Free of Training Wheel Tyranny

Over the summer, my eldest figured out how to ride his bike without training wheels. He'd tried a few times before and not quite made it, but on this one particular day, he must have awoken with an extra bit of stubbornness in his blood. He refused to give up until he got himself up on two wheels. I had little to do with it other than standing back and watching and offering some encouragement. Any and all offers of actual physical help were rebuffed.

"Fuck this training wheel shit," he would've mumbled to himself, had he had his father's vocabulary at the time.

To celebrate the event, he wanted me to make a .gif of him on his bike, similar to the one I made of his brother running up and down a railroad track. Except he didn't know the term .gif, so he called it the thing where I take the camera and take pictures like ga-jing ga-jing ga-jing ga-jing ga-jing....or however you spell the sound of a camera snapping.

So finally, months later, I finally got around to it.

The Ewings Came In The Mail

For whatever reason, the people at the American Association of Retired Persons seem to think that my wife’s uncle, who passed away about four years ago, lives at our house. I know this because they send us their magazine every month and it’s got his name on it, right there above the address. Sometimes I flip through to see what the old folks are getting themselves into these days. Mostly, it just ends up in the recycling.

But the cover of this latest issue caught my eye.

Yep, those are the people from Dallas smiling out at you from the page of this blog. Sue Ellen, J.R., and Bobby Ewing of the Southfork Ewings, they of the intrigues and the infidelities and the oil-soaked family drama. I guess they have real names, but who needs a real name when you're a Ewing? Apparently they’re doing a remake of the show, or to put it more accurately, a continuation that picks up decades after the old one left off, and it includes some of the original characters such as these three, as well as their children, now all grown up and being as shitty toward each other as their parents were back in the 70s and 80s. When I first heard about it, I was actually kind of surprised these actors were all still alive, but there they are. Hell, Sue Ellen’s even looking kinda good. Wuzzup, old lady?


My mom was the one who first told me about the new show, which is fitting since she was a huge fan of the original show back in the day. It was quite rare for her to miss an episode. In fact, one of her primary motivations for buying a VCR was so that she could record it anytime she wasn’t going to be able to catch it at airtime. She worked a lot, and when she wasn’t working, she was often running me to this or that activity, so this wasn’t uncommon. She pored over the instructions for how to set the timer to start and stop recording at the right time. If I was home, it was my job to make sure her shows found their way onto tape. I don’t remember if it was Dallas, Knots Landing, or Falcon Crest, but I once forgot to record one of her shows, and you can bet your ass I heard about it. Looking back, I can’t really blame her for getting mad. You work your ass off all day, you come home and all you want to do is kick back with your show, but your lazy kid couldn’t even be bothered to press a goddamn button? What the hell, young Holmes? Get with the program.

So that magazine up there’s been sitting on our coffee table for about the past week, and every time I walk past it, I get this weird twinge of nostalgia. At one point, I even caught myself devoting an entire thought to hoping the show does well. An entire thought! That caught me by surprise. I have absolutely no intention of watching the show, and the original was never really my thing - no talking cars, no Mr. T, no mystery-solving stuntmen - yet here I was hoping that it does well. Normally, I wouldn’t give this kind of thing a second thought, or if I did, I’d cheer for it to fail because I’m wired like that. But in this case, childhood memories overrode that and dosed me with the warm and fuzzies for a show I hardly ever actually sat down to watch.

But I guarantee I’ll be able to hum this theme song until the day I die.

The Innocent Kind

Let me tell you a story about this thing that happened this one time. One time only did this thing happen, which is good because otherwise I might be dead, struck down in my youth by a physiological reaction to artery-freezing fear, and then I wouldn’t be here to tell you about this thing that happened, and that would be sad.

First, a note to those of you who know me in real life, i.e. we’ve inhabited the same physical space and spoken face to face and been to the same parties and gone to movies together and helped each other move and all that in real life stuff. Many of you folks have probably heard this story before. Maybe more than once, even. I was disqualified in the first round of Most Interesting Man In The World auditions, what can I say? I only have so many stories worth telling that are both true and that actually happened. I tell it again here because the movie/book that is the subject of this particular story came up on the Twitterator the other day and it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to make a little internet data out of it. And so....

Ninth grade was my first year of book-learnin’ that occurred outside of a religious educational facility. I attended kindergarten through sixth grade in one Baptist school, then seventh and eight grade in another Baptist school. But once junior high was over and it was time for capital-H High School, my mom decided that I had gotten just about all the benefit I was going to get out of those kinds of places. Thank any god in the book in the book who had a hand in that decision.

So there I was, a freshman in a brand new school where I knew one, count it, ONE single solitary person with whom I had ZERO classes. Because I hadn’t gone to the public elementary and junior high schools, I didn’t even know the other kids from my neighborhood all that well. And not only was it a new school, it was a whole new environment. The building was, in my eyes, gigantic. The student body was no less than ten times what I was used to, and it felt like they all disapproved of my existence. Also, I was now being taught about this thing called evolution. Up to that point, the only thing I had been taught about evolution was that it was an idea borne out of the fires of hell, conjured up by Satan’s demon imp Charles Darwin to confuse and confound the children of God and lead them astray. Evolution, heavy metal, witchcraft, Darwin, Metallica, Catholics, they all fell into the same hell-bound bucket as far as my Baptist educators were concerned. 

As you can imagine, I spent a fair amount of my school hours alone that year. I wasn’t busy socializing or vandalizing school property or having underage sex or anything, so I had plenty of time to do things like peruse the school’s enormous library. And there was this author I had heard about, one whose works were said to inspire terror and trembling, a writer who could play ever so skillfully with that feeling you get when you awaken in a dark room with the sense that your’e not exactly alone. He was, in my mind, dangerous. My interest: it was piqued. I took a look through the library’s catalog one day, and sure enough, there he was:

King, Stephen

I remember staring at that shelf lined with his work. They’re right here in front of me. I can take any of these books I like and walk out of here and nobody will stop me. They’ll encourage me, even. I don’t know if I realized it then, but something was about to change. 

Of course, the man’s name was all that I knew at the time so I had no idea which of his books I should start with. They all sounded fantastic. Then I spotted a familiar title. Hey, wasn’t this one...? Yeah, this one was a movie. So of course it had to be good, right? I pulled it off the shelf, took it to the front desk, checked it out, and that very night, I began reading The Shining.

I spent every free waking moment I had with my nose buried in those pages. I snuck in chapters by the beam of a flashlight late at night when I was supposed to be asleep. This book didn’t care about my bedtime. No, it had much more important things to show me. Just one more chapter, little boy, just one more chapter.

It was during one such late night flashlight-lit reading session that The Freshman Year Heart Stopper aka My Shining Moment took place. If you’ve read The Shining or/and seen the movie (which really, if you haven’t experienced at least one of the two? You need to get on that), you’ll recall that the old chef warns the boy, Danny, not to enter one particular room in the hotel, (217 in the book, 237 in the movie, nerds). The old man doesn’t tell him why exactly, he just insists that Danny absolutely not set foot into that accursed room under any circumstances. But his warning only confirms what Danny already suspected, that there is something strange about that room. From that moment on, we know his curiosity will eventually win out. He’s going to open that door. He’s going to find out what’s in there, and so are we.

It was the middle of the night. The house was dark and quiet. My mom was asleep down the hall from my room. I was sitting in my bed, flashlight beam trained downwards on the chapter where Danny finally gets up the nerve to go against the old man’s advice. It’s been a few years, but as I recall, it goes something like this:

Danny stands at the door of the forbidden room.

Danny opens the door...or is it mysteriously open for him?

Danny enters, his curiosity momentarily trumping his fear.

Danny looks around the room.

Danny sees nothing out of the ordinary.

Danny walks into the bathroom.

Danny finds the bathtub filled with water.

Danny finds the bathtub filled with water and, oh look, it’s the bloated corpse of a drowned woman.

Danny recoils in horror.

The corpse pulls herself up out of the water into a standing position.

The corpse stands in the tub, water dripping from her grotesque form.

The corpse steps out of the bathtub and moves towards Danny.

I’m relaying this as simply a sequence of events, but King’s telling is...well, let’s just say there’s a reason the man’s name sells millions of copies. As far as my ninth grade self was concerned, the rest of the world had faded to nothing. There was only this boy in this hotel room with this drowned woman shuffling toward him. Which I guess is why I completely leaped out my skin when, at that very moment, my bedroom door suddenly slammed shut.

Had I had even one of my wits about me, I would have shone the flashlight on the door. I would have seen that there was nothing there, no corpses, no axe-wielding maniacs, no creepy little kids beckoning me to come play with them forever and ever. But the sound of that door slamming shut and trapping me in my room at the precise moment that this dead woman’s bloated veiny form stepped out of her drowning pool and made a move for the book’s horrified little protagonist effectively drove all of my wits towards the nearest exit. The flashlight, the book, they both went flying and I screamed, which of course woke up my mother. She ran down the hall to my room, turned on the light, and demanded to know just what the hell was going on, a demand that I couldn’t answer exactly. Between the scare I’d just had and the fact that part of my mind was still back in the Overlook Hotel, I don’t think I was able to stammer out anything coherent before my mom realized that there wasn’t a thing wrong with me and that I had just woken her up for nothing. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that all lights were to be extinguished and I was to get my ass to sleep.

I don’t remember if it was while my mom was yelling at me or if it was a few minutes later while I was laying there in the dark trying to calm myself that I realized it -- the air conditioner. The stupid air conditioner had come on, sending air through the vent above my door and pushing it closed. It had done it before, even, just never while I was reading Stephen King.

I said it at the start, I’ve told this story before. I’ve thought about it a lot over the years too, which seems weird considering what a small simple event it was. A lot like Danny, I was striking out into unknown territory and I ended up getting one hell of a scare out of it. I’ve wondered sometimes if this moment of raw fear followed by the realization that it’s okay, everything’s okay, just breathe, nothing to be afraid of, if it did a little something to the wiring in my brain, causing me to seek out these kinds of scares, the innocent kind where there’s nothing there that can actually do any harm because it’s all on a screen or a page. As opposed, of course, to the real scary scares, the kinds that don’t necessarily startle you all of a sudden, but instead drag on and on, the kind that involve things like waiting on test results or consulting specialists or wondering what the Gulf Coast is going to look like when your kids are old enough to take their families to see it.

So there you have it. That’s the thing that happened this one time.

Go Fly A Kite

My Mom came to visit us a few weekends ago, and among all the things that she brought with her, she brought a kite, a gift for Henry that she had promised on her previous trip. He had originally asked for a rainbow kite, and I believe her when she says she looked everywhere for it because she is the type to look everywhere for just the right gift. But in the end, it was a giant lizard kite, and from the way Henry reacted, you would think it was all he'd ever wanted. Any thought of a rainbow kite was completely forgotten.

The three of us, my Mom, Henry, and I, walked down the street to the elementary school at the end of the block. Next to the building, they have playgrounds and a  basketball court, but beyond that is a giant field, empty save a bit of plant life, plenty of room to let the wee folks set loose with their imagination. Or, as in our case, try to catch a bit of wind. The wind wasn't raging, but it wasn't exactly still either.

The funny thing is, most of what I remember of that day's kite-flying is repeated frustration. Again and again we tried to get that lizard up in the air, but most of our attempts ended with the kite slamming itself back down to the rain-softened planet. We had a few successes, but most of those were short-lived.

But now as I flip back through the few pictures I managed to snap that day, just about everything I see shows that kite in the air. Selective documentation at its finest.

Then we went and sat by a dinosaur. Good day.

Gun For The Whole Family

I need to get some blood pellets...

My son has guns that he keeps strapped to the ends of his wrists. He sticks out his index, pops up his thumb, then curls in the other three fingers to create the universal sign for firearm. He shouts out his shots like BANG! BANG BANG BANG! BANG! Sometimes it’s out of anger, the barrel of his gauge aimed at the object of his ire, be it baby brother, Mom, me, some stranger who gave him a funny look, not funny ha-ha, but funny BANG BANG! Other times he does it to amuse himself. He blasts with a laugh, giggling with every trigger pull.

I know he didn’t pick this up at home. That may sound defensive, but it’s not intended as a defense of our parenting, just a statement of fact about how things are around here. We don’t keep guns under this roof. The Ash and I don’t play-shoot each other. Aside from a spacey looking bubble blower, the boys have no toy guns. And I never quite got the hang of that two pistols greeting thing that some guys are so good at. Maybe he picked it up at school, I don’t know. And you know, so what if he did? Now he’s the one passing it on to other kids. To be honest, I have a hard time getting myself too worked up about it. I’m not even sure that he “picked it up” anywhere. I think back on my own experience of being a boy, of boys I was friends with, and the boys I taught for all those summers, and gunplay was always present in one form or another. Flip through a picture album of me as a kid and you’ll see picture after picture of me carrying toy rifles, pistols, machine guns, uzis, laser blasters. I might not have been wearing anything more than tighty-whiteys and a cowboy hat, but I was strapped with my gat.

 

I’m not saying all this as some sort of “boys will be boys” defense, or to suggest that it’s healthy in some way. All I’m saying is that It Is. Gunplay is there, er, here, no matter how the wife and I may feel about the reality of guns. I don’t remember what kind of thoughts went through my head back when I was a kid going around everywhere armed. Maybe they weren’t the kind of thoughts that made their way up to the surface enough to be articulated so as to be burned into memory. But what I do remember is that the fascination with guns among boys (probably some girls too) bordered on near universal. And when you think about it, why not? Guns represent instant power, something that most kids are pretty short on. Power to do what you want, power to move obstacles out of your way, power to make the world go your way. And yes, that power comes from the ability to dole out death, but I wonder if maybe that understanding dawns a bit later on. Or hey, maybe these kids know exactly what they’re imagining, but they know they’re just imagining it. Maybe my son knows perfectly well that he’s pretending to install the contents of his clip in dad’s chest, but that it’s just pretend. Chill out old people! We’re only play killing here! Jeez!

Or not.

I have faith that this kind of thing works itself out in the long run, provided we do our jobs as parents. There are a lot of important lessons to be taught, and sometimes you have to get creative with how you instill those lessons. So I’m going to get some blood pellets, and, along with a bit of inspiration from Arrested Development, I'm going to set up a little lesson about the reality of what guns can do. Next time we're sitting at the dinner table and Henry points his little hand cannons at me and BANG BANG BANG!s away, I’m going to drop my silverware and clutch my chest, smashing those pellets open so that bright red blood runs down my shirt. I'll scream “MY GOD! YOU’VE SHOT ME!” I’ll have a pellet ready in my mouth to bite into for some instant internal bleeding. I’ll fall to the floor, smearing blood all over the white tile, clutching at the sucking chest wound out of which my life force is leaking. I’ll ask over and over again “Why, Son? Why?” I’ll get the wife in on the act too. She’ll kneel down by my dying form and cry out to the heavens, “No God, please don’t take him from us! My son knows not what he does! We tried to tell him not to shoot people but he wouldn’t listen and now he’s shot his father and there will be no one to take care of us and we’ll have to live on the streets and I’ll have to sell my body just for a loaf of bread, which I will in turn trade for crack to feed the drug habit that I will now inevitably pick up!”

And then, I’ll sit up and look my son in the eye and tell him, with all the gravitas I can muster, “And that’s why you never pretend to shoot people!”

Of course, the little punk may be laughing his ass off.

The Happy Song

So if yesterday's post with the most was about the songs that were implanted in my brain during my childhood, then today's is about the music being drilled into the skull filler of my own children. I guess it was about a couple of months ago that my eldest started developing his infatuation with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It started with just one song, "Pin", a 2 minute bit of rocking goodness that he affectionately dubbed with the alternate title of "Dinna Dinna" because of the chorus, which goes pretty much

BOM BOM BOM BOM
BOM BOM BOM BOM
DINNA
DINNA
DINNA
DINNA

As for the rest of the lyrics, I don't know. They might be dirty or they might be telling a story from a grenade's point of view or they might be about acupuncture gone horribly wrong or the plight of a mounted insect or something else entirely. Who am I to say? Sure, it's an awesome enough song, but it's only 2 minutes, and it's the only song he wanted to hear, and, well, have you ever listened to one 2 minute song over and over and over and over and over again? It's a pretty surefire way to start building a hatred towards a song, any song. But I have to wonder, if you pushed through the hatred and kept listening, would a certain type of madness set in? Would you begin to love and need the song in a sick desperate kind of way? Would you begin to identify with its plight, like some sort of musical Stockholm Syndrome?

I have no intention of carrying out this experiment. Our morning commute's a bit longer than two minutes, so I had to expand our listening into the rest of the band's repertoire. It took a bit of doing to convince Henry that there might actually be another song that he'd like, but he came around, and I figured out that as long as it was rocking enough, he would dig it. Of course, some of the songs have a bit of profanity, so you'll have to excuse the kid if he ever refers to you as a "no good di-i-i-i-i-i-i-ick" or tells you he's got a man that makes him wanna kill. He doesn't mean it.

So now we had a bit of variety in the music of our morning commute, though not quite enough. While we were no longer listening to just one song, we were still listening to just one band, which eventually has the same affect, though it takes longer to set in. One day, I'd just had enough. Much love to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but I needed something else. I don't know why I chose it, but something else turned out to be "Gratitude" by the Beastie Boys. I popped it on, assuring the boychild that awesomeness was on the way. I watched his face in the rearview as the opening riff played. Then the lyrics. After the first verse, he asked me an interesting question.

"What's this one about, Daddy?"

Holy shit, I thought, he knows that songs can be about stuff.

"It's, uh," think Holmes think, this is important! "It's about being happy!" Oh brilliant. "Yeah, it's about being happy with yourself and what you've got."

"Like with my toys?"

"Uh..." sort of? maybe? not exactly? "Sure!"

Since then, I've always been able to work in a bit of the Beastie Boys along with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, especially when I play "Gratitude" aka "The Happy Song." I had to take the boys with me to the store this evening and it happened to come up in the rotation. When we got home, Henry walked into the house and started singing to noone in particular.

"Gratitude. And that's riiight. Gratitude. And that's riiight."

Music to my ears.

Merle Fucking Haggard

Man, all's I know is that I got in the car the other day around lunchtime, turned it on, and the radio was parked on the public radio station where I left it that morning. And what comes out of my speakers but an Austin City Limits recording from the 70's of Merle Haggard singing his song, "Silver Wings."

And I just...sang.

I have not heard that song in a good two decades, but when I was a kid, I must have heard it a bajillion times on trips that my Mom and I took. Back then, my grandparents lived down in the Rio Grande Valley, so every time we went to see them -- Thanksgiving, Christmas, weeks during the summer -- we packed up the car and set out on an 8 hour journey down the Eastern leg of Texas. And along with our luggage and my arsenal of toys, we always packed up these two fake leather cassette tape carriers of my mom's, both filled to capacity with tapes of all the stuff she liked, mostly stuff that I would find absolutely torturous today, but that I liked just fine back then. Let's see, besides old Merle, there was George Strait, Lee Greenwood, Eddie Rabbitt, Alabama, Conway Twitty, Barbara Mandrell, Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette -- I guess Dolly and Tammy are aight -- and, oh God, have you ever heard of this clown named, are you ready for this? Englebert Humperdinck. I think even as a kid, I gave my mom shit about that one, if only for his name.

So yeah, not exactly my current tastes. But when I heard that song, it just clicked and I knew every last word. I didn't even have to dig back into my memory, the lyrics were just right there. I can't say I particularly like that song all that much, but I like the associations, the pictures that come up when I think about it. I didn't even mind having it rolling around in my head for the rest of the afternoon.

God, music is just the best.

Holmes on the Spot

As part of his International Meme Week celebrations, Dan the Blogging Englishman entagganated me for the interview meme. Or rather, I tagged myself. Or more accurately put, I volunteered to be tagged, which means I now get to respond to a series of probing interview questions brought to us by none other than Dan himself. So put down that People magazine and read this interview instead.

Do you feel that counseling is a science or an art?
Counseling is nothing less than an exact science. You run through a list of symptoms and then prescribe Prozac accordingly.

In truth, I don't feel quite qualified to answer the question of whether counseling is a science or an art, considering I'm at the very beginning of my education in counseling. However, the question is quite clearly asking how I feel, and I'm pretty qualified to talk about how I feel about pretty much anything. That being said, I feel that it absolutely must be both. There is definitely a science to it, to understanding human beings and the disorders that afflict them and what they stem from and the dynamics of human relationships and knowing what is healthy and what is not and on and on and on. At the same time, there is an art to applying this science. Listening to a person, I dare say, is an art, and not just listening, but making a person know that they are being listened to, not to mention getting them to talk in the first place. Making sense of the dynamics of a person's situation, and never failing to recognize that each person who comes for help is a human being, with a whole universe of experience that is as grand and remarkable as anyone else's.

That's just my take on it for now. Perhaps ask me this one again in a few years.

What's in your car CD player at the moment?
We experience the occasional spat of vehicular break-ins around here, so at the moment, my car's CD player sits empty. But the last CD I listened to in the car was Bad Religion's "New America." It's not my favorite of theirs, but it's got this sort of positive "we really can make the world a better place!" theme throughout it that always buoys my spirits. Plus it's loud and fast.

What's the worst play you've been involved in?
In high school, I ran tech for "Guys and Dolls", and later for "42nd Street", thus beginning my hate affair with the "art form" known as the musical. With a precious few exceptions, I still despise musicals to this day, and sitting through those two freakshows night after night amounted to a brand of torture that I'd prefer never to repeat. Of course, these feelings put me very much in the minority in the UT theater department, but I came across a few other folks of like mind in my time there. Musical haters: we're out there.

Except you asked what was the worst play I've ever been in, and I personally don't count musicals as plays. One is a dramatic art form, the other is, in most cases, little more than a spectacle with about as much artistic value as a UFC match. I can't recall any theatrical involvement where the play itself was bad, but I've had some less than positive experiences. The one that springs immediately to mind is when I was cast in Loaded Gun Theory's "The Empty Bowl." The play itself is fantastic, and my role in particular was a juicy one, but the experience of getting it staged was one I'd rather not ever repeat. The director was young, insecure, and dictatorial, and had us do all sorts of bizarre things that made little to no sense. The real shitty thing though, was the fact that my little boy was only six months old, and plenty colicky. Every night when I went to rehearsal, after spending all day at work, I felt like I was abandoning my family. I don't think I've ever been quite so relieved to have a show close.

What did you want to be when you grew up?
The first thing I can ever remember wanting to be was a carpenter. My mom was having some work done on her house, and the guys that came out just seemed so cool to little Holmes, what with their tools and their know-how. I was able to sort of realize this particular occupational dream in college when I spent a semester working in the scenery shop at UT's Performing Arts Center. I also remember wanting to be a lawyer for some ungodly reason, a choice which would have certainly been disastrous for me, and later a veterinarian. My mom actually talked the guys at our vet's office into letting me come down and hang out and help a few times. I watched them put somebody's pet to sleep once, and that did it for that idea. Later, when I got into theater, I thought I wanted to go into the tech theater field, and later on after that, I thought I'd be a playwright. I guess since I've written a few plays, I've actually managed to be a playwright, and at some point in the future, I hope to be a playwright again, whatever my day job may happen to be.

Who would win in a fight: the Jetsons or the Flintstones?
It's always the bad guys who have the latest technology on their side. And they always seem to have British accents, why is that Dan? So should such a match ever occur, I'd have to cheer for the Flintstones. Considering George Jetson's complete ineptitude with the technology of his day, not to mention his whiny fucking attitude, I think the cavefolk would stand a fighting chance.

So that's it for this interview. If you'd like to be tagged for this one and answer a series of questions written specially for you by me, just follow the instructions below.

Interview rules:
1. Leave me a comment saying “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your blog with a post containing your the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

There's probably no way this movie is any good...

...but that's absolutely no reason for me not go see it, perhaps even on opening weekend.



Never underestimate the strong desire to really want to like a movie coupled with a bucket of beer served up by the fine waitstaff at the Alamo Drafthouse. Hey, it worked for "Freddie Vs. Jason."

Of course, this just proves that I'm falling for the evil marketing machine's ploy to repackage my childhood memories and sell them back to me.