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The Arrow That Is Aimed But Not Fired

Growing up without a male role model, I was forced to turn to the world of television.  It was 1980, and I was either looking in the wrong place, or there were not that many viable broadcast options for a 12 going on 13 year old wanna-be-rebellious mama’s boy.

I guess I was also a sister’s boy too, if there even was such a thing.

There were other boys at school, but, being my peers, they were equally uninformed – but hopefully not as pathetic as I considered myself to be.  Except for Mr. Bishop (who told a couple of harrowing stories of the Watts Riots), the teachers were all dicks and were therefore unapproachable.  Where would I turn to find an older guy to show me how to avoid the pitfalls of my teen years?  To show me how to, you know, just be a guy?

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Water Towers

IMG_5317

New York’s typically mundane wooden water towers are actually among the most beautiful things in the world (no, c’mon, hear me out now!).  Their ubiquity tells a story of tradition and longevity that stretches back over a century. In fact, their very existence is crucial to the needs of Metropolitan residents.  Please indulge me while I both share a little history and present my case (through pictures) that New York’s water towers are wonderful little works of art.

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How To Dragon*Con

The following should be treated as a cautionary tale by any sci-fi conventioneer

   During Labor Day Weekend in 2009, my wife Isabelle and I decided to attend a science fiction convention in downtown Atlanta.  I knew that since we’d lived in New York, this would probably be a snap (always thought that about doing new things).  We’d once been to a one-day Star Trek Convention at the Javits Center back in 1989.  I may not have seen any celebrities there, but I did buy a cool transporter pad coffee mug and some rubber Spock ears.

 And a tribble.

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The Post-Drunkalogue: part 1

I’ve come to believe (mostly through observation) that just about everyone comes to a place in their lives where they do what’s called “taking stock.”  That time for me was in May of 1994, where, like a postwar resident of Berlin, I emerged from my (virtual) bunker and said, “what….the….fuck?!”  But unlike the urban German of another May in 1945, I knew that in my case all the damage was literally self-inflicted.  You could say I’d bombed myself back to the “Stoned Age.”

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Jingles and Ditties

Last month my six year old niece turned to me, out of the blue, smiled and said,

“Na-tion-wide is on your side!”

She sang it, actually, with the perfect little melody that they use in the commercial.  Since then (actually since I was about 10 years old), I’ve had commercial jingles and TV show theme songs running through my head.  Some things I remember perfectly, in totality; some things are only snippets, half remembered like in a dream.

Like my niece, Grace, I was once very young and could play back ad jingles, but also like her, I exhibited no desire to buy insurance, or a used car, or bottled water.

 

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The Trails

The trails ran out behind West 1st Street in West Tulsa, Oklahoma.  To get to them on foot or bike you had to wiggle in between the fence separating the Parrish and Ogle houses.  Invariably the Parrish’s dog would bark up a storm, day or night, when threading through, which made the trip (short though it was) more of an adventure than it had to be.  The Trails, as neighborhood kids referred to them, consisted of a southwest to northeast gash in the earth running alongside the barely used, by the summer of 1978, Kansas-Texas railroad tracks.  Running through and down and back up again were well-worn bike and motorcycles paths, under a thoroughly concealing canopy of trees.

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Thank You. For Whatever Comes.

I ran upstairs because I’d heard the fight was already over.  As part of my ongoing effort to get my friend James into sports I had jotted this down on a post-it before I hit the project-concrete stairs of our dorm room at Willoughby:

“Tyson knocked him out in 93 seconds!  93!”

OK it was really 91.  But I’d been listening to WFAN and they were apparently pretty excited about it too.  I made it the 6 floors up (not trusting the “hellavator”) and stuck the note to James’ door, under the 804 number.  None of us had TVs except for Lewis Greene and Myra Rivera, and he only let us watch Redskins games (including the Super Bowl); and unfortunately this didn’t happen often because we all lived in Brooklyn.

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Scullymania – Fernandomania

As a kid, I liked football.  I had no idea that baseball could be equally (or even more) exciting.  In LA, we had the Rams, who had just been to the Super Bowl.  Then there was the Lakers, with Magic Johnson and Kareem (though I preferred Michael Cooper and his majestic 3-pointers).  Baseball…. the Dodgers, right?  What did they have?  It seemed like a quaint sport to me.  I knew a little about them, like that first baseman Steve Garvey’s wife, Cyndy was the co-host of “A.M. Los Angeles” with Regis Philbin.  I followed the rumors of marriage problems between them more than I did any of Steve’s games.  Hey, this was Hollywood after all.

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Streets

Some people are born and grow up in one place, sometimes even one house.  Then there are others who move a couple of times, maybe even to different cities.  Then there’s my family.  We moved around like neurotic nomads from place to place within cities; and then from coast to coast, ricocheting back and forth in ever widening caroms.

Probably the only thing that kept us in the same country is that we never had passports or much money.

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Swagger

Logan's Run from Memories of Hollywood

Like a fledgling sea turtle released too soon into the wild, at age nineteen I inserted myself into the swift moving currents of diverse humanity in 1980’s New York.  Of course at the time I didn’t know this one critical fact – I had been the recipient of inadequate preparation.

Existing in a world quite far from this self-awareness, I thought I was more like Private Hudson in “Aliens,” the ‘original badass,’ strutting and showing off his hardware.  It was New York after all, and I was hyper, I slept little because there was so much to do but I had no idea where to begin.  My actual training for all this consisted of living as a reluctant mama’s boy in a rundown Art Deco building in Miami Beach, Florida.

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