While it is inarguably rare for the literal public butchery of an animal to occur in a town like Hyde Park, it is not unprecedented. The gruesome tale told last month at a town board meeting of a sheep being chased, stabbed to death and hung from a basketball hoop in the yard of a house on Water Tower Road — besides making for a good, umm, yarn to tell gobsmacked co-workers and out-of-towners — reminded me of a story my friend and fellow Hyde Park product Kiki Pritchard told me once about something which happened at her house when she was 4. I got in touch with her up in Vermont to fill her in on the latest and ask her if she wouldn’t mind retelling her tale for the newspaper. As Kiki is an awesome human being, she did not, and here it is.
Our setting: 1975, in one of Hyde Park’s premier residential subdivisions, Greentree Park. Kiki’s mom, some of you might remember, is a native of Germany, and her parents are in town for a visit. Plans were laid for a good old-fashioned schlachtfest. As “schlacht” is German for “slaughter,” you can kind of see where this is going.
“I will never forget the sights, sounds and smells of that day,” said Kiki, who recalled being “dressed in my little lederhosen” for the event and her sister Ilka being just a baby.
Her family, joined by a Dutch neighbor who was also a butcher, took a ride out to Karl Ehmer’s to pick up the fest’s main attraction, a real live pig. “I remember it oinking really loud, and I was scared.”
Kiki said she was spared seeing the actual demise. “It was alive at some point, then it was dead.”
But she wasn’t spared what happened next. “They took a kiddie pool and put the pig in it and used a can to scrape off the bristles. Everybody seemed to know what they were doing.”
The dead and denuded pig was then trussed up on a ladder, its front and rear legs tied. Its blood was drained into a bucket, to make blood sausage. Then, this. (Spoiler alert: This could spoil your appetite. For a long time.)
“I’ll never forget the sight of this older man reaching into the cavity, into the gut, of the pig, elbow deep, and sort of rolling out the intestines. I was very, very mesmerized by the sight, even though I was very young and I was kind of disgusted.”
The pig was then cut up into its parts everybody hurried to their food preparation tasks. The ensuing fest was very festive. “It was a very celebratory atmosphere; everybody was into it,” said Kiki.
“Did this draw a lot of attention from the neighbors?” I asked. (Anyone who has ever lived in a residential subdivision knows that something like the en plein air slaughtering of a pig gets neighbors off the couch and out into their yard in full gawk mode. Hell, a dryer fire at 3 in the morning at my neighbor’s one time got everybody out of bed and out into the yard in full gawk mode. You’d have thought the Beatles got back together in Golden Meadows the way people gawked at that burning dryer.)
Kiki remembers some people coming out to take a look, but she does not recall her family getting any static. “I don’t remember much neighborhood activity, maybe the next door neighbors noticed, but I don’t think anybody complained. It was not like we had a screeching pig in our backyard. It’s not like anything illegal happened, and we ate the whole pig.”
One of the concerns expressed about last month’s sheep was that the sight of its mortal remains inelegantly strung from sporting equipment would traumatize young kids, maybe putting them off both eating meat and playing basketball forever. Four is pretty young, so I asked Kiki how she was affected by what she saw. The answer? Unharmed. “I have very fond memories of it — it was sort of an embracing of the Old World and the New World. Having had that cultural experience, I feel all the richer.”
One of the things that’s always fascinated me about Hyde Park, the town in which I have lived for as long as I can remember, is how many separate realities co-exist here, how many different Hyde Parks there really are. There’s the Hyde Park of the old-timers descended from the farmers and estate workers of the pre-war town. There’s the Hyde Park I am from, made up of raised ranch upon raised ranch inhabited by IBMers and other professionals who were brought here starting in the ’60s. And there are dual emerging Hyde Parks being created right now by the influx of “city people” on one end of the economic scale and immigrant workers on the other end of the scale. (I am probably missing one or two Hyde Parks somewhere; apologies if yours is not included.) What the Lambchop Incident of 2008 and the Schlachtfest of 1975 remind us of, aside from the fact that meat comes from actual living things, is that even in a small, placid burg like ours, you never can predict what’s going to happen in the back yard, and that’s not necessarily something to fear. Unless, of course, you are a sheep or a pig.

The horror, the horror, or, a Mets fan reflects

When I am asked, I often say that rooting for the Mets is like being in a dysfunctional relationship. There’s a lot of pain, tears and misery, and you know on many levels that it’s bad for you and you’d probably be happier with someone else, but you just can’t break away. To be sure, there are moments when the significant other is lovely, charming and a delight in every way. And there are also times, like the end of this Mets season, when the S.O. is like Britney Spears on a meth-and-Twinkie bender and needs to be sent to rehab stat.
Feh. If you were to take all the gall of these past few weeks and roll it up into a stone, it would be about as big as the Rock of Gibraltar. There’s the shame of the greatest September collapse in baseball history — from now on, whenever the ’51 Dodgers, ’64 Phillies or ’78 Red Sox are disinterred, the 2007 Mets will be dug up as well as all-time Lords of the Choke. There’s the dishonor of proving Jimmy Rollins right — his Phillies were the team to beat in the NL East this year. (But it will do no good to vilify the Phils. They were hot at the right time, while the Mets were as cold as Ted Williams’ cryogenically preserved noggin. And because of the collapse, Rollins is likely to win the MVP over David Wright, who was about the only Amazin’ who didn’t stumble down the stretch.) There’s the sickening realization that Kaz Matsui, for cryin’ out loud, will be playing in October and the Mets will not. And there’s the crow-eating sensation of watching the Yankees, who looked to be dead and buried while we Mets fans were riding high on a horse named Schadenfreude, surge their way back into the playoffs for the 13th straight season powered by a supernal performance from A-Rod and timely relief from a Gossage-esque rookie pitcher named after a Hutt.
Taken in whole, it’s enough to make you want to paint a giant “WTF?” on the Shea scoreboard, either before or after the aromatherapy, St. John’s Wort and red liquor. The excruciating Chinese water torture nature of the collapse was, I imagine, something like being tied to a chair helpless while watching your favorite household pet get slowly strangled.
Why, God, why, we Mets fans ask, our unbelieving and teary eyes cast heavenward. People who know more about baseball than me are more qualified to answer that question, and at emotional times like these, it’s more therapeutic to assign blame than coolly consider facts. So, blame GM Omar Minaya for failing to put together a sturdy enough bullpen to make up for the superannuated and erratic starting pitching, and for adding a few more ill-considered transactions to the lengthy list of dumb Mets trades. Blame manager Willie Randolph, whose inability to get his team going in its hour of peril makes one wonder if the Mets wouldn’t be better off with a firebrand skipper like Lou Piniella, Bobby Valentine or, hell, even Morris Buttermaker. Blame the Injury Bug — much of the outfield spent at least some time on the DL, Carlos Delgado was at 100 percent maybe for three at-bats the entire year and a few more wins from Pedro Martinez might have made the difference. Blame the players themselves, for their collective failure to escape from the feedback loop of despair fed by the loss after loss after life-draining loss.
But blame only takes one so far, and it cannot change the past. Sadly, the future is not terribly appealing either; aside from a nucleus of undeniably stellar players, the Mets have more question marks than The Riddler’s longjohns. Minaya will have plenty of opportunities to redeem himself in overhauling the team for its final season at Shea, and while I would be content to never see Randolph (or Tom Glavine or Guillermo Mota) in a Mets uniform again, he is likely to be at the helm when pitchers and catchers report some 130-odd days from now.
Baseball pain is a different kind of pain. At the time it’s being inflicted, it hurts quite intensely, but goes away soon enough for most of us and leaves few, if any, permanent marks. A few hours after the Mets’ doom was sealed Sunday, I switched to Ken Burns’ The War on PBS. Those people had real problems, I thought, and seeing the Giants kick the crap out of another Philadelphia team Sunday night helped too. And even with the Mets out of it, this year’s postseason is looking to be a real humdinger.
In the end, the Mets are my team and I am their fan, a bond as indissoluble as it is mysterious, and there is no Mets fan who does not believe there is nobility in suffering. So, sometime next spring I will, in a metaphorical sense, pick my sweetie up from the treatment center and fall in love all over again. You and me, baby, we’ve got the teamwork to make the dream work and ’08 will be our year. Twinkie?

Will I never shut up? Jesus.

Fred’s dead, baby. Fred’s dead.

 

“Anything that’s over 1,000 pounds and runs wild in the woods, you can call that a monster.”

So said a good friend of mine, when I told her about the giant hog killed the other day in Alabama. By now, most of us have seen the picture on the Internet — a beaming young kid with a Dirty Harry-looking handgun leaning on a pig so big that it should have had “osaurus” after its name. The story was that this 11-year-old kid shot a hog so humungous that it looked like it couldn’t possibly exist in the rational world and must have come from an alternate dimension or via timewarp from the Pleistocene epoch, when mammoths were truly mammoth and squirrels were the size of Volkswagens. Around the same time, some footage “surfaced” purporting to show something swimming just under the surface of Loch Ness, home of another long-purported/never-captured monster.

Both these events gave me, for a moment, that sense of wild wonder that occurs when the seemingly miraculous punches a hole, however small and however temporary, into the wall of common sense and scientific law I try hard to surround myself with. Something hardwired into the human brain, though, seems to positively leap at the prospect of the supernatural, or at least the supernormal, wishing to shed the discipline of logic as quick as one sheds long underwear on the first warm day in March. One night, when leaving the above-mentioned friend’s house after a long night of pomegranate martinis and martial arts films, I was transfixed in her suburban driveway by the insane yips and howls of coyotes drifting on the wind. As my heart pounded with fear and the adrenalin coursed through me, I was astonished at how fast and how fully I was thrown back to caveman days, when coyotes were the size of modular homes and howls on the wind sometimes meant imminent death.

But the feeling did not last. Pretty soon, allegations surfaced that the hog-monster was not as big as originally billed and the picture of the bloodied beast and his proud slayer was rigged in such a way to make the pig look larger than (real) life. Then, a man came forward claiming that the pig wasn’t a wild hellhog roaming the backwoods menacingly, with a name like “Deathtusk” or “Fatal Bacon.” The pig, mildly named Fred, was raised like many other pigs, as a pet, and sold off because the guy’s girlfriend was sick of it. Fred ended up in an enclosed 150-acre preserve that sounds something like those places where they have those despicable “canned hunts.” So the killing of the pig, rather than being Peter and the Wolf or David v. Goliath, now takes on a different cast. Probably used to being treated kindly by people, the pig may well have thought he was going to get a pat on the head or a treat from the nice human. Instead, he got a gutful of hot lead. (That serves as a metaphor for quite a bit these days, no?) And the Loch Ness footage, on second review, could have been anything. A plesiosaur, an otter, a sturgeon or even a lost U-Boat from the war.

Thus wonder dies. Occam’s Razor, the philosophical principle which states that the simplest explanation for something is way more often than not the correct one, cuts very unsympathetically, leaving UFOs, conspiracy theories and monsters on the floor like dead flesh sliced from a bone.

It’s been a long time since I’ve believed in Santa Claus, not so long since I accepted that Oswald probably acted alone. And my visit to Roswell was as anticlimactic as anticlimactic could be. But no one on this Earth would be happier than me to see Sasquatch saunter from the woods or Champ slither out from that big lake up north and present themselves to streaming video, the blogosphere and DNA analysis. I am a man of science, but boy would I love to see something shake up E=MC² and the laws of thermodynamics with a little miracle, one that even we unbelievers can believe.

Hey. Sorry I have neglected you, o blog. Here's a danitorial I wrote.

Some thoughts on school budgets

 

Last year was an annus horribilis for school budgets in these parts, with voters in both districts rejecting them twice. Both Highland and Marlboro had to adopt contingency (official name) or austerity (name everybody else uses) budgets. Not a great deal of money is saved by these budgets, just the money for things people like, such as full-day kindergarten, field trips and, in some cases, school sports. Highland suffered more than Marlboro under austerity, with full-day kindergarten being cut back to the old-style half-day and sports for eighth-graders getting the axe. (Assuming Highland returns to a full-day program this year and keeps it, it will be interesting to see how the one class with half-day K progresses over the next 11 years. Supporters of full-day kindergarten often place its value on a par with breathing, but as some one who had half-day K and turned out all right, I wonder if it really makes that much of a difference. We shall see.)

I haven’t been to a single school board meeting this year, so I might not be the most qualified to judge, but it would seem that both Highland and Marlboro did a good job in coming up with budgets without conscience-shocking tax hikes. Highland, sporting a svelte 2.74 percent tax rate hike for Town of Lloyd landowners, has actually managed to draw up a budget that’s less than the state would allow them under austerity. Marlboro, modeling a slightly less trim 5.68 percent tax rate hike for Marlborough and Plattekill landowners, made grudging increases in some needy budget lines and hope a major addition, a purchasing agent position, will pay for itself by enhancing the district’s thriftiness.

And I would like to take a moment to say some nice things about people who serve on school boards. Whether they get on the board because they would give their lives to defend the public school infrastructure or because they’re trying to realize a Libertarian fantasy about blowing that infrastructure to pieces and filling the void with charter schools (or somewhere in between), being a school board trustee is the roughest gig in all of local government. And they get paid the grand total of nothing to do it.

Normally, I would bet the ranch on these budgets passing, but these are not normal times and my ranch is not on the table. If I may incur the risk of a beatdown from the Obvious Police, I’ll point out that our valley is in a transitional period right now. We are being colonized by richer people from downstate, but the process is not yet complete. There are quite a few people who don’t have the kind of income to pay the kind of property taxes schools, counties and local governments are levying and haven’t yet sold out and fled south or west. While there are movements rising from the grass roots and plans being concocted by our state lawmakers, it could be a long time before there’s any fundamental change in the way schools get their money. Maybe someday they’ll link it to an income tax, maybe someday they’ll link it to a sales tax, but with the vast majority of school budgets passing statewide — almost 90 percent made it through on the first try last year — this hasn’t risen to the level of a crisis yet up in Albany. It may never. My prediction is that in about a decade or so, we’ll have two classes here — a landed, moneyed class which won’t give a rip about paying five-figure property tax bills, and a Morlock-like servant class who will live in rental housing and never make enough money to even think about owning a home here. (Hopefully we’ll look better than the Morlocks. Maybe the city people will take pity and let us out in their sunlight now and again.)

So while I can’t really blame anyone for voting against the school budget — if you don’t have the dough, all the rhetoric about it being “for the children” and the prospects of schools crumbling around their opportunities-deprived students isn’t going to make the money materialize out of thin air. But if you can swing it, I would ask you to vote for the school budget. We’ve all had moments, be it at the store, the fast-food drive-thru or on the phone with a utility, when we’re convinced that the world is chock full of stupid people and that our IQ as a species is in a death spiral. Voting against the school budget won’t do a thing to reverse that trend. While stupidity is often harmless and frequently amusing, a stupid person in a bad spot can crash a plane, send a nuke plant into meltdown or even, heaven forfend, launch a war. So support the school budget. The life you save may be your own.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYnn51C3X_w

Current Location: On the launchpad
Current Mood: betchy
Current Music: The Orb, encore une fois

Heyas. I was able to resurrect my parents' deeply troubled scanner/printer thingy and digitized some olde pics from back in the day.



Baby Dan, probably around 1968. Considering all the crazy crap that was going on in the world at the time, I seem rather chipper.



Dig the Star Wars shirt! I was cool, and I knew it!



I don't think I will EVER have an outfit as boss as this one, no matter how long I live.



Please note that I am wearing the Members Only jacket without a hint of irony. And I really miss that Who T-shirt.


In this 1988 photo, the angry and hairy young man reads Hemingway.



The zenith of the power of my inner hippie, summer, 1989.

Current Location: Having an awesome breakfast
Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: None

Hey everybody. I am writing from the Manuel Sanchez y Aranda house in Albuquerque, N.M., where I am enjoying a nice vacation with the family. But before I get into that, I must tell you all about a really long, bizarre and painful day I had on Feb. 13. It wasn't as bad as Dec. 7, 1941, Sept. 11, 2001, or even Oct. 26, 2000, but it will be a personal date of infamy for a long time to come.
Now, I'm not saying that I'm the most important fucker in the world, or that my laudable work as a journalist is all I have to do to fulfill my "civic duty" quota. But having to present my own personal phat ass to a location anywhere that's not my bed at 9:30 in the morning is pretty much a guarantee that the rest of that day is going to be very, very bad. And on a Tuesday, Adlertag, the day I put out the paper - holy shit. A good night's rest is essential to keeping one's editing skills at vorpal sharpness.
But this day, Feb. 13, 2007, I had to report for jury duty. This idiocy had first reared its irksome head last October, but it was the week my parents were in town, so I burned my one automatic deferral until a randomly-selected week in February. I didn't really reckon at the time that the week I chose would be the week before I went out to New Mexico for my dad's 60th birthday, because I am not really all that smart. And since Monday, Feb. 12, was the birthday of old Honest Abe - Lincoln, not my bong - the courts were closed Monday, making Tuesday the day that you actually had to show up to fill out the forms and possibly be assigned to one of the many, many exciting cases handled by the Dutchess County court system.
Yes, I considered not going. But as I get older, I'm getting a little less cavalier about things like breaking the law and paying bills on time and keeping promises I make, and I suppose I didn't want to sully my totally clean arrest record with something as retarded as a warrant for blowing off jury duty. And if my grandfather could get shot in the ass by a Jap on Guadalcanal, I can make it to the jury room, even on my worst day of the week and with a snowstorm looming. So I showed.
After parking over in the parking garage, my groggy self reported to the jury room. I was handed a clipboard with a form on it and a pen. I don't really remember what I wrote, exactly - I could have identified myself as Cleon, or Cleopatra, Jones, for all I know. Then I found a place as far away from what was going on as humanly possible - a little alcove off the main jury room where me, a guy and another guy who was trying to manage his life via cell phone were hiding. After brief remarks by the commissioner of jurors, we were shown a video on how noble jury duty was, hosted by the late Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer, who is still alive, I think. This piece of vile propaganda started out with a dramatization of how things were in the days before jury duty, where people were tried by throwing them into the river and seeing if they floated or not. While this was presented as bad, it seems to me that it was a hell of a lot more fun than jury duty - something that would break up the day of the average serf rather than throw it in a pit of clusterfuckedness. We were then separated into two groups - the group I was not in got to stay in the same building and go through the voir dire process for some case, while the rest of us were herded into a courtroom next door to possibly be put on a jury for another case.
And what a case it was. While we sat in the old-school tin-roofed courtroom bedecked with portraits of judges long passed, we heard about a malpractice case that will forever change the way I use the expression "I would give my left nut for ... " It seems the plaintiff had gone to get a vasectomy, but things didn't work out as planned. An infection in the scrotum developed, and he had to lose his right testicle. As this was detailed, I literally had to bite my hand from laughing and my eyes bugged in horror. (Yes, I was tired enough to have two conflicting emotional responses at once. So sue me.) A complicating factor in the case was that the doctor who had performed this ill-starred procedure had himself died a couple of years ago. (Isn't that punishment enough for cocking up some guy's sac? And how in the name of Thanatos is this guy going to testify? Via Oujia board?) Then some people's names were picked at random, I think, and they were brought up from the churchlike wooden benches to sit in the comfy chairs in the jury box. Then the lawyers started asking all sorts of weird questions about if they knew anyone who had had a vasectomy or had only one testicle. "Lance Armstrong" was a popular answer; if I wasn't trying to be as inconspicuous as possible and perhaps through sheer force of will disappear from the courtroom altogether, I would have volunteered "Adolf Hitler."
I noted a weird bit of human nature during this process. I assumed that all sane and rational people would do whatever they could to get out of being on a jury; I had often joked about a legal system where one's fate could be decided by people who weren't smart enough to figure a way to avoid actually being picked for a jury. And the lawyers were quite clear that they didn't want anyone who would resent being on their jury to be on their jury - a very wise point of view, I thought. But there were a couple of people who went out of their way to convince the attorneys that they were possessed of enough fairness to objectively deal with the evidence, as if the inconvenience and possible financial hit they faced was less important than being thought of as a fair-minded individual. Hmm.
As the afternoon wore on, I experienced a whole prix-fixe menu of moods - despair, exhaustion, panic, fear, horror, curiosity - and tried to read a little from a book on Byzantine history my VC buddy Basil II sent me. (Good stuff, btw; thanks, Robert!) As the hours slipped by, I began to worry more and more about what would happen when I finally got out of there and to Kingston, and my morbid imagination wove an image of me driving home exhausted in the middle of a blizzard, hitting a Yeti trying to cross Route 9G and freezing to death in my overturned, snow-covered Sentra. That's me - always thinking of, and relishing the thinking of it, the worst-case scenario.
At about 4 p.m., my name got called. I trundled my tiredness up to the comfy chair, and sat down. I held myself tightly, in both fear for having my vacation to New Mexico effed up and in an attempt to project the most off-putting body language available. The lawyer for the plaintiff asked, "Do you know of any reason you should not be on this jury?"
Hoo-boy, did I. As it is always my hope to be suave and measured in conversation, I hate to blurt. But I was raw as that Nelly video where he slides the credit card in between the stripper's butt cheeks, and I projectile blurted, "My sister is a doctor and I have to be on a plane to New Mexico on Feb. 21!" It worked, but had it not worked, I had a few more on tap - "My dad had a vasectomy; I believe people who get vasectomies are not really leaving all their options open; a man's nutsac is his castle and there isn't enough money in the world to compensate for the emptiness of a missing kiwi; jury duty is wack; I'm crazy; I may be a vampire; and I DON"T WANNA!"
To encapsulate, I was sprung and made it to the office around 6 p.m. To my delight and relief, my coworkers had rallied and gotten a good percentage of work done for me. (Thanks, Diane. I owe you one and am glad you have joined us.) Though it was a tough night, and I was at points so tired I wanted to cry, I was able to get done and get home before it got too blizzardy and no Yetis or Dans lost their lives. The only real casualty was the police blotter, which didn't get typed in. Tristesse.
Sigh. Shudder. If there's a moral to this story, it may be that sometimes, you just have to gut out what seems to be an impossibly hard day and my Ulster Publishing comrades are the finest group of editors I've ever worked with. I'm going to bed now. Goat, cute kid and vintage pics from the archives are coming as soon as I can get to some high-speed Internet.
 

Current Location: A high desert place
Current Mood: pensive
Current Music: The Orb

Dr. Thompson was both an incredibly entertaining writer and possessed of a rare ability to penetrate right to the truth of things. Gonzo is supposed to be like throwing a bottle of acid (the corrosive kind) against reality to strip off all the gunk collected in the form of lies, affectations and artifice. He did our nation and our world a great service, telling the blunt truth in an era where what's real is increasingly hidden away from us. I wish his life had more happiness in it and that he could have found a way to go on, but if anyone had earned the right to choose the manner and moment of his own passing, it would be my beloved fellow Kentuckian, Hunter S. Thompson.

I sort of feel like I’ve been losing momentum a bit with this blog, so I decided to employ a method to recommend writing topics, like they apparently do in writing school or something. (Too bad there wasn’t a BOCES for writing, and too bad I didn’t actually go to the real BOCES so I would know how to DO something, instead of merely commenting on the various somethings other people do. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s the link to this thingy I found on the Internet:

http://www.writingfix.com/dailypromptgenerator.htm#prompt_server

A bit ghey, perhaps, but I’m not proud. So in response to what the thing spit out, and presented in modern tabular form, is the history of things I wanted to be when I grew up …

Age: 3-4
Occupation: Fireman
Why: I really got a kick out of the color red, hanging off the back of a firetruck on the way to the fire, sliding down the pole, making siren noises and dalmations.
Why it didn’t happen: Not really sure, except to say that there’s quite a culture clash between myself and the kind of people who go out for the fire department, though I will note that here in thaa steady-thuggin’ H. Pizzle, we have a lesbian fire chief. I don’t know if that has had any impact on the porn movies played at the firehouse.

Age: 5-7
Occupation: Astronaut
Why: Dumb question to someone who was a small child in the Apollo era. Back then, astronauts were dudes you looked up to: Brave, smart, capable. The best America had to offer; the Knights Templar of our gleaming technocracy. Second only to the Six Million Dollar Man and John Shaft on the coolness scale.
Why it didn’t happen: I hate math. This will come up again. I will note if I did make into the space program, I would have done the psycho astronaut thing far sooner than Lisa Nowak. For a fine commentary on this matter, click below to read Steve Hopkins’ editorial from this week’s Kingston Times:

http://www.ulsterpublishing.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=391100

Age: 8
Occupation: Evel Knievel
Why: Wearing a spiff white suit, jumping motorcycles over all sorts of crap, taunting death day in and day out — if that’s not the perfect job, I should very much like to know what is.
Why it didn’t happen: Well, I just got too emotionally involved in the Snake River Canyon thing. I was so tense about it, I couldn’t get any work done when second grade started up. I kept getting held in from recess because my report on turtles or some shit wasn’t done because I was too busy stressing over Evel. We all have dreams that we just have to take out back and put a bullet into sometimes. It’s not pretty, there’s always tears, but you have to let go. I had to let go. Recess was too important.


Age: 9-12
Occupation: Cult leader
Why: Serious, I wanted to start a Voodoo Cult at North Park Elementary. I had my own little cult bible and everything.
Why it didn’t happen: In retrospect, I don’t think I sacrificed enough chickens. Had the class across the hall succeeded in their experiment to raise chickens from eggs, I would have had a ready supply of victims. Alas.

Age: 12-13
Occupation: Archaeologist
Why: A serious fixation with ancient Egypt brought on by a Steve Martin song and an obsession with the show In Search Of. Sadly, this was coupled with a phobia of mummies, so I don’t really know how this would have worked out. (I feel much better about mummies now. I was a weird kid.)
Why it didn’t happen: While researching into the field so as to perform this bizarre eighth-grade task known as a “career report,” I got the impression that archaeologists don’t make a lot of bread. Money was important to me back then, and I regret sometimes not taking up the spade, as I ended up going into pretty much the lowest-paying professional industry there is.

Age: 14
Occupation: Journalist
Why: Because of a little experience called The Student Voice, is why. Nothing but the finest underground newspaper ever to grace the halls of Franklin D. Roosevelt Fucking High School and where I got the idea that writing was something that would win me attention and acclaim. (Oh yeah and there was a bunch of crap about the power of the pen and doing good through journalism.)
It happened, didn’t it: It sure did. I briefly considered doing other things while I was starting college, like being a chemist – again with the math – or a financial analyst – would have done better in economics had the classes not been taught by a couple of Chinese dudes whose grasp upon the Queen’s English lagged a good deal behind those working the counter at Wing Shui. But I was never happy trying to be anything else. Not that I’m brimming with happiness now, but I have come to accept that being a journalist is [Darth Vader voice]my destiny[/Darth Vader voice], at least until I say eff it and become a truck driver or something similarly grinding and solitary. Or end up in a ditch on Lattintown Road.

Meteorological note: All the snow upstate is yet more proof that God hates all of New York north or west of Albany. Why people just don’t abandon it to the wolves and move somewhere else is, frankly, baffling.



 

Current Location: Sinusitisville
Current Mood: groggy
Current Music: Lefty Frizzell - "Honky Tonk Stardust Cowboy"

Doot-doot-doot-do-do-doot!

My friend Michelle reports that in a "silly headlines" feature in the Feb. 2007 Reader's Digest, the following headline from the Post Pioneer, the paper I edit, was listed  - "Marlboro funeral home resumes planting program."

I have only the vaguest recollection of writing that headline, but I am apparently such a genius that I can forge such wonders and forget about them, secure the knowledge that more brilliant heds are on their way. Werd.
(Seriously, it's not a Pulitzer, and I was shooting for Leno, but I'll take it.)

Current Location: The other side of summer
Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: Big Audio Dynamite - "Contact"