had written a sign: NO ONE UNDER 9 ALLOWED PAST THIS POINT. My other daughter Arden and her friend are, of course, 8.

Not to be outdone, Arden retaliated with a sign of her own: NO ONE OVER 8 OR MEAN ALLOWED IN MY ROOM. I guess she was hoping to strike at Avery twice as hard just in case she found a loophole for the age barrier.

Although this kind of divisive activity troubles the "Why can't we all just get along?" meddling parent in me, I managed to keep my nose out of it for once. I'm increasingly convinced that I over-meddle, that American Parents Circa 2010 do far too much meddling in their kids' lives.

This realization is by no means my attempt at excusing myself from parental responsibility. In fact, making the conscious choice not to meddle requires -- at least of a dedicated parent -- even more time and thought than does meddling, because meddling is a constant and easy reaction: see a problem and jump in to fix it. Not meddling, on the other hand, requires that we still see the problems but allow them to slide by us. Catch and release, if you will.

In an episode of The Wire I watched recently, a police captain praised the invention of brown-bagging because it allowed cops to ignore having to police disobedience to open container laws and focus on "real police work." Likewise, I think meddling in our kids' minutiae allows us to feel like we're being parents when what we end up doing is catching a lot of petty misdemeanors while ignoring and neglecting the deeper issues, the bigger laws.

Here are some of my most excited moments as a parent: when my daughters tell me they're going outside to play.

Often, I don't know what they're going to do, because they don't know what they're going to do. They might ride bikes around our dream of a back yard, a.k.a. the 100-acre school campus where we live. They might scale one of the two climbing trees above our house. They might head up the hill to the "rock quarry" and the unintentional reservoir that's filled the hole there, a place they declared to be the home base for The C 'n' S Club, a club they named after the first letters in each of their names.

Amidst just those three choices, three amongst many, lie infinite possibility for two girls. And therein lies our modern angst.

Allowing your precious, delicate young children to do something without known boundaries and with risks both known and unknown is like licking the tip of a 9-volt battery. They could fall out of a very, very tall tree. They could slip on the rocks and fall unconsicous into cold, muddy water. They could ride their bike unawares in front of a speeding and reckless teenage driver. All of this could happen beyond my eyesight, beyond earshot, leaving me helpless to fulfill my most vital and basic parental duty: to serve and protect.

One of Michael Chabon's early essays in his new book, Manhood for Amateurs, is called "The Wilderness of Childhood." Reading it had the time warp power of yanking me back to my own childhood, a time when at least 3/4 of my memories involve absolutely no adults.

Bottle rocket fights. Kickball. Bike rides miles away from home to the local theater or a huge construction site. Ghost in the Graveyard at 11 p.m. behind my friend's house, with one of those large inner tubes used as a primitive trampoline for home base. Swimming unsupervised at a friend's house, pretending to be Sub-Mariner and Aquaman and twisting and turning underwater as we wrestled with the tentacles of his pool's mechanized cleaning system. Hour after hour of role-playing games in a pal's basement, or sitting in one of our bedrooms and reading comic books while Elvis Costello's Get Happy! or the Best of the Doobies played on the turntable until someone got called home for dinner.

On our way to a concert in December, my friend Andy and I were reminiscing about our childhood. "I can't tell you how many times I'd go home from staying the night at your house, and my mom would be, like, 'Did you sleep over at Billy's last night?' and I'd be, like, 'Yeah.' Can you imagine? She went to sleep not really sure where I was, but she was totally OK with it. Slept just fine."

The adults in my childhood memories are certainly more pronounced and comprehensible than the ones in Peanuts cartoons, and their roles were neither minor nor insignificant. But their errors rarely involved neglect. Perhaps that was due solely to my incredible fortune to never get hit by a car, kidnapped by a pervert, or attacked by a rabid bully. Perhaps that was because nothing horrifying and worthy of Katie Couric ever happened to a kid in my neighborhood.

But as a parent, looking out one of the kitchen windows, watching my daughters hop on their bikes or trudge up that hill, the feeling I embrace is not knowing what they're up to, wondering what fun they might have that I can't begin to imagine. Looking out those windows is practice for the very thing all parents most anticipate and most fear, practice for the day we must acknowledge their increasing independence and accept that all we can do for them is hope, and cheer, and wait for them to visit our little universe on occasion.

Under Your Skin...

Future Love Paradise - Seal (mp3)
Informer - Snow (mp3)

It was no surprise that in a liberal city like Austin (Texas), every parent was a welcoming multiculturalist, embracing diversity. But according to (Professor Birgitte) Vittrup's entry surveys, hardly any of these white parents had ever talked to their children directly about race. They might have asserted vague principles -- like "Everybody's equal" or "God made all of us" or "Under the skin, we're all the same" -- but they'd almost never called attention to racial differences. They wanted their children to grow up colorblind...

This paragraph, early on in a Newsweek feature story about children and discrimination, was one of those moments when I was very happy to be reading it in the exclusive privacy of a bathroom rather than in public. Because if others had been watching me read that paragraph (and many others after that one), they would have seen me begin to gulp and fidget and even look around, slightly paranoid that others might notice my discomfort.

In short, that paragraph describes with almost perfect accuracy how I've been trying to raise my daughters on matters of race.

And whenever our behavior or attitudes are called out in a national publication with such accuracy, trust me, it's never a good thing. It means we're fucking up somehow. And I knew it early on in this article. But I kept reading anyway, despite my gross discomfort.

When it comes to issues of race, when it comes to talking about race, I'm astonished anyone from my generation could feel comfortable with the subject.

I was raised by and surrounded by adults who couldn't even figure out their own opinions on the matter. Some of the most memorable "serious talks" my father had with me were about race. One of my father's co-workers at TVA was black, and he and his wife always attended the annual work parties my parents hosted.  On several occasions my father would that night or the following day explain to me that they were good people and equal in every way to everyone else at the party. He would talk about how proud he was that things had changed and improved so drastically since he was my age, because he had black friends who weren't even allowed to come to his front door or enter his house without clear permission from his mother, and she almost never gave permission.

Yet I also saw him struggle with those very prejudices.

Most specifically, I remember us watching Flash Gordon together on HBO back in '81 or '82, making me 9 or 10. There's a scene where Ming gets Dale Arden drunk on some Midori or something. In the scene, Dale is surrounded by a bunch of female "slaves," many of which were African-American, and I remember my father calling them several words. One or two I'd heard before and knew were wrong, and one or two I'd never heard before.

I realize in hindsight that Dad was shitface drunk when we were watching it. Not that intoxication excuses it for the general public, but it helps make sense of what seemed to me at the time as confusing contradiction.

Dad wanted to believe races were equal. He wanted to believe that America was quickly moving past inequality and injustice based on race. But deep down, he was constantly fighting this deep-seeded feeling that black people just weren't as smart, weren't as capable. He wasn't proud of it, but it rolled in like a mild thunderstorm once or twice a year. (If he managed to prevent passing that contagion down through another generation, isn't that at least a small victory?)

All I've ever felt when it comes to matters of race, my whole life, is a mixture of pity and fear. Pity because it's one of the few subjects where no one seems to be allowed to get over their ignorance because all ignorance gets labeled as racism, and being called a racist isn't conducive to a willingness to learn, and everyone on all sides sometimes seem doomed to be stuck in their own ruts because they either shut up and keep it to themselves or they speak up and get raked over the coals.

Fear because I've learned that shutting up is the best approach, and I absolutely hate shutting up.

In college, my freshman RA was a black guy named Chris. He was from inner-city D.C., and he was the President of his black fraternity, and he was sharp and confident and smooth. He was the first guy -- one of the few African-Americans I've met my whole life -- who could comfortably and calmly discuss things with white people who had a lot to learn (or, he'd say, unlearn).

At the time, there was a huge movement (and opposition) on campus for a stand-alone Black Student Union, and a group of guys from my floor got into this debate with Chris. "Y'all have this whole campus," he said. "All we want is one damn building."

"But the whole campus is yours, too," several guys retorted. "You're not excluded from anything or anywhere."

"But it's not ours. It's yours. We're just welcomed to visit."

Later that year, I walked into the Black Student Union -- it was just a couple of rooms inside the larger Student Union building at the time. I was so nervous my knees were buckling, and I honestly fought back tears. I wanted someone to explain to me why I was so scared to ask questions, why I felt so guilty for having done nothing, to my knowledge, that was hateful or cruel. What I couldn't deny, however, was having grown up with family members and, later, friends, who expressed racist opinions and used racist language. And I felt guilty just for being a part of it, for knowing it was out there, and that people who looked like me thought and said those things.

And I felt guilty because I had no idea what I was supposed to do about it or how to make it better.

The BSU's assistant director sat down with me. I don't remember much about the conversation. I remember her actually smiling and patting my shoulder and having a look of pity on her face. I remember her telling me that having the nerve just to come into the BSU and talk was a sign of courage and progress, and that my responsibility was to refuse to tolerate hearing expressions of prejudice from others.

Almost 20 years later, I still feel knots of fear and discomfort. I've tolerated some expressions of racism and expressed intolerance for others, but more of the former than the latter.

So when my daughter, at 5-years-old, referred to her black classmate as "tan," I didn't even try to clarify. We used that a lot in our house for a while. "Tan." It sounded good.

And when I did talk about race with them, it was in those vanilla (Neopolitan?) notions of "everyone's equal," "everyone's the same," yada yada. I was so afraid of educating them incorrectly that I ended up not educating them at all. And I'm using the past tense just to deceive myself, because it's not like I'm suddenly Daddy Diversity.

And I'm left to wonder, is this merely my failure, or are we as a society doomed to continue to fail until we can figure out a way to talk about it without being paralyzed by fear?

Living In Oz: The Album (Part II)

Alyson - Rick Springfield (mp3)
Me + Johnny - Rick Springfield (mp3) -- SONGS REMOVED BY REQUEST

(Part 1 is here)

I don't think you can call someone your "first girlfriend" if you never had a date with her, never kissed her, and never really did anything more physical than one hand grazing another. But, by the strictest definitions, Amy W. was my first girlfriend, the first girl I went with. [NOTE: The girl on the left looks nothing like Amy W., but that's precisely the kind of ensemble Amy wore regularly.]

Amy W. might well be the shyest girl I ever knew. And she had some seriously buck teeth. [NOTE: Isn't it sad that initially describing someone with a negative trait -- say, "buck teeth" -- automatically makes you think they were unattractive? In truth, it was probably her most noticeable trait, yet she was also incredibly cute. When I think of her, I specifically recall the Olan Mills picture of herself she gave me. Soft-focus lighting. Soft fuzzy purple V-neck sweater over some teal Miami Vice type of shirt. Wavy, feathered-back dirty blonde hair. And a gold locket around her soft neck.]

Six weeks of going with someone when you're 11 is, like, a serious chunk of your life. As a percentage of your life, fifth-graders going together for a month and a half is like 25-year-olds who date for two years! Entire dynasties rise and fall in the elementary school universe in less time than Amy and I went together.

For those six weeks, what "going with Amy" really meant was we'd spend recesses sitting within arm's reach of one another and saying as little as absolutely possible. Although I was gregarious and downright silly with my guy pals, Amy's presence forced me down to her level of mute interaction. We'd just sit there, in relative proximity, usually on the same bench. We'd look around, our hands clasped in our laps, and coexist. It was both terribly awkward and monumentally exquisite. There was nothing I would have rather been doing than to sit there mute next to Amy W.

On Valentine's Day in 1983, I gave Amy a necklace which was pretty damn expensive for a 5th grader. It was, like, $20, which was, like, totally three weeks of lawn-mowing and housework. Gag me with a spoon! $20 in 1983 is approximately $450 today or something! It was real 14k gold or something! In the exchange, Amy gave me a cassette of Rick Springfield's Living in Oz. This was my very first significant gift from a girlfriend, which practically made it my own personal Ark of the Covenant. (Except, you know, without some dude's face melting off or angels of death swirling around me.)

I listened to that album so incessantly I'm somewhat shocked the tape didn't burn. As the added kicker, Platonic 5th-Grade Man Tom was a huge Rick Springfield fan. Whenever we would pretend we were in a band, Tom would always play his guitar way down practically on his thighs because Rick played it down that low. And Tom did what Rick did, right down to sweating profusely.

When I consider my love of -- borderline obsession with, really -- the musical genre known as "power pop," I'm pretty sure its genesis began on Valentine's Day 1983 when Amy gave me Rick.

While in prior albums Rick had clung to a more traditional rock sound, Living in Oz found Springfield colliding with the synthesized world of 80s pop rock. The result is an album where Springfield fights with what it means to be human and what it means to have "human touch." Everybody's dancing to a drum machine, he writes in the opening verse of the opening song. And later, I sit so snug and isolated alone in the modern world.

This song feels quite prescient in our social network modern day.

All the songs are about the ways we connect. Although I realize this isn't a particularly shocking topic for power pop, on this album it feels much more thematic than usual. Songs about two souls finding one another serendipitously ("Souls"), or about engaging in a very surreal extramarital affair with his actress co-star ("Alyson"), or about just shaggin' a slut ("Motel Eyes"), or about connecting with his best friend ("Me + Johnny") or struggling to connect with his father ("Like Father Like Son"). [NOTE: I'm not the only one who noticed this, as I discovered this evening by reading Allmusic.com's review of the album.]

The two biggest hits off this album, "Human Touch" and "Affair of the Heart," perfectly described what Amy and I had together. We never touched, and we hardly ever talked, so what went on between us HAD to be soooo much deeper than just physical, since that was non-existent. Our hearts were communicating without us!

When people want to know why I'm an unapologetically stout Rick Springfield fan, "Valentine's Day 1983" is my Listen w/o Prejudice plea.

Living In Oz: The Album (Part 1)

or "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Springfield"

Gloria - Laura Brannigan (mp3)
Always Something There to Remind Me - Naked Eyes (mp3)

In the spring of 1983, I was in the fifth grade.

My teacher was an intimidating black woman named Mamie. She pronounced "R" as "arr-uh." She adored me, which on occasion created some awkward playground moments where I was forced to defend myself against those Mrs. Hamler didn't like. Her preferred punishment for misbehavior was making students hand-copy dictionary words from Webster's, character for character. The standard punishment was 50, but I remember three occasions when she assigned 300. Everyone giggled when she assigned someone to "start with the arr-uhs."

One of our most beloved recess pastimes was Mad Libs. The entire goal of Mad Libs, by the spring of 1983, was to fill out the entire sheet using only cuss words. Fifth grade was when I truly began to learn just how versatile the word "fuck" and its derivatives could be. Ironically, even by completely destroying the innocuous spirit of the activity, the activity still honed my understanding of the parts of speech. So it wasn't all a   fucking   (adjective) loss.

The other favorite recess activity was Tetherball. Tetherball never had a chance at being an actual competitve sport; therefore, I was pretty good at it. In fact, if I wasn't the best Tetherball player in the school, I was in the running in spite of not being particularly tall. (And anyone who's played Tetherball can attest to the supreme value of height in that game.)

The ecstasy of Tetherball was that, in the most intense match-ups, a cool-under-fire attitude didn't really help. Some of the best Tetherball players were absolute spazzes. Like me. Once your opponent got the right angle on you, and that ball started sailing over your head and wrapping tighter around the pole, you could hope to perfectly time your jump to save your game, or you could flail and spaz and hope that your panicky desperation somehow stopped the momentum. It felt about like the odds of Luke Skywalker firing those torpedoes into that little toilet hole on the outside of the Death Star. But if you could make that one key jump, sometimes the entire tide of the game shifted.

Tom was my best friend at school. Although I would never have admitted it, Tom was my Platonic ideal of the Fifth-Grade Man. He was always smartly dressed and in touch with proper fashion, and his blonde hair was always expertly feathered back and perfectly split down the middle of his skull, but not, y'know, in a greasy icky way. In 1983, a certain demographic of mostly-heterosexual boys could use tons of hairspray and get away with it. That he was smart and confident with girls and had gone into the skating rink corner and swapped bubble gum with one of the hottest girls in our class elevated him to my superior in all ways.

I think he got away with wearing nice clothes and dress shoes to school because he also happened to be quite the athlete, and he could hold his own in a scrape. This was not true of me, so I was both a preppy and a pussy.

At that point in technological history, I got my music the hard way. I would sit and do homework or play within reach of our stereo for hours on end, listening to KZ 106, the local Top 40 station at the time, and a blank cassette would be sitting on Pause-Record. Anytime I heard the beginning of a song I liked, I would rush desperately over and un-pause, thus earning a copy of that glorious song. Unfortunately The Jammer didn't know how to STFU and would usually talk talk talk riiiight up to the first words of the song, and then the bastard would usually cut the song off before it was really over, but the imperfect science of the entire deal tended to make it all the more challenging to try and get the absolute best versions of the most beloved songs.

Mixtapes at that point in my life were based on the whim of luck and timing. I had no power over the ordering of the songs. I was a slave to The Jammer. Sometimes Laura Brannigan's "Gloria" and Naked Eyes' "Always Something There to Remind Me" had to go back-to-back regardless of how well they meshed sonically or thematically.

Between fifth and sixth grades, I "went" with four different girls. For reasons that don't quite make sense to me, I can't keep the chronological order of these "girlfriends" quite right, and I can't place them very accurately on a timeline. I don't even know how long I "went" with each of them. Two weeks? Three months? No idea.

Why did we call it that? Where were we going? Nowhere! We couldn't hardly even "go together" to the damn swingset, much less go anywhere else. (Sorry. A brief Seinfeldian moment. It has now passed.)

But I remember very specifically who I was "going with" in the spring of 1983. Her name was Amy Wall.

To Be Continued...

I Wonder Where My First-Grade Classmates Are

Pretty Babies - Dishwalla (mp3)
What's the Matter Here? - 10,000 Maniacs (mp3)

Billy is on sick leave today. In his stead is a column he wrote for the Warner Robins Daily Sun in the spring of 1995.

I Wonder Where My First Grade Classmates Are...

I didn't learn everything I needed to know in Kindergarten. Or first grade, for that matter. But I always tell people I wish I could stay that age. I wish I could be in first grade forever, because nothing was wrong with anyone. Everyone looks at me like I'm weird when I say this. I don't understand why.

My cousin Cathy was in my class. While me and Timmy Burkhalt were busy being Bo and Luke Duke, driving around the playground in our imaginary General Lee, Cathy was sitting on the monkey bars with Mason Jenkins.

Mason was black, and Cathy used to tell me she was going to marry him. One day, Cathy told that secret to her parents. Cathy and Mason never talked to each other after that. I don't think I ever heard Cathy call him that bad name until after she told her parents. After that, though, Cathy called him that word all the time. But not to his face, because she knew it would get her in trouble.

Mason moved to New York in the middle of the second grade. I think his father got a job trading on Wall Street. They were rich, and his father was a genius.

Cathy's married now. To a white guy. Her husband likes fishing. I hear he especially likes to fish for bass. And women.

Last time I talked to Cathy, she asked me if I remembered Mason, if I remembered how she used to say she'd marry him. Back before she noticed the color of his skin, before she knew how bad black people were.

Bill Robertson lived down the street from my aunt, the aunt I stayed with after school until my mom could pick me up. My aunt knew Bill's mom, so they always made us do stuff together in the afternoons.

Bill loved cartoons, and he was a little strange. We usually played with his Superfriends dolls, but sometimes he'd start shaking and banging his head against the floor. His mom would come and get him and put him in bed and tell me Bill couldn't play anymore that day.

One day during show and tell, he got up and said he was the Incredible Hulk. He started growling and hitting the chalk board with his fist. Then he peed in his pants. Bill didn't return for second grade. I never told anyone I used to go to his house.

Bobby Fields was pretty popular. He was pretty smart, if second graders can be smart, and nobody ever talked bad about Bob. He was a politician even in first grade, always saying the right things to the right people.

Bob and I used to talk about baseball, because his uncle was a pitcher for the Astros. I changed schools in third grade, and I lost touch with Bob.

Five years ago, Bob was away at Texas Christian University, where he had been voted into the student council as a sophomore, and he was coming back home for Christmas Break. Unfortunately, Bob stopped at a gas station that was getting robbed. He was back at the coolers getting a soda when the masked guy came in with a gun.

According to the papers, Bob tried to talk the guy out of robbing the store. The robber didn't take any money. Bob died from the gunshot wounds before they could get him to the hospital. Bob's murderer never got caught.

Nikki White was the most gorgeous girl. Even in second grade, our classroom of guys, who usually didn't admit to liking girls, battled on the playground for Nikki's attention.

I never knew Nikki well enough, because I wasn't the most impressive playground competitor, and Nikki only allowed the best to court her.

A friend of mine told me Nikki lives in a trailer park outside of Rossville, Georgia. She has four children from three different fathers and lives alone, on welfare. Nobody competes on the playground for her anymore.

Rachel Russell was shy. She was always sitting under trees and wouldn't really talk to anyone. After I learned Nikki would never be interested in my advances, I spent quite a while trying to impress Rachel. Maybe because Rachel was the one girl harder to reach than Nikki.

Rachel made good grades, and Rachel dressed for school like most of us did for church.

Rachel moved away just after Valentine's Day. Her mother took her away, and we never found out where. I learned later that Rachel's father loved Rachel more than a father is supposed to. But he didn't ever beat her, if that's a concession. Funny how she never looked anything but pristine in those Sunday dresses.

I was the only person she gave a Valentine to. I still have it. I miss Rachel, and I wonder if I should have tried harder to talk to her under that tree.

I don't understand why people look at me weird when I tell them I wish I was back in first grade. I wish it all the time.

The only thing I wish for more often is for Rachel's father to trade places with Bob at that gas station.

"Pretty Babies" is from Dishwalla's debut album, Pet Your Friends. "What's the Matter Here?" is from the MTV Unplugged album. Both can be hunted down on iTunes and Amazon.com.

The Big D

I Wish the Best for You - Emerson Hart (mp3)
How to Survive - Lori McKenna (mp3)

Celebrities obviously didn't become famous for being intelligent. Not a damn one of them. Don't wanna go marching down an already-tromped trail, so no need to wax about our culture's freakish obsession with their lives and our even freakier desire to be one of them, lust for fame at whatever cost.

Although I've only read Slate's take on it, I can't deny a morbid fascination with the Christie Brinkley divorce. Even more than the predictable R Kelly acquittal, this courtroom drama of irreconcilable differences to the power of google is a real head-scratcher.

First, the pathetic stereotypes. The husband is the horniest bastard on the planet. Except for, that is, all the other males. As for Christie Brinkley, the very same woman who made horny bastards all over the planet envy Chevy Chase for 20 minutes in Vacation, she's the nun-like woman scorned, somehow capable of marrying the Horniest Bastard on the Planet, having two children by him, and never realizing that he was spending more than I earn every year on porn and God only knows what else, either hookers or more Vaseline than you can fit in a large master bathroom.

But here's the kicker. This woman has been in the spotlight so long, the heat from those lamps have burned what few brain cells she ever possessed in the first place. She insisted -- no, fought tooth and nail -- for the right to have her circus drama unfold in the public eye. Let me repeat: She wanted us to gawk at their mutant marriage. Her sole motivation? Anger. The desire to reveal her future ex as The Horniest Bastard on the Planet.

Christie claims she wanted it going public "for the kids." Yes, I'm sure your children will be forever grateful that you have shown that half your DNA comes from a scuzzbucket. Everytime they're mocked at school for having such insane parents, they'll be like, "Ohhhh thank you Mom! We're sooo popular!" Fortunately, she's probably so vapid she won't ever realize this. Besides, they can afford therapy for the kids, so what's the big deal?

I reckon she got what she wanted. Ironically, if any sane person believes Christie's ex is going to struggle to find 50 women hotter than Christie Brinkley willing to give him a chance -- or at least a job -- you might as well check yourself into the same anger management psychiatric ward that Christie needs. Here are the stereotypes romping around in the current story:

• Man = Horny Bastard
• Woman = Clueless, sexless, vengeful and full of wrath beyond reason
• Supermodel = stupid and clueless, marries rich man for the money
• Rich Men = marry trophy women for the cute family portrait over the mantle, then screw every other supermodel (and waitress, and sometimes hooker) they can get their sweaty palms on 
• Other Women = Totally willing to screw around with a rich man they know is a Horny Bastard
• Media = Sharks in shock for being invited to a bloodbath
• Americans = Tourists staring into the aquarium to watch it with perverted envious glee -- it's a lot cheaper than online porn, and those rich celebrities deserve to be miserable, 'cuz it's karma!

It's no coincidence that Maureen Dowd's weekend column, "An Ideal Husband," was an instant hit. Lots of us -- even folks who don't care about celebrities -- find ourselves wondering what the hell these people are doing getting married. And not just Christie, but other people we know. We see 'em, and we think, They'll never make it, not in a million years.


And we're right. They don't make it. Usually not even for three years, much less a decade. But people keep doin' it. Getting married to the wrong people. And not, like, slightly wrong. We're talkin' totally, completely wrong. Your own personal Anti-Spouse is wearing a ring with your initials in it, and you wake up every morning staring the person in the face, wanting to throw up all over them like some Linda Blair in The Exorcist punishment.

(DISCLAIMER: To my friends who have been through the meat grinder of divorce (and there's more than a few of you out there), please forgive, because I'm not trying to reference you and your shitty marriages in this. I'm trying to speak more generally. Your marriages ended for unique and nuanced reasons, and I've only once said aloud to someone, prior to a wedding, "They'll never make it," and they were hardly friends. Most of your marriages didn't get shitty until sometime later.)

(SECOND DISCLAIMER: Sorry I called your marriages shitty. 'Twas a pathetic attempt at humor. But they were kinda shitty...)

And another thing. How the hell can a celibate Catholic priest understand so pristinely what more than half of us marrying types don't understand one whit? Meanwhile, the preacher who conducted the premarital counseling sessions required by North Carolina law gave Jenni and me only one piece of memorable advice in four hours' worth of meetings:

HIM: If you wake up, and your wife is in the kitchen cooking you breakfast, and maybe y'all didn't have a great night the night before, or maybe y'all had a little fight, or maybe you can just sense she's a little down that morning, or maybe you're not feeling very happy. You know what I like to do at times like this? I like to go over to my wife, and I just peench her boob.

ME: You wha?

HIM: Peench a boob. Just go up and give it a tweak. Always makes the day a little brighter. 

I said it was memorable advice, not wise advice. And no, I'm not making that up. Sometimes I think it's a miracle that even 50% of marriages survive.

"I Wish the Best for You" is from Emerson Hart's solo album, his first after the demise of Tonic, Cigarettes and Gasoline. "How to Survive" is off Lori McKenna's unbelievable Favorite Album of 2007, Unglamorous.

High Dives and Monkey Bars

Trapeze - Patty Griffin (mp3)
The Wrong Child - R.E.M. (mp3)
In My Tree - Matthew Sweet (mp3)

Had a melancholy moment with my daughters last night. We were driving back from Ringgold, emerging from the Fourth Circle of Hell otherwise known as "a swim meet," and they asked me if I'd ever been on a high dive. The only high dives they've ever seen were on the Olympic Trials we watched last night. They've never actually seen one in person.

"Was it fun?" my older daughter asked me.

As usual, I probably overthought my answer before just being honest, worrying that my honest "Yes, it was very fun" answer was salt in the wound, reminding them of joys they'd never have.

"What was it like? Was it scary?"

It was scary. It was exhilarating. Most of the fun was trying to decide what kind of flying leap you had the nerve to take while you were climbing up that steep ladder, then standing on the edge of that board for a gut-check. To dive, or do a flip, or just take the coward's way out and do a "pencil" or run flailing off the edge, hoping the silliness would disguise your hesitance to do something more skillful.

The high dive was an awesome rite of passage. That water seemed a looooong way down as a kid. It seemed even higher up when you'd see some adult -- usually a mother -- get up there and have trouble working up the gumption to jump.

What I didn't tell my girls -- not yet -- was that I fell off the back of a high dive when I was eight years old. After a year of swim lessons and regular visits to the neighborhood pool, I had finally worked up the nerve to dive off the high dive. It took a few minutes, but I finally managed, and even received a 3.4 from the East German judge.

Having successfully done it, I was in such a rush to repeat the miracle that I raced up the ladder a little too quickly, and as I reached for the rail at the top, my hand slipped, and I fell backward.

It's amazing how quickly your brain can shut down. That one split second in time, of my hand slipping away from that rail, feels like several minutes in my memory. I couldn't have been in the air for more than a second or two, but I don't remember any of the actual fall. I never even felt myself crunch against the concrete.

The only things I remember before starting to wake up is the nervous reaction of my mother, who was so frightened she couldn't even scream. She whimpered. And I could hear it as she leaped from her lawn chair. My biological father died when I was a couple of days old, and Mom never hid the fact that her single greatest fear in the world was losing me. The sound I recall coming from her is a lot more chilling now than it was back then.

Turns out blacking out saved me a few broken bones at the very least. I landed so completely flat against the concrete that I got up with only a few minor scratches and nothing else. We didn't sue. We didn't even cancel our membership. We were back at the pool the next week. No measures were put in place to make the high dive safer. No warnings were posted that one should grab the hand rail carefully, that no one should go too quickly up the ladder. The judgment was made, fairly quickly, that user error was the root of my accident.

By the time I was 10, I was joining my friend Andy and other pals at his pool, doing really stupid things. He had a curved slide that went eight or so feet down into the water, but mostly what they did was climb to the top and jump in. The really daring moments required you to stand on top of the handrail before jumping.

Someone really could've hurt themselves. Especially a massive klutz like myself. But we never did, other than a few bruises or scrapes from hitting the pool bottom too hard on occasion.

When I start thinking back to my childhood, there wasn't much of any of it that hasn't been deemed, by one group or another, as Too Dangerous. Riding dirt bikes 10 miles, across several four-lane high-speed roads, to the local movie theater. Fighting in bottle rocket wars. Playing "joust" on our bikes with baseball bats. Watching HBO when my parents weren't around. Hell, even playing Dungeons & Dragons.

And those adventures that weren't deemed dangerous were flat-out demolished. Like high dives. Monkey bars. Sitting in the floorboard of the back seat of your parents' car on the trip to the grandparents or the beach, playing with your Star Wars figures.

Where do kids today find healthy ways to explore that gray area of Acceptable Risk? The very nature of growing up, of maturing, requires that kids and teenagers test boundaries, take flying leaps, push red buttons. Part of growing up is learning that sometimes parents and other adults were right on about warnings, and sometimes maybe they weren't.

Lately it seems like adults, with heavy assistance from hungry attorneys, are working to sanitize the entire fucking planet. Gone is the notion of acceptable risk, replaced by "if it hurts even one child, it's too dangerous." I'm honestly surprised swimming pools are still permitted at all, with the crippling power of the anecdote and its value in the news media over actual statistics.

My daughters are oddly fortunate, however. The school campus on which I live includes something affectionately known as "The Tower," a huge concrete platform that soars some 20+ feet above the surface of the water. If it was a rare treasure 20 years ago, now it's a rat that has somehow survived in a cage full of velociraptors. I'd like to say The Tower will survive another 20 years, but the cynical side of me doesn't even give it another five. A boy had to be taken to the hospital a couple of weeks ago after slipping and falling off the concrete structure.

The lifeguards responded quickly. All of the precautionary measures in place worked. But he was hospitalized. The first injury we've had on The Tower in at least four or five summers and four or five school years, with thousands of boys, thousands of kids running and leaping from it every day from late April until September.

But one injury might be all it takes in today's world. The notion that kids will be kids and that sometimes being a kid can hurt... well, that's not acceptable.

"But I Play One On TV"

Camera One - Josh Joplin Group (mp3)

Bully - Sugarbomb (mp3)

When you were a kid, did you find yourself watching certain movies over and over because you identified so strongly with one of the characters? Writing a post that never made the light of day got me thinking about an indelible movie from my pre-teen years. It was right after we got HBO in '82 or '83, and I watched this movie several dozen times: "My Bodyguard."

Every time "My Bodyguard" came on, I found myself drawn into the TV, even though I never would have said it was particularly beloved. I suspect it's allure was because I identified, even at the ripe age of 11, with the main character. The actor, Chris Makepeace, was also the pathetic outcast Rudy in "Meatballs." I identified with him in that film as well.

When I realized how pathetic it was, that at some point in my past I identified with this goober, I started going through a list of all the teenage movie characters with whom I identified during my pre- and prime adolescent years. It wasn't pretty:

• Chris Makepeace in "Meatballs" and "My Bodyguard"
• Andrew McCarthy in "Heaven Help Us"
• Ralph Macchio in "The Karate Kid"
• Patrick Dempsey in "Can't Buy Me Love"
  
• Ricky Schroeder in "Silver Spoons"
• William Katt in "The Greatest American Hero"
• Corey Haim in "Lucas"
  
• Jason Bateman in "It's Your Move"
  
• Anthony Michael Hall in "Sixteen Candles"
• Anthony Michael Hall in "The Breakfast Club"
• Anthony Michael Hall in... just about everything up to 1985.

It doesn't take Dr. Phil to look at this list and acknowledge I had a depressing and disturbing fascination with wimps, geeks and outcasts. Strangely, I never -- at least not before I watched that damn clip from "My Bodyguard" -- made the connection that I was so drawn to all these pathetic Loveable Losers. (OK OK, part of my obsession with "Silver Spoons" undoubtedly had to do with the fact that Erin Grey was one of the '80s hottest women.)

Although I absolutely adored Ferris Bueller, I never really identified with him. I simply held him in awe. Likewise with pretty much every role John Cusack played. He might have been an outcast, but it always felt like he had more coolness in his pinky toe than I could muster in my entire body. And I sure as hell never identified with anyone in "Dirty Dancing" or "Pretty in Pink."

And thus began a true Chicken vs. Egg debate: Do the characters with whom we identify shape who we become, or do we simply identify with whom are destined to be?

Did kids who grew up to be aggressive type-A jerks watch these same movies, but instead of identifying with the geeky protagonists, they secretly yearn to be Matt Dillon ("My Bodyguard") or Kevin Dillon ("Heaven Help Us") or William Zabka (Johnny from "Karate Kid")? Yes, the Dillons had the market on asshole bullies covered for several years.

Were there others out there who watched Alex P. Keaton and Gordon Gekko with this same glossy-eyed fascination? Did some girls feel their heart strings tug at Winona Ryder's Veronica while future witches found themselves drawn to Shannon Doherty's or Kim Walker's Heathers? Did most girls watch "The Breakfast Club" and find themselves inevitably identifying with either Molly Ringwald or Ally Sheedy, that movie's own version of the classic "Mary Ann v. Ginger" dichotomy?

Are there others who watch all movies and TV shows without making the slightest hint of a personalized connection to anyone?

There are only two encouraging silver linings to my obsessive cloud. First, lots of dudes in Hollywood clearly had these same hangups. So I'm not alone... but I'm not necessarily comforted by the company I'm keeping.

Second, these characters eventually stood up for themselves. They looked deep within themselves, found the strength beyond their doubts, and fought back against the bullies and the naysayers. But that hardly makes the obsession comforting. It's hard to find comfort in what breaks down to a Geek Fetish.

Yet something about these fanciful tales fed my soul. Awwww who am I kidding by using the past tense? These damn things still feed my soul. I still get misty everytime Elisabeth Shue rushes the mat to jump all over Daniel-San, too giddy to care about his wounded leg. I clinch my fist in glee everytime Anthony Michael Hall winds up locking lips with a girl five furlongs out of his league in "Sixteen Candles" or "Weird Science." Snot runs out my nose everytime the student body gives Lucas a standing ovation.

If you think I admit this with pride, you're very wrong. Acknowledging this is only slightly less painful than confessing my young devotion to Blair from "The Facts of Life." (While this isn't as embarrassing as if I'd been in love with Mrs. Edna. Or Nell Carter from "Gimme a Break!", it's nothing to go Tootie-ing my horn over.)

Perhaps our guilty pleasures, not our eyes, are the true windows to our soul.

(If you have any sympathy for my confession, please comment on your own guilty pop identifications to help me feel less... outcast.)

"Camera One" is off the Josh Joplin Group's debut big-label CD, Useful Music. "Bully" is off Sugarbomb's only album of the same name. Both are available on iTunes.