Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Memoirist BS
Golden Gate Bridge
Our feet are in the soil, most of us. We’re rooted. Travel doesn’t come naturally nor is it entirely pleasant. Think jet lag. Think Traveler’s Diarrhea. We evolved to roam by foot, not by engine, and any deviation from that genetic dictum takes its toll.
When I travel, I kiss my wife goodbye as if I might never see her again. I’d do the same to my son except he’s not the physical type. (And when did that happen? Around age six, I think. Before that, he couldn’t get enough hugs.) People die all the time on the road. Shit happens. When I arrive, I call Karen to let her know I got there safely. I doubt I’m all that unusual to do so, but I also doubt that most folks are as bloody-minded as I am. Hi, Karen. I’m here. Which translates as, The vultures aren’t picking my bones . . . but they’ll still have another shot on the return voyage.
I prefer new places, given the choice, because I find displacement in space far less disturbing than displacement in time. If I could travel from new location to new location I would be just fine. I could imagine that those old places had never changed, that they would always be as I had remembered. The roots I had put down would rejoin me somehow and all would be as it was. I would be like Dracula with coffin-bearing safe houses all across London.
On the Stanford Campus, things look familiar but never too familiar. When I was there, I spent 98% of my time on the medical school campus, with a spot of time spent in the biology and chemistry buildings (across the street) and precious little time dodging the undergrads’ bicycles on the main campus. I still have to dodge bikes, only now the kids are listening to their iPods, smoking cigarettes, or texting — all while biking. I’m not kidding. So this campus has only vague familiarity, and when I try to come up with place names, my mind substitutes proper nouns from the Berkeley Campus. No, that is not Zellerbach Auditorium. No, that is not Moses Hall.
College campuses minimize the sense of displacement in time. They’re intrinsically conservative since it takes a major disaster to motivate them to tear down and rebuild. That’s what happened at UC Berkeley in 1989 after the Loma Prieta quake, and parts of that campus will never look the same to me. Still, I like it better than the Stanford campus. Berkeley is where I shed my childhood, made friends that have lasted a lifetime, met my wife. Stanford is where Karen and I spent some of the most challenging years of our lives together (and not challenging in a good way).
That photo of the Golden Gate Bridge was taken with a long exposure time. In real time, the towers loom less brightly. They’re ghosts, orange behemoths. They would lurch from their moorings, their dripping feet encrusted in concrete, and would vault north past Sausalito, past the Muir Woods, dragging their spans behind them like wedding trains. They’d do it in a steel heartbeat were it not for the fact that after 71 years, even a bridge puts down roots.
D.
Boys State
Memories jogged by the upcoming election . . .
In my high school-era photo album, I have a picture of a tall Hispanic kid with tousled hair, wearing a red terrycloth bathrobe and slippers. His right hand is raised.
Some other kid is administering an oath of office.
Hypnagogia
Was it that old fraud Carlos Castaneda whose brujo, Don Juan, warned his apprentice of the risks of staring at running water? The spirit catches the current and floats away like a twig, like a wisp of algae. If the spirit strays too far, it may never find its way home.
Wind can do the same.
I’m sitting in a car feeling the reality of gravity, my butt, and the vinyl underneath, and I’m thinking of all those other times in cars, and how that same sensation of weight had to have been there before, but it’s never recorded in memory. Few sensations receive such an honor. I can remember, for example, a time when my then-teenaged brother drove us down to some Atlantic beach. The day was warm, the salt air breathed summer. The memory merges with all of my other beach memories of childhood: hot sand beneath me, sun orange against my closed eyelids, tinny music from my green plastic Realistic AM radio from Radio Shack. Shrieks of laughter. The pulse of the surf. And, yes, gravity, as I wriggle my body, trying to hollow out a comfortable bed from the sand.
We’ve crossed the Dumbarton Bridge many times. I can never remember which direction is the toll crossing, but I remember the colored drying pools, the KGO tower, the dry grasses on the eastern hills which flow with the wind making swirls like hair on a dog’s belly.
We missed seeing the dirigible.
Last dirigible to cruise American airspace? The Hindenburg, and we all know that turned out. This time around, things went smoother.
You would think I’d have a better memory for food. I remember the childhood horrors, of course, and I know I’ve blogged that before, too. But what about the good stuff? Let’s see, I remember
the first time I ate rumaki
first scampi
first cantaloupe
first abalone
not all happy memories.
Driving, windows down, it’s sort of like wind and like wind if you don’t pay attention you might suddenly find your spirit quite far from your body.
I remember countless times as a passenger, drifting off to sleep, the road noise would cut in and out with my varying level of consciousness. The little scientist in me took note and was fascinated. The white noise of wind and road had become an instrument to probe the mysterious black box of mind. How could hearing simply shut itself down? But it did.
There’s laughter in the car and now I’m awake. To my brother’s extreme amusement, I’ve fallen asleep using my mother’s ass as a pillow. Now my mother and I are both awake, both grumpy. Are we there yet? No, we’re not there yet. But at least my brother has something to laugh about.
D.
Narrow comfort range
Earlier this evening, our bedroom’s floor-model air conditioner belched water, spewing at least a gallon across the hardwood floor. We moved furniture, trashed a half dozen crappy cloth towels, ran through a roll of paper towels. Best we can figure is, the unit somehow got set on “suck every water molecule from the room” mode and had nowhere else to put Lake Sweat.
The floor is saved. (Not our floor, but we try not to trash our rentals.) Furniture is back where it belongs. And I’m hot.
Fressers
This evening, I realized I’ve never told you the soft shell crab story. Oh, I’ve hinted at it on occasion, but I’ve never really put this one out there in all its gory detail.
Blowin’ Shit Up Day
Here in America we celebrate the birth of our nation by settin’ shit on fire and blowin’ shit up. I’m always tempted to get a bunch of $1s and $5s and set them all ablaze, but Jake likes the glittery stuff. None of us like the screamers so we always ask about that. Nevertheless, every year they sell us at least one screamer. I’m tempted to take the burnt-out husk back to the tent the next day and ask for my money back. Jake could drip a little red food coloring into his ear canals and let it run out onto his neck. I’d say, “You said this wouldn’t scream.” Then I’d point to his bloody ears. “Now look what you’ve done.”
Really, though, we do a damn fine job of (nearly) setting ourselves ablaze every year. Safe and sane is for pussies. Jake likes to put a bunch of ground blooms together on the ground, their fuses all pointing inward. That way, he can light one or two and get them all spinning at once. We also like to save fireworks from year to year, because old fireworks carries that cachet of unpredictability. Will it be a dud? Will it explode?
Ground blooms fly this way and that. One of them flew under our rented U-Haul (I’m dumping eight years worth of accumulated junk this weekend) and I had visions of the beast turning into its very own red-and-white ground bloom. Would our insurance cover that? As it is, they had our names on their blacklist from the last time we rented. Blow up a truck and I’m sure that earns you a spot on their Double Secret Blacklist.
After we shot off our Big Mama Grand Finale firework — and you know, don’t you, that they’re never as much fun as the medium-priced fountains — we did some more ground blooms and then we got tired of it all and threw a huge brick of 48 ground blooms into the burn barrel (which by now was blazing pretty good). You’d think 48 ground blooms would do something cool like make the burn barrel explode, lacerating our colons and spleens with rusty burn barrel shrapnel, wouldn’t you? Sadly no. The 48 ground bloom super-brick merely smoked and flamed and pissed itself into ashen oblivion.
I was a kid back when they didn’t have fire-safe pajamas. I remember how sparklers would sometimes leave little black spots on my jammies, places where the micro-fireballs would try to take hold but never managed to gain any momentum. I suppose they could have doused me with lighter fluid first, but then it would have been harder to make it look like an accident. Anyway, I disliked sparklers. The sparks hurt. I guess I was a sensitive child.
Back then, I liked fountains best. I can’t recall when I first saw “real” fireworks, up-in-the-sky fireworks, but it must have been at Disneyland, where every evening is the Fourth of July. That’s been my favorite form of July 4th entertainment ever since. Last year, we spent the Fourth with protected static and his family. They live close to a show — and what a show. Those Seattleanianites sure know how to blow shit up.
Roman Candles are back. They don’t call them Roman Candles, but the idea is the same: it’s a fountain you can hold. I vetoed that idea. And do you remember pinwheels? They had another name which escapes me. Saint something, or maybe it was named after a queen. Why did they take those off the market?
A few years ago, one of the locals was showing off to his friends — he’d been a demolitions expert in Nam (or maybe the first Iraq War) and so he thought he knew shit about blowing shit up. And he did, too — he blew a few fingers off really well.
But I guess it’s too late to give you a cautionary tale. I hope you all had a safe Fourth. We did, but it wasn’t for want of trying.
D.
Worst wedding music ever
. . . unless you can think of something worse than Carly Simon’s “That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be.”
My friends from college they’re all married now;
They have their houses and their lawns.
They have their silent noons,
Tearful nights, angry dawns.
Don’t get me wrong, I love this song. It’s biting, insightful, a real eyeopener. It does for marriage what Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s In The Cradle” does for fatherhood. But does it really have any place at a wedding reception?
You say we can keep our love alive
Babe – all I know is what I see –
The couples cling and claw
And drown in love’s debris.
The old gf and I are friends now. We write each other regularly. Tonight, she mentioned her sister’s wedding, which I also attended. Her sis played this song at her wedding, and when I asked her why (why, why, for the love of God why*), she said, merely, “I like that song.” She stopped talking to me soon afterwards, but that’s another story.
You say we’ll soar like two birds through the clouds,
But soon you’ll cage me on your shelf –
I’ll never learn to be just me first
By myself.
So, what do you think? Worst choice ever, or can you think of one which tops this?
Here’s the video, in case you’re having trouble remembering the song.
D.
*Never the diplomat, I believe I cried, “WHAT WERE YOU THINKING? Have you ever listened to the lyrics?”
Thirteen musical memory triggers
Anduin* writes:
List thirteen songs that when hearing them, take you back to a moment in your life.
Never one to say no to a beautiful woman, I thought it would be best to comply.
Sweat it out
A question for the women in the room: In high school phys ed, did y’all strip naked for showers? Purely an academic question, naturally, since you never know when I might have to write a scene featuring high school girls in a locker room setting, and I wouldn’t want to get it wrong, would I?
Well, we stripped. It began in junior high, and I’m not sure what the point of it was. Lord knows it wasn’t necessary. We didn’t get all that smelly. At the time, I considered it a rite of passage, or perhaps a hazing ritual. We dissected cadavers in med school in small part to learn anatomy, in large part to overcome the taboo of not cutting people open with sharp implements. So what was the point of getting naked with a bunch of other guys? For what part of adult life did that prepare me?
This is no small point. Like girls, boys mature at different rates. In my 10th grade gym class, side-by-side in the locker room we had a boy who lacked the slightest poof of pubic hair (NOT me, so get that out of your mind) alongside a fellow I’ll call The Donkey (also not me, but if you want to think I’m lying, I won’t argue with you).
The Donkey once told the story of how his girlfriend had broken up with him, but had wanted him back within the fortnight. Implicit was the suggestion they had been sexually active and her dalliances elsewhere had not matched up. We all shook our heads knowingly. With clothes on, we would have figured him a BS artist, but in the locker room, we trusted the evidence of our eyes.
I used to wonder, and perhaps worry a little, about the prepubescent kids. The Hairless Ones. To me, this would be more profoundly disturbing to the adolescent male psyche than girls comparing their breasts’ Tanner Stages. Some girls never get past a Tanner 2, yet they’re just as feminine as a Tanner 4. But the guy with the Tanner 1 prick really does have something to worry about. His whole sexual future depends on making progress. If he’s thirteen and hairless and surrounded by a bunch of Tanner 2s and 3s and even a well endowed 4 (The Donkey), why shouldn’t he worry?
It’s not the worst part about PE. The worst part is war ball. Nevertheless, it ranks up there if you’re one of those Tanner 1s. So I’ll ask again: why was this necessary? Admittedly, I have to get nekkid around the guys in my gym’s locker room, but we’re all adults. It ain’t the same dynamic.
Maybe it’s that old life lesson that the world isn’t fair. I learned early on that some kids were richer than me, cuter than me, stronger or faster than me, more talented than me. That’s the way it was. That’s the way it always would be. I would never be the star quarterback, no matter how much I willed it, and I would never run a mile in under nine minutes. I would never play guitar like Peter Frampton, play chess like Bobby Fischer, or look good with an assault rifle like Patty Hearst.
And I would never, ever be hung like The Donkey.
D.
Thirteen moves
Ugh. I hate moving.
And it keeps getting tougher every time.
I have boxes in my garage which have remained unpacked since our move from Texas in ’98. That garage . . . man oh man I have nightmares about that garage. I can’t wait until we hold our yard sale, because maybe after that I’ll feel like I have more real stuff than junk. Right now, junk wins, no contest.
Thirteen (or more) moves, below the cut.