Heroes for Ghosts

On a somewhat related followup to my previous post, Syd Barrett, the creator of the band Pink Floyd died last week. I became a big Pink Floyd fan the summer before I went to college. Then I became a rabid fan while in college. I listened to them all the time, I had their album posters on my wall, I had quotes from their songs plastered all over my dorm room door, I used their music as background in various video projects I produced, I even named a major character in one of my shows after the now-deceased founder, Syd.

Reading their incredibly informative and intimate biography, "A Saucerful of Secrets" by Nicholas Schaffner only served to fuel the obsession. It was in this book that I read all about Syd, the guy who brought the band together but then fried his brain so much on drugs that he couldn't continue with it. Unfortunately for Syd, yet very fortunately for every Pink Floyd fan out there, music history was much better served by his fall from rock stardom. Pink Floyd only became the super, mega, trippy, space age band it became because of Syd's demise. Roger Waters took over as head of the band, bringing his weird visions and lyrical mastery into the mix. David Gilmour was brought in to replace Syd as lead guitar and vocalist, which gave Pink Floyd their now classic and signature sound. Beyond that, everything great that Pink Floyd has done, every album and song that people know and love them for, was inspired (directly or indirectly) by Syd Barrett's collapse. Dark Side of the Moon chronicles, through poetry and incendiary guitar licks, Syd's descent into madness. The Wall is the story of a rock star who allows the pressure of fame and the horrors of the world to drive him deeper and deeper into insanity. Several songs and scenes from the movie depict actual moments of Syd Barrett's own life, including a night when he locked himself inside his hotel room then sat there catatonic until moments before a scheduled show, while managers, loved ones and the other band members hollered, "Time to go!" from outside.

The song "Wish You Were Here", from the album of the same name, is an obvious dedication to Syd. I've never been to a Pink Floyd concert (I got into them the summer after they stopped touring), but from what I've heard, they are visceral orgasms full of lasers and lights and psychedelic images beamed onto a signature circular projection screen above the stage. Yet whenever they sang, "Wish You Were Here", the lights dimmed, the lasers and the projector were turned off, and the band sang the simple song to their friend, with the audience singing along amidst a sea of lit cigarette lighters.

If only for this I felt a pang of mourning upon hearing of Syd's passing last week. Honestly I held no special place in my heart for him as a musician. I've tried listening to albums Pink Floyd did with Syd at the helm and it is entirely unlike anything they did in their later, more productive, years. During their Syd years, the band had a more Brit-pop sound to them. Basically picture the way the early Beatles sounded... you know, if the Beatles had dropped acid and tried to write songs for children. One of Syd's most famous lyrics comes from the song "Bike" on the Piper at the Gates of Dawn album and goes, "I've got a mouse and he doesn't have a house. I don't know why I call him Gerald." So from a musical standpoint, I don't like anything except post-Syd Floyd. Some pretentious music buffs will try and scoff and say the band was never the same after Syd left. I agree with that... it got better. Infinitely better. Anybody listening to Piper at the Gates of Dawn side-by-side with Dark Side of the Moon would swear that these were actually two completely different bands.

No, my regrets over Syd Barrett are felt more because I do know his story and it is tragic. Here was a guy who was ruling the musical world at the time and he wrecked it all with drugs. He spent the remainder of his life as a recluse, living in his mother's house off his Pink Floyd royalties - which the rest of the band made certain he always received. Yet he was the inspiration for the music that defined so much of my late teens and early 20's. And knowing that these songs originated out of the unravelling life of a real life person who I'd read all about only made the songs hit me at an even deeper level. These days I have to be in a very specific spaced out mood to turn on the Floyd, though their music remains, and will always remain a very fond relic of my college days. If only for that I raise my glass to the late Syd Barrett and say (along with every other cliched Pink Floyd fan), "Shine on you crazy diamond..."

FEED ME... does it have to be human? FEED ME... does it have to be Sprite?

I was up late last night watching the Colbert Report on Comedy Central and waiting for Lauren to get back from a birth. During one of the breaks, a commercial came on for Sprite. I always turn down the volume to almost silent during commercials because the ad companies always jack up the sound on us. Combined with the fact that I was also half-asleep (I'm usually passed out by 11:00), I don't actually know what the context of this particular Sprite ad was. I just know that at low volume, and in a haze of consciousness, it was one of the creepiest images I've ever seen put out by people trying to sell soda. Basically some guy was in a greenhouse watering what appeared to be a large quantity of either Snapdragons or Venus Flytraps. My assumption is that he was spraying Sprite all over them, or maybe he was holding a Sprite in his hand... it was nearly midnight by this point. Either way all these little Snapdragons began seductively turning their white heads with blood red lips toward the guy with the hose. It looked like they were talking to him - whispering actually - though again, with the volume turned down I couldn't tell for sure. Eventually this guy was surrounded by these little whispering flowers. The look on his face was probably intended to express a sentiment like, "Hey why are all these flowers turning toward me?" But what I saw at 11:50 at night was, "Oh my god, these things are going to eat me!"

Again, I don't know what the context of the commercial was. Maybe, had I turned the volume up, I'd have heard silly music in the background and realized that the flowers were actually singing a Weird Al song to the dude with the hose. But with the volume down, I filled in my own soundtrack, supplied by Pink Floyd from their album "The Wall." There is a scene in that movie based on the album where two animated flowers sprout and then begin moving seductively towards each other, much the same way the Snapdragons appeared to be moving toward the Sprite guy. Well in the scene in "The Wall", one of the flowers ends up raping the other flower. Then the vagina on the victim-flower turns into a dragon, bites the head off the rapist-flower and then flies off across a barren desert wasteland with the dead thing in its mouth... yeah, it's a trippy, f---ed up movie if you've never seen it.

So as this image and soundtrack is going through my head, the thought occurs to me, Why would Sprite put a commercial like this on TV at this time of night? And during the Colbert Report no less! They must know that a good portion of their audience at this point is going to be high on marijuana or some other illicit substance that ends up screwing with your perception and paranoias. After all, who else besides out-of-work stoners, college kids and college kid stoners (and, of course, completely sober husbands waiting for their midwife wives to return from the hospital) are up until midnight? Somebody high on Mary Jane is going to watch this commercial and flip right the hell out that this poor greenhouse worker is about to be devoured by thousands of little Audrey II's. You think he's going to feel very thirsty for a Sprite after that?

But what to do I know? Again, maybe it was a Weezer song in the background and the Snapdragon's voice was John Ratzenberger, the guy who played Cliff Claven on Cheers.

Because wolves don't suddenly decide to go vegetarian

Has anybody else from my generation noticed how the classic story "The Three Little Pigs" has been changed to become more "accessible" and "kid friendly"? Everybody remembers the basic story structure. There are three brother pigs who go off on their own to build houses. Two of the pigs are lazy and build their houses out of straw and sticks respectively. But the third little pig is an industrious forward thinker. He knows there are wolves out there who would try to knock down his house and eat him, so he builds a strong house out of bricks. Well low and behold, along comes the Big Bad Wolf who proceeds to "huff and puff and blow the house down" on the first two pigs. But the third little pig's brick house is too strong and the wolf is foiled.

Exactly how the wolf is foiled has evolved over the years. Well first of all, in certain versions of the story that I had read to me as a kid (or told free form) the Wolf actually ATE the first two little pigs. I don't think there is a version around anymore where this grisly turn of events still takes place. I think even if you manage to find a classic book of stories with "The Three Little Pigs" in it, it will have been changed so that the first two little pigs, after having their houses blown down, run to the house of their better-prepared brother. This specific rewriting doesn't bother me all that much. I know the original intent of that particular plot line was to reinforce the Christian work ethic in kids everywhere, basically saying: "Don't be idle and lazy or you'll DIE!" But as a writer, I know it's hard to enjoy good light and happy literature if two such lovable characters die a particularly gruesome death. So I don't mind creative license being taken there.

What bothers me is how history has tried to rewrite the ultimate fate of the Big Bad Wolf. Again, in the versions I always heard, the Big Bad Wolf died at the end of the story. After failing to blow down the brick house, he goes up on the roof and comes down the chimney where the little pig (or PIGS depending on the version) have put a kettle of boiling water into the fireplace. The Wolf slides down, lands in the water and is boiled to death. Again, depending on the version, his death goes down in one of two ways. Either a) the little pig(s) cooked the wolf and ate him or b) (the more palatable version) the wolf simply boils away into non-existence. Either way, the wolf gets his due comeuppance and the little pigs are freed from his reign of terror.

Well, that is not the way it happens today. In every modern version, the Wolf slides down the chimney, burns his bottom on the boiling water then scrambles back up the chimney and runs away into the woods where he decides to never bother the little pigs again.

(((I guess I should acknowledge the caveat that this isn't necessarily a new way of telling the story. The popular Disney version of the story includes this kid-friendly non-violent ending - and that cartoon came out in 1933. I guess it was too heavy to actually show three cartoon characters carving up another character on film. But as of the early 80's, when I was growing up, there were still plenty of printed versions of the story that included the wolf's boiling demise.)))

I know we're trying to save our children's fragile psyche's by eliminating all mention of death in their stories, but I must state for the record that I HATE this version of "The Three Little Pigs" with its non-violent climax. From a purely storytelling point of view, there is nothing satisfying about the Wolf escaping with just wounded pride and a sore bottom. I mean he just spent the better half of the story doing everything HE could do to kill and then devour three helpless little pigs whose worst sin was having lazy work ethic. Why shouldn't the Big Bad Wolf die at the end when, if he had succeeded, the pigs would have been the ones who died? It's just plain gullible to believe that the Wolf is going to give up after this. Do the rewriters really expect us to believe that the Wolf is just going to sit around moping in the woods and never bother the pigs again? Please! As soon as his ass heals, he's going to come back. Knowing he can't penetrate the house, he'll just patiently hide outside, knowing that these pigs are going to have to come out eventually and then he'll pounce. No, the only way to have full closure on this story, the wolf has to die or be subdued in some way. Maybe the pigs manage to tie him up and send him to Abu Dhabi or something. (Pat yourself on the back if you caught the Garfield reference).

The reason why I hate this version of "The Three Little Pigs" on a larger scale however, is because it is so indicative of the society we live in today. Though really, it is more indicative of the patty-cake-playing ultra-liberals who, when a psycho is arrested for chopping up his entire family, want to make sure the guy is treated well and gets basic cable in prison. When some evil dictator slaughters 100,000 people, rather than marching a battalion of tanks up the guy's asshole, they want to impose "sanctions" and "U.N. Resolutions" and other cute little solutions that equate to about as much as giving these people a little smack (or a burn) on their butts. But most of all, this ending epitomizes the growing mindset so many people in this country have of no consequences for your actions. You can be a non-stop maniacal prick, and the second somebody calls you on it, you can just run off into the woods, nurse your burned bottom and wounded ego and wait until people have stopped thinking about you to return to your former prickish-ness.

I know I'm overreacting, and I know it's just a kid's story, but if it is just a story then why are we so gung-ho about changing it in the first place? Why can't we meet half-way and let the wolf dissolve into vapor in that boiling cauldron? It's harmless. It leaves no lasting gruesome images. And it makes for better storytelling and lesson-teaching.

Four years and counting

July is a good month for celebrating independence and national identity. Of course there’s July 4, our own Independence Day. There’s July 1, which is when Canadians celebrate the formation of their country. And today, July 14 is Bastille Day, an important holiday for the French, marking the day those military geniuses, rose up and declared their independence from… France. The only reason I even remember the date of this particular French holiday is because July 14 also marks the day Lauren and I joined forces and became husband and wife in 2002.

That’s four years, man. FOUR YEARS! I’ve been married for as long as I was in college. Longer actually when you realize that college doesn’t even last a full four years. I make this comparison a lot when I’m weighing units of time. This drives Lauren nuts sometimes because it makes it seem like I’m constantly living in the past. But my reasoning for this particular comparison is simple. College was an all-encompassing time in my life that seemed to go on forever. And I don’t mean that in a bad way, like it was some inexorable chore that I just couldn’t get out of. I just mean that during those four years, it seemed like the entire world was in college. And when you’re surrounded by that many people all in the same station of life, you could swear that phase is never going to end. But it does end and you do eventually move on.

When comparing things to that sense of time, it does not feel like four years has passed since I said, “I do.” Then again… does it? Consider what Lauren and I have done since that day: three different apartments and soon to be a fourth; a graduate degree from an Ivy League school for Lauren; a job in Avid tech support for me which has taken me all over the country; a slowly budding writing career; a job at a birth center for Lauren where she routinely catches babies in her bare feet; an awesome road trip; two trips to Hawaii; the death of a beloved cat; the birth of two nieces, several friends’ babies, our own daughter and another baby already on the way… hell, I even grew a beard! Consider the new things we’ve learned about since that day: midwifery; homeopathy; attachment parenting; vaccine theory; cloth diapers; organic foods; how to make our own peanut butter; theories of evolution; chiropractic care; where to find really good coffee; satellite radio… some of my favorite bands today, I didn’t even know about four years ago.

When I think of our marriage in those respects, then yes, I guess it’s very easy to believe that it’s been four years. I look at who we were and what we thought and talked about back then and so much of it is different today. We’ve grown in ways I never would have imagined four years ago, and what’s more, we’ve grown together. I mean that in both senses of the word. I mean that we’ve grown in these things alongside one another. But I also mean we’ve grown closer… grown into each other. I’d only had one other long-term relationship before being with Lauren, and the longer we were together the more things stagnated. I thought those couples who said, “We love each other more and more as each day passes,” were just regurgitating lines from romance movies. How could you possibly love somebody more the longer you were together? It seemed to me that the longer you were with somebody, the less there was to learn about them and the more boring and stale the relationship had to become. But with Lauren, all those old preconceived notions have been turned on their head. Sure, as each day goes by there is less for us to learn about who the other person was and used to be, but in place of that we have constantly reinvented ourselves and who we are together through common experiences and newly acquired knowledge. We haven’t allowed our relationship to go stale because we haven’t allowed our lives to go stale. And that’s the key. But I do think the cliché movie line is a little bit misleading. “More” is the wrong word. I love Lauren deeper today than I did four years ago. As we grow together, I find myself loving her in ways I didn’t know I could love back then. It’s such a strange and intangible feeling and I wish I could explain it better than that.

A lot of single people out there have a really screwed up vision of what marriage is. They view marriage as the death certificate to their own independence and identity. And honestly it’s not their fault. There are a lot of married couples who fuel that stereotype of jaded, loveless, co-dependent, miserable people who have lost all sense of who they are to the marriage and subsequent parenthood. But honestly I have found my own marriage to be quite the opposite. I have found more freedom in my life with Lauren than I ever had alone. We support each other. We help each other. We lift the other one up when they’re down and make sure they don’t give up. Rather than losing all sense of who I am, I have found myself growing in ways I never considered – aided, challenged and encouraged by the one who has vowed to walk with me through good times and bad. Yes, part of my identity includes the suffix, and Lauren. Part of my independence means conferring with Lauren for major decisions. And yes there is a certain degree of co-dependence, but it’s a dependence that comes with a sense of security, knowing that that person will be there when I get home at the end of the day and will stand with me in all things.

I’d be lying if I said there weren’t aspects of my single days that I miss. I miss the parties, the late nights out, and “the chase” (even though I rarely “caught” anything). I miss being able to just throw a backpack into my car and drive out to the desert on a moment’s notice without having to check in with anybody back home. There are always certain things you have to… maybe not give up completely, but at least alter to fit any new station in life you enter. But hopefully you find new things to not only fill the void of what got left behind, but actually overflow it. Sure I miss certain things about being single, but I know that I wouldn’t be half the man I am today had Lauren not been by my side this entire time. While we have our share of problems like any other couple, there is definitely far more good here than bad and it’s made the last four years pass with excitement rather than boredom.

So it’s on this day that I, along with France, celebrate my independence and constantly evolving identity with the woman who I love and will continue to love for the rest of my life.

Happy Anniversary, baby!

Not fair at the Fair

Last night, against my better judgment, I allowed Lauren to drag me to “Southampton Days” the local county fair, which is finishing up tonight. This was your typical traveling carnival complete with rickety rides that carnies assemble and breakdown in a matter of minutes; games boasting sometimes difficult, sometimes impossible, sometimes dishonest odds, all for the chance to win a giant replica of Spongebob Squarepants stuffed with packing peanuts; greasy carnival food that most normal people only ever eat at a fair; greasy fat white trash people who you can tell eat carnival food every day of the year; local businesses giving away balloons, rubber bracelets and other chintzy trinkets to kids in the hopes that their parents will come into their tent and buy anything from blinking neon sunglasses to a new checking account; a little main stage featuring local performers (and sometimes nationally recognized ones depending on how big the fair is) putting on everything from boring puppet shows to lousy multi-instrumented musical revues.

But no fair would be complete without the final element, the one that makes all the other crappy things at the fair worth it. Actually, this final element is the only reason any of us ever put up with all those other crappy fair things: the local high school girls slutted up something fierce, wearing clothes that you’d swear they must have stolen from their older sister’s closet… provided their older sister was only four feet tall and far far skinnier than her younger sibling. I tell you it’s a sight to behold and really quite amazing actually: short shorts, hot pants, tight-fitting low-cut midriff shirts, bellybutton rings, push-up bras, open mesh baby doll t-shirts over bikini tops, not to mention lipstick, blush and eye shadow lathered on streetwalker style. Mind you I’m not judging, nor am I condoning. Just pointing out that it’s enough to bring the statutory rapist out in any man.

Especially at this particular fair. Every fair I can ever remember from my childhood and adulthood involved a much higher percentage of ugly, obese white trash women wearing tight and revealing clothes that they should not have been wearing – with the occasional token hottie sprinkled into the mix here and there just to give us hope. But apparently in Southampton, either the contingent of hot girls is higher, or else the less attractive ones are smart enough to know not to wear the kinds of clothes that make us turn our heads and notice.

So I walked with Lauren around this fair last night, pushing Allison in her stroller, and repeating this mantra to myself: “You have a daughter and a beautiful wife who you love… You have a daughter and a beautiful wife who you love… You have a… DEAR GOD, that twelve-year-old has bigger breasts than Jenna Jameson!”

Now the only reason I spent so long speaking about the slutted-up teenage girl element of state and county fairs (beyond the fact that I’m a sick, perverted F---) is to point out another element of fairs that I found conspicuously missing from the Southampton Days: creepy stalking older guys who prey on said slutted-up teenagers. Now by “older guy” I don’t mean middle-aged men or really old farts. By and large, these guys are in their mid-20’s to early thirties. They’re young-enough-looking that it doesn’t seem overtly weird that they would be hitting on the hot teenage girls. They’re generally relatively good-looking, or at least good-looking enough that the girls they’re preying on aren’t immediately grossed out by them. The way it usually works is they find a group of girls who are clustered together and either ask them if they want to go get high or if they want to go to some party that his friends are (supposedly) throwing. They know that generally only a couple of the girls from the group – usually the ones with low self-esteem, false-high self-esteem, or just with something to prove to nobody in particular – will actually come with them, detaching themselves from their group and effective safety net. In a good scenario, these gazelles cut from the herd are only the victim of quasi date rape. They end up so high and intoxicated that they’re only more than will to do whatever the guy (and possibly his friends) wants.

Worst-case scenarios can go pretty much as far as your grisly imagination can take you. That’s why fairs have always kind of given me the creeps. Not the fairs themselves, with their brightly lit amusements, rides with loud calliope music, and, by and large, families and friends having a few hours of harmless mindless fun. It’s the areas just outside the fairgrounds that make me uneasy. Since these are usually ragtag operations set up on the cheap by traveling companies in towns that don’t want to pay a lot of money, there’s generally no security or cop presence outside of the actual carnival. “Security” pretty much means the local geriatric WalMart greeter who’s directing traffic out of the elementary school parking lot. As soon as you step outside of the brightly lit midway, the surrounding fields are by contrast almost dangerously dark and shadowy. Those lurking shadows are the perfect place for a murderer-rapist to do whatever he wants to a frail slutted-up teenager, trusting that her cries for help will be muted by the speakers on the Tilt-a-Whirl blasting 2 Unlimited’s “Get Ready 4 This.”

There’s a reason the vampire movie The Lost Boys was set where it was. The shifty, leathery teenage vampires (of whom Keifer Sutherland was their leader) took most of their victims from the carnival boardwalk or just outside in the parking lot. As a father of a little girl who I can already tell is going to grow up to be a head turner, it scares me to death thinking of letting her and her friends go alone to one of these things, knowing the kinds of people who might be lurking there. But as a parent, you can’t just not let your kids go. You just can’t. They have to be able to do their independent thing, be with their friends and have fun with that feeling that they run their entire universe. Honestly, they need to go out and dress sexy and know that the teenage boys from school (as well as their fathers and grandfathers) are ogling them. After all, as I said, that’s the very nature of the local fair. As a parent I guess you just have to hope to God that you’ve raised your kid the right way to know that she’s going to be responsible and isn’t going to leave her group of friends to go off with any members of the creepy older guy element.

But as I said, that element wasn’t even there last night. At least not that I could detect. Honestly, Lauren and I were the only people our age I saw there last night. Everybody else was either sixteen, forty or sixty. I’ve mentioned before that we live in some kind of generational vortex in eastern Pennsylvania where people somehow just skip their twenties and go straight from high school to middle age. So any guys accompanying a group of teenage girls were likewise either teenagers themselves or their parents. So unless that creepy stalking man presence has just gotten better at concealing itself, it just didn’t exist at this fair. I can’t imagine that though because as a teenager, that element was always very conspicuous, mostly because you couldn’t help but notice that they were stealing all the chicks that you wanted. Who knows, maybe Southampton just isn’t as easy pickings as other places. After all, any area where the ugly girls have the self-esteem to not slut themselves up as much as their much-hotter friends, its obviously an area where the girls are smart enough not to walk off into the shadows with strange guys offering drugs. It gives me hope as a dad.

Perhaps I'll float too

I started off writing a blog about something but it has run away from me and now I think it's going to end up being a full-blown essay. I had to stop only two pages into it tonight because I've developed a throbbing case of carpal tunnel in my mouse hand this weekend getting The Road Trip designed and posted and it started flaring up as I was typing. So I've left it for now, but what got me going on it in the first place is the book I'm currently reading. It is, hands down, my favorite book in the world. It is, honestly, the book that makes me want to be a writer of fiction more than anything in the world. The book that I will one day credit as being my inspiration, the muse that I've been chasing. I read this book and I hope to one day create a work of fiction that even approaches it. And the thing is, I'm embarrassed to admit it. I'm embarrassed to say it's my favorite and my inspiration. Because I don't imagine this book has much, or any, weight or significance in "serious" writing circles simply because most people assume it's just a stupid horror book about a demon clown that eats children.

That's right, the book is IT by Stephen King. And for those who haven't read it, or worse, for those who have only seen the HORRIBLE miniseries they did of it back in the 90's, I just want to say that I have never read another book, or another author for that matter, who can break down the psyche of a child as well as Stephen King does in this book. Even a lot of really great authors out there simply don't understand children. They've been away from it for too long or something. Even books that are critically hailed as beautiful masterpieces, when I read them, I see the children as caricatures. Fake. A grownup's idea of what a kid is. But in IT, every single one of the seven main characters is a flesh and blood kid. They talk like kids do. And not just the way kids talk when they're around adults. They talk the way kids talk when there are only other kids around.

I love this book and if you've ever read my (essentially defunct) humor column you know why. I say in it that I've never really grown up. But that's not really accurate. It's more that my memory is very vivid and I remember PERFECTLY my childhood. I remember specific days, instances, feelings, conversations. I remember how I was and how others were. Which is why I can spot a phony kid so easily when I read another author's depiction of childhood. I feel cut from the same swatch as Stephen King because he seems to be the only other person on earth to not only remember childhood the way I do, but can express it honestly without screwing it up. And to be honest, while I remember it easily, I know I have a long way to go in expressing it. I read IT and I know that. But that is the level of expression that I aim for. I'm not sure what kind of fiction I will ultimately write and hopefully get paid and become famous for, but I know it will involve children as the main characters. And I only hope I can acheive the level of deepness that Stephen King accomplished in IT.

Crap, my hand is flaring up again. Gotta stop now. More on this later.

ROAD TRIP!!!

Hey readers, Week Three of the Road Trip is finally up! Check out the What's New page now!