she doesn’t wanna know me now

Because nothing on my "potential projects" plate is leaping out at me today, here’s some lazy content in the form of the “Eight Things People Don’t Know About Me” meme that’s been making the rounds as of late. This was a more difficult process than I anticipated, given the autobiographical/confessional nature of Armagideon Time.

1. Irises are my favorite type of flower. I like they way the look. I like they way the smell (sweet and vaguely lemony). There used to be random wild patches of them growing in the North Woburn woods when I was a kid.

2. I once shook hands with Larry Storch. I met him outside a theater where he was appearing in a play. My wife and her friend were huge fans of F-Troop, and were pen pals with the man otherwise known as Corporal Randolph Agarn. He seemed like a really nice guy.

3. In my senior year of high school, I won first place in the annual public speaking contest. I recited Colonel Kurtz’s “pile of little arms” speech from Apocalypse Now in a pseudo-Shatnerian manner. The prize for first place was forty dollars.

My grandmother refused to attend because I wouldn’t remove my earrings before going onstage. She insisted that “They’re all going to laugh at you.” Fortunately the night was free of pig’s blood and telekinetic mayhem.

4. I can play the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on both the flute and the piano. It is the only piece of music I know how to play, which suggests that there may be a genetic propensity toward enjoying Die Hard hardcoded into my being. Or that my grade school music teacher was a tyrant.

5. I have bits of gravel embedded in both kneecaps. The last day of my freshman year, I had a bad crackup on my brother’s scooter, and shredded my knees something fierce. I spent most of the following week alternating between long soaks in the tub and peroxide rinses. While most of the grit got cleaned out, some deeper fragments remained beneath my skin, and the dark splotches are still visible on my knees to this day.

6. If my family’s genealogical legends are to be believed, John and Priscilla Alden (of the Mayflower and the Plymouth Colony) and General Oliver Otis Howard (one of the founders of Howard University, Commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau, and the man who fucked over Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce) are among my distant ancestors.

7. I nearly drowned when I was two years old. I got too close to the waves at Plum Island and was sucked in by the undertow. A fisherman heard my cries, and pulled me out of the ocean. As a consequence, I can’t abide submerging my face in water.

8. The first record I owned was a copy of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band I pulled out of a trash pile. The first record I ever purchased was AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.

The Who – The Real Me (from Quadrophenia, 1973) - Really rockin'.

Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions – See the Real Me (from People Get Ready, 1965) - Really soulful.

been waiting so long to be where I’m going

(This is one of those creepy autobiographical posts. You have been warned.)

I’ve been recently spending my free time playing the excellent Bully for the PS2, and the experience has induced some not entirely welcome flashbacks to my high school days. Not that I attended some posh boarding school; Woburn Senior High was (and still is) a typical, unremarkable example of a northeastern suburban high school. The Social Darwinist shark tank elements were still in force, but full on feeding frenzies were rare. I was fortunate enough to avoid them. The bite I delivered to an upperclassman’s arm on the first day of my sophomore year served as an ugly message that I would not be assuming the role of the weak pigeon for the next three years.

I spent the early part of my high school career being ignored by my peers for the most part, aside from the occasional taunts. I fell in with a crowd of other marginalized souls - role-players, comic book geeks, and videogamers – and was content passing the time discussing various aspects of nerdity with them, counting the days until graduation.

In the November of my junior year, my mother passed away suddenly and unexpectedly, and in the shitstorm that followed I went to live with my maternal grandmother. As horrible as it was to lose my mother, it was even worse that my previous home life, a Bukowski-like downward spiral where both my parents had lost all control, became public knowledge. As a consequence, the same folks who had taunted or ignored me started to approach me and make the effort to invite me into their little cliques. “Oh, he’s not a freak. He’s had a freakish home life.” It was a mistake for all involved, like trying to domesticate a rabid raccoon.

My social skills, long turned inward due to a natural shyness and situational guardedness, weren’t up to dealing with “normal” folks. It also didn’t help that my primary male role model was a master of emotional cruelty and manipulation. But where he wielded his talents like a surgeon’s scalpel, I flailed around like Leatherface at the end of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The threads that bound these poor kids together were easy to discern, and even easier to twist, tug, and knot. The imp of the perverse called the tune and I played the notes to chaotic perfection, causing fights and killing friendships simply because I could.

These tendencies were only gotten under control in the early 1990’s, after I started dating my future wife. She figuratively beat them out of me, and I owe her much for doing so. “I want someone who is an asshole to everyone but me,” she said, and so I settled into my comfortable present role as a low key, sardonic smartass.

Musically, my tastes underwent a massive change during the 1988-1989 period. Prior to my mother’s death, I had been a quasi-mod with an ash blond mop of hair and an extreme devotion to The Best of Sam and Dave and Roger McGuinn-heavy Easy Rider soundtrack. After her death, my tastes shifted toward speed and thrash metal, due to working with a group of metalheads at the local hospital kitchen. Eventually, I fell under the tutelage of the hospital chef, a thirty-something ex-punk rocker who took me along on his lunchbreak record-buying expeditions and would pull classic punk and hardcore discs out of the bins and convince me to give them a try. His relentless evangelism paid off. By the summer of 1989, my long blonde mop had been buzzed out of existence and replaced with Vaseline-slicked orange spikes. Not long after, “Andy” would also go by the wayside in favor of the much more acceptable “Otto Erotic” (which still haunts me to this day, years after I began introducing myself as “Andrew” again.)

Cream – Sunshine of My Love (from Disraeli Gears, 1967) – I can’t estimate how many hours I spent in my bedroom listening to the local classic rock station (before it switched to the execrable “songs by classic artists” format) and reading stacks of books I brought home from the local library. This song must have been on heavy rotation when I read Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon, because my association between them and the song is unshakeable to this day.

Anthrax – Among the Living (from Among the Living, 1987) – During my brief thrash metal phase, Anthrax were my band of choice, probably because their interests meshes well with my nerdist heritage. They wrote songs about Judge Dredd and Stephen King stories, and avoided the beer buzz suicide ballad ghetto entirely.

The Circle Jerks – Coup D’Etat (from the Repo Man OST, 1984) – The Repo Man soundtrack was the first punk album I ever bought, and I was blown away by what I heard on it: all the anger and aggression of metal, but with a better sense of humor and far less pretentiousness.

Halloween Countdown: October 10 – she had synthesized her emotions

Up for something really creepy? Like high school?

Seriously, H.P. Lovecraft’s pantheon of alien gods have got nothing on the Pavlovian social control experiment and artificial drama factory known as grades nine through twelve. Even rebellion and non-conformity are factored into the institutional feedback loop in the form of detention hall or a swiftly deployed SWAT team. It’s a type of predestination so total that John Calvin would have wept tears of joy…providing he could look past the ban on school prayer.

And in the end you find out how meaningless it all really was. If you’re lucky, you might come away with some lifelong friendships or happy memories, but the rest is dust, scattered to the winds and soon forgotten. The fact that I know so many people who want nothing more than to go back and relive those nightmarish days (“and do things differently,” they say. Ha!) disturbs me a little.

“Doesn’t it bother you, not knowing what the ‘kids’ are into these days?” a thirty-something friend asked me a while back, the reaper’s distant hoofbeats goading him onto the gilded path of wistful nostalgia and youth envy.

“Not at all,” I replied.

Today’s Halloween selection is a disturbingly clinical dissection of adolescent romance by Washington, DC art-punks, No Trend. It may not seem like it fits with the theme at first, but bear with it, and all shall be revealed.

No Trend – Teen Love (from the Teen Love 12” EP, 1983)