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September 2002
That we were reminiscing about 1991...in 1993, was the first indication that the future had passed.
A newly massive mindscape of life's colorful, plastic details had become the thing that kept us atrophying in our apartments, weakly nourished by the last great conversation of the 20th century.
Early in the morning, sprung from a restless sleep, you might answer the phone and hear: "Dude...Lidsville!" Then roll over and enjoy the untarnished slumber of the illuminated.
The empty space on our desks, later to be filled by computers, held no answers. The details of history had to worm their way through layers of smirking adulthood. And no one could move on until this thing was straightened out. Girls jammed pink barrettes into their hair and cuddled against adolescent boyfriends. Boys drowned in a whorl of striped shirts and backward, half-hearted vision quests.
Collars were wrung and confidence was bolstered or destroyed over bits of information. For every Diggity Dog or Laff-Olympics, there was a beaming raconteur and four or five hysterical listeners who, in order to remain on the mountain, fired back with every sub-detail they could muster--typically a sudden, uncharacteristically earnest, delivery of a theme song, or a very urgent "...and the little Donkey sidekick with the....," uttered with a twitching lip. These were dangerous times.
Our seemingly bottomless devolution became the impetus for every human endeavor and technological breakthrough to follow. The boom of the nineties was a result of my generation buying back our childhood to eradicate what had essentially become a disease. We could not move on until it was "finished," laid out, catalogued and experienced one more time. The stock market is crashing because we've finally put it all back on the shelf, and...are...slowly...getting on with our lives. Consequently, the internet, and our massive collections of toys, can be discarded like the sodden sweat-towel of a methadone freak who has just graduated from rehab.
These days, I tend to follow the "all things understood" conversational discipline. In fact, writing this piece is a step backward.
You played Zaxxon; I played Zaxxon, let's never talk about it again.
What will the next generation do with their post graduate years? Something? I hope so.
August 2002
The Australians have accomplished teleportation. You know they''ll use kangaroos to test it. They''ll teleport a kangaroo to Tom Cruise''s workout room and it will punch him in the face.
Australian ruffians will run amok, materializing in women''s locker rooms to wag their tongues and yell "struth!"
The fists of world leaders, raised to declare war on teleportation, will suddenly be holding cans of Fosters. They will sigh and look at the camera, then twist their mouths into perturbed little knots, as safari hats with chin straps appear on their heads.
No one will be safe.
Mel Gibson and The Vines will be criticized for not speaking out. They''ll be detained indefinitely, then rescued by Yahoo Serious, who will dance a bandy-legged jig, all the while maintaining his Buster Keaton stoicism. The sound bite will be played incessantly.
As Saturday night live parodies the Yahoo serious incident, Jimmy Fallon will disappear into thin air, only to be replaced by a startled Mike Myers in bath-robe and socks. The Prime Minister of Australia will deny responsibility, and Jimmy Fallon will never be seen again.
Months later, a group of Tasmanian school children will admit, (to Ashleigh Banfield disguised as an Aborigine, speaking in clicks and whistles that she learned on the flight over) that they and many of their teachers did not find Jimmy Fallon funny in any way. "We thought he was a dick," they''ll say. Ashleigh will make clucking noises and the children will stare at her.
George Bush will meet with the Australian Prime Minister, and will guffaw and slap him on the back after learning that baby kangaroos are called Joeys. "That''s just about the dumbest dang thing I ever heard."
America will invade Iraq.
Both of The Proclaimers, beamed in to assassinate him, will accidentally fuse with Osama Bin Laden. No one will notice.
And it just goes on and on like that. Another obnoxious throwaway cartoon bit.
I think I want to learn how to fix cars.
It''s the jumpsuit. I need to spend a portion of my life in a jumpsuit.
My dad knows everything there is to know about cars (American, pre 1990.) I used to climb up and peer under the hood to help him work on the Chevy, my feet dangling.
After about ten minutes, this would happen:
"Can you go down in the basement and get me the socket wrench attachments? I need a 3/8 inch"
I would walk down into the basement and scan the work bench, my six year old idea of a socket wrench being something about three feet long with cogs and a motor.
Then, back outside, I''d quietly ask, "What does it look like?"
He would angrily throw a distributor cap, or hit his head on the hood and say "You wouldn''t be able to find your ass if it wasn''t attached," then stomp into the house to find the socket wrench.
One time, I considered my ass, and how it was always there no matter what. He was right. If it hadn''t been attached, I probably wouldn''t have been able to find it.
I would leave and throw a rope over a high limb in the front yard, tie one end to my Green Machine and hoist it into the sky over and over again.
So, instead of learning how to change spark plugs, I was perfecting this bizarre and useless bit of performance art.
And, of course, the garbage men would ride by on the side of their truck, clad in jump suits and bandannas, obviously living life to its fullest, obviously bound for genuine glory.
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You can buy Black Hawk Down at the grocery store. It's on a rack between the Tiny Chiclets and the blinking display for eyeglass straps. Pick it up, it weighs about a gram. A gram!
I will never ever buy a DVD player! Until three years from now when I'll break down and, in fact, buy a DVD player.
For the time being I'll stubbornly cling to my beloved erstwhile technology, romantically fumbling with hideously ugly, cumbersome VHS tapes--My copy of Xtro is barely smaller than a cereal box. (I know, "porno size." Please don't ruin this for me.)
It's not that I want people to stop buying DVDs. Feel free. I understand that there is a market for Marlon Brando's face, as clear as a cheese puff, 5 feet high in your living room, mumbling in 20 track stereo. It's just that I feel my VCR is a perfectly adequate machine, which performs a variety of functions, notably, the recording of television shows, and the anchoring of my life in a place where people and things remain reasonable and somewhat blurry.
Once, I tried on my dad's glasses and the world became as sharp and vivid as all Shrek. "I must need glasses," I thought. But after a minute, the clarity became sort of painful. The sharp edges, stark, parental liver spots and clouds (now abrasively fluffy) were more than I could handle, so I removed them, restoring the comfortable haze of a warm and fuzzy, flawed universe.
Floundering in VHS loyalty is cool. It passes the "What wouldn't Vin Diesel do" test. Very important these days. Nothing against the man himself. I understand he reads books and attends D&D weekend retreats or something. But the character in the fur coat, snow-boarding over senior citizens while humping Russian waifs wth a plastic Doritos tube as a condom; that guy probably has a DVD player.
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McMansions. What a great sit-com--four different stories occurring simultaneously in different rooms, every episode ending with the house of the week tilting into a common sinkhole. The entire neighborhood, built over a landfill, circumscribes a playground which is swallowed into the earth causing the surrounding houses to bow to one another. This event ties the season together. The final character from the final story of each episode could crash through a cathedral window and into another of an opposing or adjacent house to introduce the next week's characters.
The second season would be a wagon train of sorts, an SUV convoy across the country, families rebuilding their shattered lives, torching the homes of sex offenders and rediscovering America via regional paraphernalia at Applebees.
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I remember a story which someone printed out at work and hung on the door. It was from one of those Darwin Awards type websites, about a guy who tied weather balloons to a lawn chair thinking he could just hover above his yard and drink beer, but ended up 10,000 feet off the ground floating through LAX airspace, freaking out, until he was rescued by helicopter.
The upshot of the story was that this man was an idiot. That he should have been content to sit on his patio beneath the garden sprinkler, listening to Spooky Tooth for the remainder of his insignificant life.
I strongly disagree. The man should be a folk hero. He was an adventurer, transcending the limited possibilities of the suburban sky. Granted, he wanted to drink beer up there, but wasn't Johnny Appleseed really making moonshine? Weren't the Vikings searching for new places to slog grog?
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