beautiful, funny, sad & true

When I was in sixth grade, one of the crazes in that myopic little world was for everyone in the class to have a small stuffed Garfield doll.  Guys had them, girls had them, everybody had them.  We didn’t play with them, per se, the thing was just to have one in your desk.  Incidentally, my mom told me a few months ago that with the release of the new Garfield movie, the little stuffed dolls were becoming a craze with kids again, thirty years later.   I never saw THAT one coming.

A more universal craze of the time was the Rubik’s Cube, a maddening brain teaser of a toy that took the country, and indeed the world, by storm when it was released in 1980.  You know, one of these:

I was hooked on it too, and even bought a book on how to solve it.  You start by solving one side, then another, and it all sort of comes into place that way.  The book was full of these arcane strings of formulas with acronyms like, “F L U2 R2”, which stand for Front, Left, Upper 2, Right 2, etc.  Some people just gave in and pulled their cubes apart in order to ‘solve’ them, and some people pulled the stickers off and moved them into place, which I think would be a prohibitive amount of work, and it would make the stickers look crappy once they were back on.  But I digress.

I learned to solve the Cube in record speed.  When they would have national competitions on TV, like this one, from the show That’s Incredible. . .

. . .I would always beat them ‘by a large margin’, as my brother used to say.  I wondered how they got to be on TV and everything, when it took them an eternity—like forty-five seconds!—to solve it.  My hat’s off to you if you sat through that entire piece of crap video, by the way.  The episode of the show is staggeringly boring, and the video ends before we even get to find out who wins the contest.  What a letdown!

The world record for solving the Cube was seven seconds, and I could only whittle my time down to around eight.  When I was in New Hampshire visiting my grandparents, one of their neighbors, upon meeting the eleven-year-old me, handed over his scrambled Rubik’s Cube and said, “If you can solve this, you’re a better man than I am.”  Little did he know what he was in for.  I whipped it around and handed it back to him a few seconds later, completely solved.  He gave me a stunned look, and was actually a bit angry and petulant about the whole thing—although he tried to hide it—which I found hilarious.  I got the feeling he didn’t particularly care for kids, and he wanted to give me something to keep me occupied and out of the way of the adults.  I had my secret skill, however, which foiled his little plan.

In the interest of full disclosure, I was telling a friend about this story on the phone today and afterwards said, “This is probably a blog story.”

“It’s totally a blog story,” he replied.  “You should call it ‘Eight Seconds.’  You can start it like this.”  He lowered his voice in imitation of a melodramatic TV announcer.  “Eight seconds.  That’s not the length of time I can stay on a bull, or the amount of time before I have an orgasm, that’s how long it took me to solve the Rubik’s Cube.”

We both laughed, and then he had to get off the phone and return to work, as did I.  I liked his suggestion for the name, but I obviously took some liberty with (i.e., completely disregarded) his other suggestions.

In the interest of even more disclosure (is that possible, after proclaiming the last disclosure ‘full’?), unlike my skill at playing Ms. Pac-Man, which hasn’t ever really dwindled over the intervening decades, my ability to solve the Cube has completely evaporated.  Sad, I know, but it’s the kind of skill you have to use, or else you lose.  I might still have my old Cube in a box somewhere at one of my parents’ houses.  Amazing how little of that childhood stuff actually survived, and also amazing are the things we adults WISH had survived.  My brother and I do still have a bunch of our original Star Wars action figures, and my little Yoda one is the mascot for my recording projects, to remind me and the people working with me, “Do, or do not; there is no ‘try.’ “  More than anything, I wish I had my collection of toy cars.  I have a couple of them, but most of them got given away, or lost, or given to Goodwill, or just. . .vanished.  I also wish I had my collection of cassettes from childhood through high school.  My brother and I made tons of cassettes in which we acted out skits, or made up songs, or just recorded ourselves talking and playing with our friends, being our dorky selves.  Those are my favorites.  I still have a couple of them, but we made tons, and they don’t seem to have survived.  The ones that have survived are worthy of their own separate blog entries.

By way of the television industry calls a ‘teaser,’ I’ll tell you that my favorite of the tapes, which has been safely stored away from almost thirty years until I recently copied it onto my computer and digitized the audio, is entitled, “One in a Million,” and it’s quite possibly the best thing ever.  If my brother will agree to it, I’ll write the story out and post the audio on here.  If he doesn’t, then I’ll have to just tell the story minus the audio, which will still be entertaining.

There is more to come.

Well, huzzah.

Beautiful, Funny, Sad & True is celebrating its fifth anniversary today, and I’d like to take the opportunity to thank you for sticking around and reading.  I realize that updates and stories have been a little sporadic around here lately; I’m working on rectifying that situation.  Five years is a long time to keep a blog.  Actually, including the previous incarnations of BFS&T on Blogger and that other social network, it’s been more like eight years, which is a bit mind-boggling.

Here are some updates I can provide you with, and I’ll divide them into the quadrants that create the name of this place.

beautiful:  My friend and I started writing and recording an album together a year ago, and it’s getting very close to completion.  We’re aiming for a release date this spring.  We’re thrilled to finally have a bassist (who also plays a number of other instruments) on board with us, and an excellent drummer is in the works as well.  Exciting times!

funny:  I could split hairs and wonder if this means funny/strange or funny/ha-ha, but either way I’m at a bit of a loss on this one.   Well, okay, here’s a little joke.

JOHN:  Ask me if I’m a truck.

PAUL:  Are you a truck?

JOHN:  No.

Ha ha.  Don’t worry if you don’t get it; there’s really nothing to get.  It’s just absurdist, and you either like it or you don’t.  I happen to like it.

sad:  Holidays are tough.  I tend to get the blues around this time every year.  It’s not seasonal affect disorder, I just find myself ruminating a lot about the things in my life (or even in myself) that are missing or lacking.  That’s about all I’ll say on the subject here, but I thought I’d let you know that’s what I’m dealing with at the moment.

true:  I went to visit my dad a couple of weeks ago, and came home with two big boxes of LP records.  Almost all of them are classical, and many are the same ones that I grew up listening to.  Some I know by heart, like the Glenn Gould piano recordings and Bach organ recordings, while others are ones I wasn’t familiar with back then but am totally interested in now.  There were a few surprises in there, too, like Johnny Cash’s greatest hits (from the 1960’s! and a couple of Moody Blues and Chet Atkins records that I doubt have ever been listened to.  I certainly don’t remember hearing that stuff in our house when I was growing up.  Certainly am glad to have them now, though.  I’m totally looking forward to plowing through all of them and giving them the attention they deserve.

So that’s what’s happening on this Very Special day.  Here’s to another five years!

When I was in high school, one of my friends had a reputation for being a prankster. Sometimes I found myself guilty by association, and sometimes I was an actual accomplice. He went through a phase during which he liked to find pictures of nude or scantily clad women and post them in friends’ lockers or Pee-Chee folders, so that when the person would open the folder, he’d have a little surprise waiting for him.

He actually got in a bit of trouble when he did that to a girl in our choir. The girl had red hair, you see, and so did the girl in the picture, and the picture was exceptionally lewd, so the girl reported my friend to the teacher. By way of a reprimand, the teacher famously told him, “Now, I like to look at a Playboy every now and then—“, which still makes us laugh, even all these years later. Hindsight being twenty-twenty, my friend thinks that was a cruel thing to have done to the girl, and if he could do things differently, he would. He also has daughters now, and that tends to make people grow up real quick, as well as to make them much more sympathetic to the tribulations that girls often experience in school.

Back then, however, the picture prank was something he did somewhat regularly. Once, he went to the library and found a National Geographic magazine with a story about Tahiti, which was full of half-naked women, so he pulled out a page and kept it for his own nefarious purposes. We sat next to each other in choir class, which meant that we shared a music folder. On that fateful day, when we sang the song “The Cloths of Heaven,” I opened the music and found the picture of a half-naked Tahitian woman. Ha ha. Then, when we finished the song, we put the music and the picture back into the folder, never to be looked at again, since the two of us learned and memorized music faster than most people. I only mention that fact because it’s apropos to the story. We had the song memorized from that day on, so we didn’t use the music anymore.

Three or four months later, our choir drove to a college an hour or so away, in order to participate in a somewhat prestigious regional music festival. I don’t remember much about the trip, to be quite honest with you (it’s been almost twenty-five years now), but I do remember that we did well enough during the afternoon performance to qualify for the finals later that evening, and one of the songs we performed was “The Cloths of Heaven.” At some point between the afternoon show and the finals, a couple of people came up to my friend and me, saying, “That wasn’t funny, you guys,” or, “Not cool.” We were mystified, and had no idea what they were referring to.

That night at the finals, it was our choir’s turn to take the stage. We filed onto the risers in our robes and awaited the announcer, who walked out a moment later. “Interesting story about this next choir,” the announcer told the audience of several hundred. He explained to them that the judges got quite a shock when they opened the music for “The Cloths of Heaven” and found a picture of a half-naked Tahitian woman inside. Our choir director was unaware that this had happened, but he had no doubt about who was to blame for this disgrace. He glared furiously at the two of us as we realized what had happened and tried unsuccessfully to suppress our giggles. Our surprised choirmates turned to each other, saying, “Who did that?” and others turned to us and asked, “Was it you guys?” as the entire audience erupted into laughter.

Our director was really angry, and after our performance he pulled my friend and me aside into a rehearsal room. He was convinced that we had done it on purpose, to prank the festival. We had to explain to him that no, this was just a private thing, and that we hadn’t used the music for months. We’d long since forgotten about the Tahitian. Out of the seventy numbered music folders our choir used, each one of which contained one or two copies of “The Cloths of Heaven” (our folder had two, one for each of us), the teacher’s aide had unluckily grabbed OUR numbered folder, and THAT copy, to turn in to the judges. I don’t think the director believed us at first, but eventually he had to admit that the circumstances were pretty funny, and we got off with a Well, Don’t Do It Again.

Oh, and our choir won the competition, by the way, so there you go. Apparently, sex sells.

I cooked chicken last night, and beef a few nights ago.

That may not seem like big news, per se, but I was vegetarian for a long time, and some habits die hard, or are difficult to explain to other people.  I made the switch around fifteen years ago, after listening to a radio interview with Howard Lyman, a former rancher who had become an advocate against the egregious practices performed by the meat industry, and who eventually chose the ultimate middle-finger salute to the industry by becoming a vociferous vegetarian.  I found that compelling, as well as poetically hilarious, and decided to follow suit.

I gave up meat for probably seven or eight years, until I started spending lots of time with a woman (it always seems to come down to that, doesn’t it?) who was mostly vegetarian, but would occasionally eat teriyaki chicken or something, which always smelled amazing and renewed cravings that I’d forgotten or buried.  That choice worked for me.  Eating meat every once in a while could be okay, and was probably good for my body, too.  I started to incorporate meat back into my diet again, slowly.  I would sometimes order a burrito with chicken on it, or get curried chicken at a Thai restaurant, maybe one or two meals a week.  Maybe once or twice a year, I’d have a burger.  And not a veggie burger, either, but a BURGER burger.  I didn’t have to tell myself I couldn’t have any of that stuff—nothing makes you want something more than when you tell yourself you can’t have it—I just didn’t want it, and it took a while to develop a taste for it again.S

One of the interesting things about making the switch to a vegetarian diet and then back to an omnivorous one is that there are still habits that I find myself clinging to that are hard to explain, or simply don’t make any sense.  I have a hard time watching someone pull a turkey leg off and eat it, for example.  It kind of grosses me out to watch the tendons pull and everything.  For a long time, I wouldn’t cook meat in my kitchen, I would only order it when I was eating in a restaurant.  I have a couple of formerly vegetarian friends who are the same way, so I don’t feel like a freak, at least not in that respect. Ha ha.

My family members were kind of mystified by all of these changes.  It took years for them to understand my decision to become vegetarian, and once they finally got it, I gave them The Old Switcheroo and started eating meat again.   Many of my friends and family members are excellent cooks (a few are even at the professional level), and I would always try whatever they made, which led to some confusion on their part.  “Hey,” I heard more than once, “I thought you were a vegetarian, but you just ate pulled pork.”  “That’s right,” I would smile mischievously and say, “because you spent a whole day laboring over it and barbecuing it to perfection, and I’m sure it’s the most amazing pulled pork I’ll have in my whole life.  I’m not gonna miss out on that.”

These days, I pretty much eat everything—albeit in moderation—though I do try to get organic, free-range, naturally fed meat instead of chickens who’ve been crammed into tiny cages and force-fed ground chicken beaks and eyes and stuff.  It’s easy to make choices like that living in Portland, since the quality of restaurants here is famously high, and demand creates a good supply.  I’m sure if I lived in pretty much any part of the rest of the country, it would be much more difficult—not to mention expensive—to eat this way.  I should mention that this kind of thing is what the rest of the country finds quaint (if they’re being kind; ‘precious’, if they’re not) about Portland.  There’s a famous scene in the TV show “Portlandia” that takes concern for the welfare of animals (while still ultimately choosing to eat them, it should be noted) to new and funny heights.

I told you all that to tell you that I set a new standard this week, by cooking beef AND chicken in my kitchen.  It felt very strange and funny to be shopping in the meat section again.  As I was preparing dinner (stir-fried beef, green peppers, and green onions over Japanese noodles) I wrote on Twitter, “For the first time in years, I just stir-fried actual beef, in my actual home, to be actually eaten by the actual me.”  For the record, it was delicious.  What I had forgotten, however, is the extraordinary length of time that the smell of beef lingers in the places where it’s been cooked.  I went out the next day to run some errands, and when I got home, the bovine smell was still pretty overwhelming, and it stuck around until yesterday, which was three days after I cooked that meal.  I don’t imagine I’ll be doing that very often.

So there you have it.  I pretty much eat everything, and now I even cook it at home sometimes, too.  But I do still have some quirks to deal with.  Actually, I have rather a lot of quirks, but you’ll have to wait until some not-so-distant point in the future in order to read about them.

In the early 1980’s, the longest-lasting and most revolutionary new product was not the Rubik’s Cube, the tiny stuffed Garfield doll, or even MTV—it was the personal computer that would go on to change the world.  A closely related product that was also created around that time was the video arcade game. Home video games, like the Atari 2600, or even the quaintly archaic Pong, had existed for a number of years by then, but video arcades were a new and exciting phenomenon. Pinball was for old people; video games were for us kids.

The grocery stores near our house both had a couple games each, but the nearest serious video game parlors were Pizza World (which at the time of this entry is the current location of El Portón, an excellent Mexican restaurant) and Nob Hill Lanes, a bowling alley with a smaller but more unusual lineup of games, including a 2-player Ms. Pac-Man console, which was—and still remains—my all-time favorite video game.

I loved Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man so much that I bought the ‘strategy guide’ books about how to beat the games.  I even carried my little red portable cassette recorder to the arcade with me and recorded myself playing the games.  I took the tapes home and listened to them in headphones, imagining how the game play went, and trying to re-enact it in my little mind’s eye.

One day, we got a new refrigerator, and it came in a gigantic cardboard box. When it stood on end, it was the size of a video game, which gave me and my brother a brilliant idea: LET’S MAKE OUR OWN PAC-MAN MACHINE.  That’ll be great, we thought. Now, all our friends in the neighborhood won’t have to go to Pizza World or Nob Hill Lanes to play, they can just come to our front yard. And we’d be rolling in money!  Yakima wasn’t anything like Silicon Valley (either then OR now, quite frankly) and besides, I was ten and my brother was six, but at least we had imagination and determination.

The contraption we made is one of the things I really wish we taken at least one picture of.  It was absolutely ingenious, but surprisingly difficult to describe.  Follow me closely.  Here’s the type of original Pac-Man machine we were trying to emulate.

We stood the refrigerator box vertically, and then drew a Pac-Man maze screen in magic marker on the top half of the box. I think my brother drew the side panels, and we collaborated on the name plate that said, “PAC-MAN” on it. Directly underneath the ‘screen’, we placed a smaller cardboard apple box, which was for the joystick and coin slot. We cut a slot for people to insert quarters, and we sculpted a heap of clay into a joystick and plopped a golf ball on top of it.  Voila!

So now it looked good, but it didn’t do anything yet; we had to figure out how to bring it to life. We knew that one of us would have to be inside the box, but we struggled to come up with a workable solution. I think it was Mom who had the idea of using a box knife to cut a rectangular ‘track’ hole along a section of the maze we had drawn, and then we could stick a magic marker through the hole and tape a cardboard Pac-Man to the end of it to move him through the maze.  So that’s what we did.  The Pac-Man kept falling off the end of the pen, though, so it took a while to figure out how much electrical tape to stick him on with.  For the machine’s sound, I had all those cassettes I’d been making for weeks, so I put some batteries in the cassette player and brought it in the box with me.

We were ready to go.  We ran up and down the street, yelling, “Pac-Man!  Play Pac-Man!”  We cajoled everyone to give it a try, and somehow they all went along with it.  When someone put in a quarter, I would press the Play button on my tape recorder and the introductory song would play, followed by the sound of game play.  The person would grab the golf ball joystick and move it around as best they could, and I would move the marker with the Pac-Man on the end of it through the maze route, randomly.  Some people actually played this thing multiple times, but most realized right away that they weren’t actually able to control the Pac-Man at all, and that they’d spent the same amount as if they’d played the real game.  I think the box lasted only a few days, until the novelty wore off, both for us and for our friends.  But, like I said, I would dearly love to see a picture of that bizarre homemade contraption.

Since we’re on the subject of Pac-Man, once when my brother and I were at an arcade playing the game, a slightly younger kid we didn’t know (or maybe we did; I don’t quite remember) came up and said, very quickly and dramatically, “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was this maze?  And there was all your favorite food and you just couldn’t resist?  And then you CHASE it?  And then when you get there, you EAT it?  That’d be awesome.“  My brother and I stifled our laughter and kinda said, “Sure, yeah. . .awesome—” and turned back to our game.

Portland has a ‘vintage’ arcade down in Old Town, and every once in a while, I like nothing better than to plunk a couple of quarters down and spend an hour or so in an attempt to get the new high score on Ms. Pac-Man, and occasionally I even get it.  You’ll know if I do, by the way, since I like to use the pseudonym Mr. T, so if you see ‘MRT’ on the high score list, that might very well be me.  Be all that as it may, I was very glad when that arcade opened, because that meant that all those skills I’d honed as a kid weren’t going to lie dormant anymore.  I would hate to think I wasted all that time on frivolous endeavors.  I can rest assured, though, because there’s still something to be said for hand-eye coordination, and running through a maze with your favorite food that you just can’t resist.

There’s also something to be said for the old video games from the ‘golden age’ of the early to mid-1980’s.  Despite their simplicity, they were captivating in a way that more modern games absolutely are not.  If you  haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing them, I urge you to arm yourself with a handful of quarters (most of these games, if they’re still around, still only cost a quarter to play, amazingly) and give some of them a try.  I know you’ll be glad you did.