I'll House You

For a couple weeks in high school, my friend and I had our own house.
We didn't actually pay rent or live there or anything. We would just sort of hang out there every once in a while.

We were walking home one day after cross country practice and a celebratory bonus meal at 7-11 (that was when you'd buy a Big Gulp and stash a microwave burrito in the cup. The plastic wrapper kept it from getting wet) and got caught in one of Florida's summer downpours.

We sat under the carport of a house for sale waiting for the storm to stop. While discussing the dangers of misdiagnosed mental illness expressed in Suicidal Tendencies' "Institutionalized," we noticed the door to the house had Jalousie windows.

If you grew up in Florida, you know what Jalousie windows are, even if you don't know the name. They were those horizontal glass Venetian blind looking windows. Here, like in this picture I stole off the internet while searching for "old Florida horizontal glass venetian blind windows."

While they offered several  benefits to Florida homeowners, including brightness, an ability to catch breezes and a cool mid-century design, they had a few drawbacks, the main one being the fact that a couple of high school delinquents using no tools can take out enough of the glass panes to slip in the house in about 7 minutes.

It was strange once we were in the empty house. We were quiet and probably a little scared. Still, we figured if we got caught, we'd just say the door was open so we came in out of the rain.

We noticed the previous owners had left some stuff behind in their move. Nothing too interesting, some glasses and silverware, some food and supplies and a Penthouse magazine I let my friend keep, a move I instantly regretted.

We remained fairly respectful and quiet in the house that first day, and left soon after splitting our feast. Of course we were going to go back.

We couldn't wait to get out of practice the next day to break back into our new clubhouse. Again, we just sort of hung around inside, ate some shoplifted 7-11 treats and poked around to see what the owners had left behind that we missed the first day. It was a weird feeling; we knew we shouldn't be in there, and we still remained fairly quiet in the house. That would change soon.

We had been visiting our house fairly frequently when in a rare case of quitting a bad idea while we were ahead, we decided we should probably stop hanging out there. So we decided to go back one last time, but this time instead of exploring, we would dedicate our last day in the house to science and the arts.

Specifically, I had a science project that had vexed me for years while looking at my parent's sliding glass doors. If a scientist were to throw a glass at such a door, would the glass shatter on impact or would the momentum be enough to leave a cartoon-like hole in the door? While I had made many advanced mathematical equations, I still needed real-world testing, testing  my science hating parents would probably try to actively discourage.

So we tried it out. As a teenager, it is insanely liberating to break something. It is even more liberating to do so inside a house you aren't supposed to be in. The sound of the breaking glass was magnified through the empty house, and while we were dedicated scientists, we weren't robots - it was exhiliratingly funny.

The arts portion of the trip involved us squirting some left behind Elmer's glue on the floor and coating the design with a box of cereal we found in one of the cabinets. I can't recall exactly what we made, but I can almost guarantee there was at least one anarchy sign.

We threw all the abandonded food (including a bag of flour) we could find through the house, a glorious food fight against ... the house? Squares? Homeowners? The Man? Probably all of the above. We had brought along a can of spray paint and decorated the rest of the house with punk rock slogans and band logos, along with what I considered the crowning touch -  "LEAVE THIS EVIL HOUSE" in all caps above the mantle, as if a ghost got a hold of some haunted spray paint, leaving a terrifying warning to the human residents.

We left the house, carefully taking our spray paint can so it couldn't be dusted for prints, and walked away, never to return. And I can only speak for myself, but I remember feeling a bit depressed. Not only because we were walking away from so much  potential science and art, but because we had found a place where we were guaranteed not be hassled or oppressed, a place where we were free to create however much mess and trouble we wanted without facing any consequences of our actions.

Its sort of a sick joke that as a teenager you have all this extra energy built up and only a handful of acceptable ways to let it out. Once I become President, I will take all the nation's foreclosed homes and open them up to teenagers to vandalize and destroy. This would not only help the kids blow off steam, it would help the economy by employing workers and cleaners round the clock.

And in our case we actually did  help the economy, sort of. Years later we were telling the story of our house on the track team when an older runner got sort of quiet.

"My sister tried to buy that house," he said.

Oh shit. Was this guy gonna kick our ass for messing up his sister's house?

"Yeah, because it was so trashed, her and her husband got it for like, next to nothing."

So remember kids, vandalism is a win-win. Not only is it fun and stress-relieving, you also have a great chance of helping out some struggling homeowners.

Mighty Big Shoes to Fill

I went Bigfoot crazy a few weeks ago. It started when I caught an interview with an author plugging his latest book on NPR about the legendary creature (his shocking conclusion: Bigfoot probably doesn't exist, the 'bigfoot community' is sort of nuts). That sounded pretty cool. Then, within a week, two or three people mentioned Bigfoot or sent me a Sasquatch-related link.

Realizing this was a plate of shrimp moment like the movie Repo Man told us all about, I was powerless to fight fate so I loaded up my Netflix queue with whatever Bigfoot movies they had, checked out the NPR guy's book from work, and would have listened to Bigfoot music, if I could figure out what that was. I have a hunch he would listen to Fu Manchu.

Bigfoot was everywhere when I was a kid. Exploitation filmmakers cranked out films about him, he was on TV, he even had his own line of shoes, which I remember pitching a fit for in Buster Brown. I do not recall if my shitiness was rewarded.

I do, however, remember lots of time spent in the woods looking for the beast. This was back in the late '70s/early '80s when parents didn't really care what their kids did, just as long as they did it somewhere else, or at least did it quietly.

And man, did I love hanging out in the woods. My friends and I used our Bigfoot hunts as an excuse to follow trails for what seemed like miles and to freak each other out with outrageous lies as we got deeper and deeper into the woods. You could also fairly regularly find piles of waterlogged and moldy Penthouse and Playboy magazines out there which was an added bonus and safer than running into Bigfoot.*

There are adults who still do the same thing, although they are completely serious, which is funny, because even as kids we knew we were wasting our time. If you have cable you might have seen those ghost hunters who walk through haunted houses in green light challenging ghosts to fights. I'm serious. Half the running time is guys in Ed Hardy shirts yelling stuff like, "'SUP GHOST?! WHY DON'T YOU SHOW YOURSELF? YOU LIKE SCARING LITTLE KIDS AND WOMEN? WHY DON'T YOU MATERIALIZE RIGHT NOW, GHOST?"

The ghosts never show up.

As with many things I loved as a kid or teenager, Bigfoot tracking is probably the next ridiculous thing to hit the mainstream. Next time you're out on a relaxing walk in the woods looking for old dirty magazines, don't be surprised if you interrupt a camera crew shouting "C'MON, BIGFOOT! WHY YOU GOTTA HIDE, BRA?! I'M RIGHT HERE IN YOUR WOODS, DUDE!"








*Do you remember the thrill of spotting the back cover of a magazine somewhere as a kid, seeing a cigarette ad, getting excited thinking you had found some forest porn only to realize it was just a Newsweek or something? If I could bottle that euphoria and exhilaration I'd put 5 Hour Energy out of business.

I'm Your Garbageman

My trash can was left rolling around out in the street this morning. I am at the age where this results in letters to the editor and decade-long speeches on how nobody takes pride in their work anymore.

Truthfully, I can't say anything. Back in high school my friends and I came up with a game. I drove a huge '77 Lincoln Continental. Think of a tank, only faster and a bit more maneuverable, piloted by a 16 year old blaring out Bad Brains and the Clash.

Every Thursday was trash day. Every Thursday morning I'd pick up my friends to drive to school, and we'd cruise the neighborhoods looking for trash cans. After spotting one, I'd floor it, sending the trash can either into outer space, or frequently being dragged under my transmission for a half mile or so.

Naturally, this was hilarious to us.

There was one house that constantly put their three garbage cans out in a sort of pyramid shape, which was pretty much asking for us to drive through it. Looking back now, considering it was Bradenton, the owner could have been a WW2 veteran, a guy who served his country honorably and whose only solace now came from arranging his garbage cans once a week.

Being teenagers, we didn't think about any of that or even consider what pains in the ass we were. We just liked seeing all the trash cans fly away when being hit by a huge chunk of Detroit steel.

Man, was I a shitty kid.

So today when I have to lug my empty trash can from the street in the rain, or I have to stop the car in the street because the can has blown into the driveway, I figure it could be a lot worse.

AP History

For some reason tonight we had a revolutionary war soldier guy in the library. Some kids saw him and yelled out, "Hey Napoleon! Look out for Hitler!"

Does This Sort of Thing Happen to Normal People?

So I'm riding home Monday at 6:00, just when it's starting to get dark. About a block away I see this little black dog running pretty fast. Then I see a boy of about 10 years old chasing after the dog.

"Mister, please help me," the kid pants. "Please help me catch my dog."

Well, I can't really refuse that. I park my bike and figure the dog will see a new person and come up to see me, then either me or the kid can catch her.

Nope. The dog runs at me, then takes off in the other direction.

"Come on, please get off your bike and help me catch her."

I get off and put my bag down on the sidewalk and start running for this dog. The dog is running on to porches and then running away at full speed. Every time I sort of start to half-ass it after the pooch, the kid seems like he's about to burst into tears and urges me to catch her.

Finally the dog goes into a back yard. The kid starts closing the gate and pleads with me to close the other one.

"Yeah, I don't know if we should mess with someone's gate like this."

"Please, please, please," the kid wails, so I close my part of the gate and figure with the kid and the dog in the yard, my work is done. Plus, I was sort of getting tired of the chase, what with little Vince Lombardi there telling me to keep hustling after the world's fastest dog.

Naturally, as soon as I close the gate an SUV pulls up.

"Hi, um...I'm sorry about this, there's a kid back there trying to catch his dog. He chased her back there and I'm really sorry about messing with your gate and..."

The woman was actually very understanding and thought the whole thing was funny. If I had pulled into my driveway and seen some helmeted guy coming towards me after closing my gate, one hand would have been on the final 1 in 911, the other hand would have been wrapped around a gun, and my foot would have been poised on the gas pedal ready to floor it.


I guess that's the sort of thing you get to miss driving to work.