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The Days of Our Lives C June 19th, 2008 |
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1994: The Great Schism This is also the year, as Chris mentioned, we had our first major falling out, through no fault of my own. I have to be very clear about this, I was not there on the day this happened. At any rate, I can gather together a story from having heard both sides. Apparently, Erin, Chris and Tommy were fooling around as usual waiting for the bus to take them to the bowling alley, laughing and pretending to be members of the Warriors tribe we had all inevitably made characters for. Erin found an empty bottle sitting on the side of the parking lot and, in a fit of the hyperactivity she was already becoming known for (Erin was one of the few kids actually did have a problem with ADHD) threw it in Chris’s direction. The bottle shattered harmlessly in front of Chris and they went on playing, but not before a teacher walking out the door saw what happened, gasped, and pulled According to Until that point we had been an inseparable quadruped, both on the playground and now in the lunchroom at Fassett. Now suddenly, I suddenly had a choice: let Seinfeld was big this year, having just won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series, thanks in part to “The Contest,” perhaps the show’s most famous episode, which refers to the characters competing to see who can refrain from masturbating the longest. Although the word wasn’t used, this gave me my first real indication that people were doing something other than just “looking” at pretty girls. The series, however, would continue to top the charts throughout… 1995: Starting on the Road to Hell …and beyond. Suddenly the family was gathering around the TV at 7:00 every night to watch Seinfeld. I joke that my family didn’t go to church, but we did watch Seinfeld. Those of us sitting around the TV knew this wasn’t exactly a lie. Whatever the facts were, I did stop getting dragged along to church every Sunday, which was just fine with me because I hated getting up early, and I didn’t much care for the company. It had always been hard for me to connect with any of the colored-up stories from the Bible, which were on the whole less interesting than the idea that the Lost Ark was waiting in a government warehouse somewhere to kill more Nazis. Plus, the boys I went to Sunday school with seemed more interested in having Bible fights (which were like food fights, except presumably more holy). As a result, I got to stay up later and later on weekends, where I could watch late night Star Trek and Outer Limits episodes. Both of these seemed far more spiritually fulfilling than anything I could do before noon on a weekend. My inability to connect with religion was mostly my own fault, though I blame some of it on my mom being raised Lutheran and my dad Catholic. When I asked what religion I was, I was told I was a Christian, and if I asked what denomination, I was told I could decide for myself when I got older. Not that they made any attempt to educate me. I had had a dream many years earlier so frightening that at the age of 12 it already seemed like a haunting memory, and it changed my life. I was living in a log cabin, on an island, surrounded by a lake of fire. The island was connected to the mainland only by a long rope bridge. Suddenly, a bright blue bird flew down out of the eastern sky. “Retreat from this place, for it is an abomination to live here. The Lord has sent me to guide you to a new land, where you will thrive.” Dutifully, I started across the treacherous bridge hanging over the boiling lava. Suddenly I noticed yet another bird, this one bright red, flying toward me from the west. “Hark! Do not listen to agents of the devil who may try to temp you away from this place. The Lord will grant you the strength to persevere, and to thrive.” I turned back to the blue bird behind me, but somehow knew what he would say. Both were offering salvation, and both sounded convincing. I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there in the center of the rope bridge, trapped between two feuding angels. And then the dream ended. Another religious event, from my point of view, was the death of Calvin. Yes, that’s how I see it. Calvin and Hobbes, a comic strip I had read every day for the last ten years, was coming to an end. Bill Watterson announced it at the beginning of the year, and I cried, but came to accept it by the last strip. Still, he’s a jerk for doing that. Roxanne, the family dog I had known for my entire life until that point, dropped dead quite suddenly that fall. The family had been attending a wedding and we were one of the first groups to rush home so I could watch the Outer Limits at 11, and in my hurry to get inside I was the first to discover her. The vet said she hadn’t suffered (heart attack, most likely), but the blood on the carpet made me wonder otherwise. I had wanted to take her on one last walk, but said I would do it tomorrow. This provided perhaps the one moment of comfort I got from Chris Zasada, who I didn’t have much contact with through 7th grade. The schism was mostly no longer an issue due to Erin’s taking up gifted and talented classes and having no more time for me during the day (though the phone calls continued, as I recall, though I was never the initiator). I didn’t talk about the death much at all, but Chris heard about it through His company was especially important after an early seventh grade incident wherein I wrote a story for Language Arts, made the mistake of showing it to Erin before I turned it in, and was amazed when later that week Erin stood up in class to read a story identical in every respect to the one I had just turned in. It’s then that she made the famous quote, “I’m not stealing your idea, I’m improving on it.” To me, it was the greatest kind of betrayal, and enough to re-compensate for the Schism. I think I fell a little out of love with her then, and our relationship was never the same. Not that I ever thought of her as more than a distant cousin, anyway. GoldenEye, the first James Bond movie to be released since the end of the Cold War, came out this year. I only saw the ending because my parents were watching it, and might have entirely missed the fact that it was a franchise with a lengthy history had not Another news story that just about passed me by was the Predictably, we glanced over that, but were permitted to stop class and turn on the televisions when the verdict of the O.J. Simpson trial was announced in October. I was in Social Studies at the time, so that could claim it was an effort to get us interested in current events, even though I had no interest in sports and wasn’t really all that surprised by the verdict. You might not know it, but the O.J. trial dominated the entire year, was marketed and shoved down our throat as the Trial of the Century, even though I believe it was far less significant than the Whitewater hearings that dominated… 1996: Rapids on the Political Scene
…and actually told us something about the man we had elected to be our leader. I’ve never been good with money, and couldn’t even now explain to you what he was accused of, except it seemed incredibly dishonest and untrustworthy. In 1996 I had just turned 13. Nevertheless, I spouted rhetoric at my family and friends in favor of Bob Dole after he won the Republican nomination. I’ve since had a complete reversal of opinion, but allow me a few words to justify my conservative leanings in middle school. I grew up in a quiet suburban neighborhood and went to school with mostly white kids of Eastern-European descent. There were no blacks, few Hispanics, and if any issues regarding sexuality, much less homosexuality, popped up, they were quickly silenced. That and, let’s face it, I was 13 and had to go with the few facts I had. At the time my hot buttons were second amendment rights (not because I had ever held a gun, but only in principle) and decreasing the national debt, both of which Dole said he was good for. That, and I remember reading in history class that the Republicans had originally risen up to free the slaves in the 1800’s, and I thought this could only be a good thing. At the beginning of 8th grade, during gym class, they asked for volunteers to work in the cafeteria washing dishes in exchange for a free meal. Much to my initial surprise, the other volunteer ended up being Chris Zasada, my old friend. This gave me the opportunity to relearn how much I had missed him, but we eventually bonded over memories of the cafeteria ladies trying to kill us, and many readings from our journals in Language Arts, to the horror of our teacher, Mrs. Morrin. We spent a few nights together, at his house or mine, or up at his cabin in Michigan, which was always relaxing with the boat rides up the creek, fires in the night and hours in front of the Sega Saturn. None of these, however, would be quite as memorable as… 1997: The Year of Bad Movies …which I dub so because it’s true. Wes Craven was being called the master of suspense for his work on Scream 2 and I Know What You Did Last Summer. I hadn’t seen any of these, but decided that if they were calling him The Master of Suspense, it must be true. I had Chris over one night (the night of the cheese-jelly incident, but it would take too long to explain) to watch them, along with Species, which came out in ’95. Species was one of the top ten stupidest movies I have ever seen, but there was a naked girl in it so we watched it twice. We also watched The 5th Element when it came out, and squinted to be able to see the girl naked from a distance in two or three scenes. We were so used to squinting that it was only a short step to scrambled porn, staying up late and sitting close to the TV on the Playboy Channel (22B), where you couldn’t see anything but static without paying, but you could hear everything, and sometimes, really late, you could even make out general outlines. Also, Disney released Hercules. I had found Pocahontas irritating, because it was historically inaccurate for so many reasons. The Hunchback of Notre Dame was the first Disney movie I officially refused to see, even as it was popular, because turning a classical tragedy into a kid’s story just seemed like a bad idea. Hercules, however, took the cake, because I had actually been interested in Greek mythology since my elementary school years. Knowing something about what I was hearing, the whole movie seemed so dumbed-down, commercialized, and adjusted to fit the unrealistic ideals we were already being force fed. I lost all confidence in movies that year. As you know, Bill Clinton got re-elected. When, in March, he banned federal funding for human cloning, I took this as vindication I had been right all along. As you also know, this did not stop me from taking an interest in politics again. In fact, I became more involved, somehow thinking if I had campaigned a little harder, perhaps my candidate would have won. I’m not entirely convinced I was wrong. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll also know this is the year I started high school. I won’t even try to describe all the thoughts and feelings entering my head as I stepped into the big arena, and besides, I’ve forgotten most of them. Suffice to say it was intimidating and full of possibilities at the same time. As yet, I still had no idea what I was going to do with it. One thing I am required to mention, and it can be summarized in two words: Tech Prep. It was advertised to me during the orientation before the year began, and though I was much more interested in the Enriched Connections program, Clay’s own nod to a gifted and talented program that merged three or four subjects together with a focus on classical studies. Surprising as it may seem, my parents, who I had always thought of as supportive and encouraging, convinced me that it would be too hard and too much work. I still kind of regret not going for it. Instead my dad pointed me toward Tech Prep, to the point of getting angry when I brushed off the idea. For some reason they thought that computer aided drawing was right up my alley, and it did sound pretty neat. If only there had been some of it. On the first day I found myself talking with Chris Zasada in the corner, I’m not sure how he got sold on the class, dodging barbs both verbal and literal. Aside from the two of us, the class was populated by some kind of sub-human under-race of orcs. Not only were they uniformly stupid, which allowed them some primitive ability to coordinate their actions, but they all looked roughly the same and spoke in a language neither of us could understand. “ZOTNUMMINGURTARD!!!” one of them, a particularly ugly one named Kyle Cutcher, yelled at me as we left class that first day. Kyle would later give me a swollen lip by slamming his elbow into my face as he ran past me in the hall, one of the few incidents we actually managed to get them in trouble for, and only because Chris insisted on shoving me into the principals office. I later felt kind of bad because I misidentified the culprit, but not real bad, because they were all basically the same. Believe me when I tell you that an elbow to the face was one of the lesser indignities we both suffered in that class. And, no, you don’t want to know. The teacher only made the worst of a bad situation. Mrs. Boyer was a pregnant member of the National Guard, and if I could remember her rank I would look her up now and fire her. Her method of controlling the seething goblin-mass of idiocy coursing around her consisted mostly of standing at the front of the room and shouting “Shut up!” at the top of her lungs. After that she basically gave up, and we had the rest of the year to roam free. By which I mean Chris and I had the year to cower in the corner of the Tech Prep lab while the rest swatted at us with measuring sticks, carved themselves fake penises and thought hard to come up with lower and lower depths to stoop to. I don’t recall a single thing I got out of the class, other than a sudden realization what the average American voter really looked like outside my small social cast. A few other notes about high school. At the beginning of the year I responded to a request in It was, for all intents and purposes, the year I decided what I was going to be when I grew up. Aerosmith came out with their “Nine Lives” album this year, which you may not have heard of, that had the song “Pink” on it, which you most certainly have heard of. I inadvertently picked it up at the library, wondering if all their songs were like “Cryin’,” and was suddenly deluged by sonic bass notes and lyrics fresh from the lips of the demon of screamin’, and what’s more, I liked it. Queen was by now more or less the whole of my CD collection, but I took a chance by picking up “Big Ones” at the So there you have it, my love of Aerosmith was mostly based on a misconception. Doesn’t diminish it for me at all. Also, on June 30th, the first Harry Potter book was released. Not that I cared, because I was a Big Bad Freshman by now. I would get even bigger and badder in 1998: Little Dogs Who Think They Are Big Dogs …when I earned my first varsity letter for running cross country. I made a big deal about being the first member of the Selmek family to do so, as though it was somehow bringing honor to my name. No one backed me up on this, however, and I quickly dropped the subject. Before the end of my Freshman year, I was to be involved in my first really major dispute with my parents, or at least the biggest up until that point. Predictably, this involved pornography, in the form of a magazine page scanned into a bitmap and delivered to me via floppy disk a la Zasada. Who says we weren’t high tech? The thing that stuns me, more so than my parents’ ability to find me out, was their reaction to it. At an age where many of my classmates were contemplating whether or not to have sex, I stumbled on my first true realization that women were naked under their clothes. And I was grounded. To be fair, my parents had been fairly open with me about sex, in a “this is where babies come from, sit down and watch this documentary, that’s not something you need to worry about” kind of way. I was very familiar with the mechanics of sex, in theory. However, as any grown adult knows, there’s a lot more to human sexuality than “how,” and important questions need to be asked about “do what?” “with who?” “when?” and even, yes, “why?” To me, sex had always been presented as something you do either to make a baby, or because you were being contrary to the standards of polite society, and that was that. I’m still a little resentful, but my mom to this day doesn’t seem to understand the complaint. In the end, Chris blamed me and I blamed him, both our mothers were willing to see us as victims of the other’s perverse imagination (Chris’s, I think, was slightly more understanding), and surprisingly it didn’t upset the friendship too much. That and we had to depend on each other for survival in Tech Prep, come what may. On March 17, For the first week, we advertised a lost dog in the Toledo Blade. I was determined not to grow too friendly with him for fear he would go away, but the tiny little black dog only seemed to take this as a challenge. After a week had passed, we more or less decided we were going to keep him. Until then he had remained unnamed, the better to get rid of him quickly if we needed to. Laura proposed the name “Erin Tucker” to me on the swing-set, and while I made no suggestions of my own, I felt that a two-word name for a dog was pretentious and just really, really dumb. “How about just Tucker?” I thought, to which my sister responded “NOOO!” But obviously, if you are reading this you know how the story turned out. Tucker was the name, frequently slurred into “Tugger,” or “Bug” for short. And he is still cute. School this year was unremarkable. I threw myself into chemistry, and even had sort of a good time with it. My goal was still a job in journalism, which I was allowed to start taking as an actual class that year. Every morning I met Chris and Tommy in the band room, which I was not technically allowed into since I was not a member, but we all know how much I respect the rules. Other characters who popped up this year were a funny-looking kid named Brian Rycowski, who you can read all about it in Chris’s story, and Austin Ibarra, a violent kid who transferred in from the juvenile academy. Chris developed a non-sexual crush on Austin, who I think he admired because he disregarded authority even more than the two of us, and because they shared a passion for Japanese animation, which I did not. I implicitly mistrusted this kid for a lot of reasons that would take too long to describe, but I mostly tried not to talk about it because somewhere, deep down, I knew I was just jealous that Chris had another friend besides me. I should mention at this point that Chris and I had our own ritual at dances. We always went in matching black and white suits, termed “Blues Brothers” by the rest of the crowd, and we went with it. We were always way, way overdressed for the event and we never brought dates, just leaned against the wall in the corner and talked to each other. In retrospect, it seems kind of weird that we needed to go out to do this, but it provided an excuse to go to Big Boy afterward and then to one of our houses to stay the night, watch anime, and make nachos. One incident in particular I remember, when I had received a tweed jacket for a Christmas present that I never wanted to wear. I was happy with black, both because black has always been my thing, and because it was “our” thing to do the Blues Brothers. My parents at once insisted I wear it to the first dance of the year, said that it was black (it wasn’t, it was tweed), and wouldn’t let me make arrangements to borrow Chris’s (I had outgrown my old one, and owned only the tweed). After giving me a Ritalin pill, which always seemed to work before, I quickly acceded and began walking around the house wearing the jacket. It was then that I phoned Chris and asked him to have his spare jacket ready in the car. I suppose you know the rest of the story, because what young man or woman doesn’t have at least one story of wearing their real clothes underneath the ones their parents approved. Mine only gets tricky, however, when Laura observed me at the school dance wearing the black jacket and somehow felt compelled to report this back to my parents. I was staying at Chris’s that night, and it was his mom picked us up, took us to Big Boy and back. Still, I phoned home after I got to Chris’s to let my parents know I had gotten in alright, when they let me know what Laura had reported. My mom expressed disappointment, but it was my dad who jumped in on the other phone and said I would be grounded. I told them that sounded fair to me, if only because I disobeyed them, and would accept the consequences of my decision, even though I wasn’t sorry at all. The next day, my dad walked into the house carrying a two-by-four and asked if I was still ready to accept the consequences. I asked him what he was going to do with that, smiling inside because Chris and I had practiced stick fighting in the park (though I’m sure I still would have lost to my dad). Anti-climactically, he said it was just in case he needed it, I think because he was starting to realize I might be big enough to give him a fair fight. I was too tired to get up off the couch, but in many ways I wish he had actually hit me. I was prepared to offer no resistance and laugh at him, however bad it hurt, asking him if it made him feel big. My dad lost about a thousand cool points that day. I also accept that if it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else. Boys and their fathers have to go through a bit of a scuffle during that age, almost as a rite of passage. It’s too hard to explain, but if you’re a man with a dad, you understand. I spent the better part of my high school years hating my father with a passion, and can no longer quite remember why. This only cooled down after I had been gone a year. I don’t remember what I was grounded from. Nor have I ever figured out why it was such a big deal in the first place. As a result of my growing turbulence with my dad, I didn’t talk to him about Species II when it came out on DVD, which I watched, even though it sucked, because it was still more or less an excuse to show topless women. I also didn’t talk about my experiences with online porn, mostly in the form of stories and audio files, during which I discovered a few other important things about my body that weren’t covered in the reading. In counterpoint to my own sexual dilemma, President Bill Clinton was dealing with problems of his own in August of this year, owing to a youngish girl named Monica. Once again, the media was about to make a circus of something that didn’t seem like such a big deal. Interestingly, this scandal actually gave me more respect for a president I had previously brushed off, because it made him look like an ordinary guy I could relate to, and because he eventually admitted he was wrong (something politicians never do.) One final bit of trivia, 1998 was the year of El Nino. Don’t ask me what El Nino is; nobody knows. And nobody really knows what the results were, except it has something to do with weather patterns over the ocean that environmentalists went crazy saying would be devastating. They weren’t. Nevertheless, converge of El Nino persisted basically the entire year, though El Nino’s got nothing on the storm that swept the nation on April 20th… 1999: I Was Dreamin’ When I Wrote This, So Sue Me If I Go 2 Fast …when two kids from Columbine High School in Jefferson county, Colorado, halfway across the country, made life a lot more difficult for everybody, everywhere. I feel some need to explain. The Columbine High School Massacre was at the time the third largest school massacre in history (this was before the Virginia Tech Massacre). Two kids from Columbine, both social outcasts, decided to take guns into school and slaughter a bunch of their classmates before killing themselves. This kicked off a horde of national level interest in things like gun control and school safety, but at my level it was even more inconvenient, because the focus was sharpened down to paranoia and inane regulations. Clay wasn’t fortunate enough to have the money for metal detectors at all doors, though I don’t doubt we would have sprung for them if we could. Rather, new school regulations at the start of my Junior year prohibited all students from carrying backpacks or wearing coats inside the building. My newspaper did a series of articles about another regulation, a prohibition against wearing “concert tee-shirts,” which nobody could quite figure out what they meant by that, or why. Because I thought it was funny, and I am just sick like that, I began wearing a trench coat and Barenaked Ladies tee-shirt almost every day. Usually I wasn’t stopped. Mostly the regulations weren’t enforced very well against kids the teachers knew to be “good kids,” and I spent most of the year freely walking around the halls during my journalism period simply because I could. My mom worked in the school library at the time, of course, and I spend a considerable period of time visiting with her. Just as I’m sure she wanted. But all the minor, unenforced regulations were as nothing to the one-day-only holiday which shall forever be known as “Bomb Day.” Toward the end of my Sophomore year, some budding Einstein decided it would be a good idea to phone in a bomb threat. Police swept the school but were unable to find anything that looked like a bomb, and just about everyone dismissed it as a phony threat. Still, word got out to enough of the parents that there was some interest in keeping their children home from school on the day of the alleged threat. The school then made the equally brilliant move of sending out a memo that no student would be penalized for being out of school on the given day, which, as you already know, was a cue to every student in the school that this was Skip Day. Tommy, my sister, and about 80% of the student population took them up on their offer. Chris and I were equally amazed, but took the opportunities to run screaming down the nearly empty hallways and get extra credit in most of our classes. It was so much fun, I sincerely wish they would have done it again. Toward the end of my Sophomore year, my family moved once again from the brick house on Cromwell to a similar house less than two blocks away, where they remain as of this writing. I had the opportunity to collect up a bunch of junk and sort it out in my new room, as well as order a completely new set of bedroom furniture. Scholastically, the only effect this had was that Mr. Cooney, my Sophomore English teacher, gave me an A for writing an extremely shitty essay because I said I didn’t have time to do any better, what with the moving. Then again, maybe it was the best three paragraphs anyone had turned in; you never know. In personal news, I was distracted for the last three months of 1999 by the sudden unexpected arrival of my first girlfriend, a girl named Jalynn Robison, who was introduced to me through the girl Chris was currently pursuing. The usual routine of Chris and I standing around complaining that we can’t find dates was severely disrupted by the fact that we both had dates. This was the Homecoming Dance of early October. Later that night, at Big Boy, I was sitting next to Chris eating a club sandwich when I suddenly went white and leaned over to him, whispering in a voice that I’m not sure was sufficiently quiet, “Jalynn’s rubbing her foot against mine, what do I do?” Several weeks later I took her to a play at another school where we hugged for warmth in the cool fall air. That weekend I walked to Chris’s house, where I became an impartial observer in his IM conversation with her, asking why I haven’t kissed her yet. She was a romantic and wanted me to initiate, except I didn’t really know how. The next weekend I agreed to meet her at the park for two hours, and we ended up finding a secret spot hidden far back from the public trails (pointed out to me by Chris, no less) and making out for the whole time allotted us. Jalynn was a pale skinned-black haired girl who wore a cat outfit for me on our first Halloween when we sat in my driveway handing out treats together. She was actively involved in the Enriched Connections program, which I regretted not taking myself, and had a kind of aristocratic turn to her nose only emphasized by her Christian conservatism (this says nothing about her upbringing, as all three Robison girls were bizarre in different ways). I remember her as being very pretty, but not much about her personality beyond the fact that we both wanted to experiment with having a relationship. Prince was all the rage, all the year, because he had recorded a song many years ago titled “1999,” about how the world was supposed to end at the turn of the century. You could not have lived through this year without becoming familiar with this song, particularly the lyrics “life is just a party and parties weren’t meant to last.” In many ways it’s an anthem of a generation, though by the end of the year we were all tired of hearing it. In a similar vein, Y2K was all the rage. Supposedly, computers worldwide were expected to be unable to cope with the change in digits and start reporting the year as 1900 rather than 2000. Why this was supposed to cause a disaster I don’t know, unless the computers could be fooled into thinking they hadn’t been invented yet and subsequently wink out of existence. Nevertheless, numerous companies devoted valuable resources to making sure nothing bad happened to their systems, and at least one made-for-TV movie scared the shit out of everyone, though of course everything was fine, as I always knew it would be, when the clock struck midnight in… |