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.

Diver Down

I did a google search for googoomuck the other day. Oh, like you've never googled yourself. The first result after a few awesome Youtube clips was an Urban Dictionary definition. Let's see what it says, shall we?

Oh, my.

If you couldn't be bothered to use the link, the definition reads:

"A double entendre meaning a vampire or a muff diver. Famously used in a Cramps songs bearing the same name."

Couple things.

First, I was mildly shocked to see the term "muff diver" all written out there on the internet. Has anyone used that phrase since 1982? In a place that wasn't a middle school cafeteria or schoolbus? I think as soon as you utter the phrase "muff diver" you automatically grow a wispy mustache and notice you're wearing a 3/4 sleeve 95YNF or Lightning Bolt T-shirt.

Hey! That could be my new superhero! A mild-mannered kid in the '80s who uses the secret phrase to become MUFF DIVER, a fighter for justice, Get the Led Out radio weekends and ...I dunno... world peace or something. It still needs work.

Where was I? Oh yeah, "The Goo Goo Muck." I've heard that song for what, over 20 years now and yeah, that reading makes a lot of sense. Let's take a look at some of those lyrics:

"I cruise through the city and I roam the streets
Lookin for something that is nice to eat."

"I'm the night headhunter looking for some head
With a way-out body underneath that head."

How could I have missed that? And the Cramps were covering a song from 1962. Could people really sing about oral sex back then? Didn't they send Lenny Bruce to the electric chair for saying "damn" on stage? How did that song slip by? Was everyone in 1962 was as dumb as me?

Was this phrase common knowledge back then? I'm picturing guys in leather jackets on street corners saying stuff like, "Nah, we didn't really have sex, we just googoomucked." Or "You know me, fellas, I'm a real googoomuck."

Actually, that sounds sort of gross. Nowhere near as pleasing to the ear as "muff diver."

And you know, if I did inadvertently name my blog after a sex act, that's not a bad one to pick. It's a funny term, something I endorse, and it's way better than my first choice, Santorum's Laff Factory.

Oh, just google it.

Moving Pictures

I saw True Grit last night. It was good. As a general rule I avoid remakes, because, really, what's the point, but you know, it's the Coen Brothers. Even their crappy movies are pretty good.

Now that I'm out of the coveted 18-35 year old age range, nobody gives a shit what I think about movies, and it shows.

Actually, it doesn't seem like Hollywood gives a shit about movies, period. Three quarters of most movies are remade from an older, better movie (True Grit gets the Awesomeness Exception), or based on some TV show that nobody liked 30 years ago, or a video game or a comic book nobody cared about. And do you think anyone involved in any way in shit like The A-Team or GI Joe actually cared about it? Did the directors or writers really yearn to tell a story? Did the actors really try to find the inner B.A. Baracus? No, they didn't care, and I think they actually hate anyone who actually paid money or wasted their precious cable time to see their shitty movies.


The indie ghetto is almost as bad, but at least you don't feel the hate for the audience from every frame. More like condescension. You know as soon as you see the handwritten credits while a guy and girl tonelessly sing with a kazoo or ukulele, you're gonna get a story about a guy who works as a crossword puzzle editor who's gonna meet a girl who knits sweaters for birds navigate their way through the trials and tribulations of being young, quirky, and upper middle-class.

Then there's a gazillion CGI movies where plastic shiny animals trade pop culture references and fart at each other, but as I'm childless, I don't have to watch those.

It's been said there are only a handful of original stories, everything since the time of the Greeks or Cavemen or whatever has just been updating and refining these universal themes. But there are really only two themes for a good movie.

There is only "Holy Crap! Check this out!" and "Listen to this story." Examples of "Holy Crap! Check this out" would embrace everything from Buster Keaton to musicals to martial arts to exploitation flicks. "Listen to this story" could be anything from "There's this cab driver who's all messed up" to "This village keeps getting raided so they try to find some protection" to "This cowboy goes on a 5 year obsessive quest to track down his niece."

Obviously, "Listen to this story" could apply to anything, even movies based on crappy kid's TV shows that were made to sell toys, but it has an important qualifier. As soon as you have to add sentence like "Yeah, you remember that old commercial/sci-fi movie from the '50s/TV show," the "Listen to this" story gets weakened, and eventually dies. If you have to add, "Someone wears a fat suit and farts a lot" or "Nicolas Cage and John Travolta" or "Adam Sandler and his less-funny friends" or "Yeah, it's Will Smith's kid" the genre shrivels up.

Is this a perfect system? No, it's not. It's more a "I'll know it when I see it" system. But it works for me. I guess. I'm watching a PBS American Experience on the Civil War as I write this, so maybe I am too old to comment on pop culture.

I'm on a Highway to Hell

I'm on the desk watching a girl walk across the lobby.

"Look at that fucking hipster," I think. "Wearing big stupid 1985 mom sunglasses indoors, a pair of cowboy boots, some stupid mismatched sweater over an ugly skirt. Why do they do that to themselves? Why do hipsters and indie rockers go to such great lengths to make themselves ugly and childlike? Who the hell wants to be a kid? I didn't want to be a kid when I was a kid! I wanted to grow up so I could eat cake for breakfast and say bad words and drive cars and get into rated R movies. Screw that childhood innocence jazz."

"God, she's coming this way and...hey, wait a minute. She's walking sort of funny. You don't think she's... Oh shit. I've spent the last thirty seconds hating on a poor retarded woman. I am totally going to hell for that one."

Egg Raid on Mojo

Like a lot of people, I was a real creep from the ages of 14 to about 19. I’d like to think hormones and chemicals and what not had a lot to do with it, and in my defense, today my assholishness is more of an occasional embarrassing slip-up rather than a defining character trait.
There are many, many things that make me squirm now when looking back. I was an ugly, whiny little shit with no regard for anyone except myself and when I got in fights, I really should have just let whoever it was pound my ass just on principle.
Like many powerless, angry nerds, most of my damage was directed at property, because to paraphrase Bruce Lee, property can’t hit back. I had a group of friends that would meet up fairly regularly to go egging cars at night. We’d usually meet at my house, I’d sneak out and we’d head down to the 7-11. I don’t know why we didn’t just take eggs from our house, because it would have spared us the need to go into our little play.
“So, your mom wanted us to buy eggs?””Yeah, she said she was making a cake. Kind of crazy to be baking a cake at 3 in the morning, but you know, that’s what she said.”
I don’t know why we bothered, since at that hour the 7-11 usually employed scary burnout dudes more interested in their copy of Kerrang than whatever mischief a bunch of kids were up to.
Then we’d walk down Manatee Avenue, hiding in bushes and throwing eggs at cars. Sometimes we’d pick grapefruit from trees if we didn’t feel like buying eggs.
Every now and then when driving through some town early in the morning, trying to stay awake, I wonder what I’d do if I heard the thump of a grapefruit on my hood. Probably freak out, spin out of control and drive off a cliff in a ball of fire like in the movies.
Luckily, we never caused anyone to wreck, and we knew the side streets well enough never to get caught.
The thing is; being bad was just so much fun. It was exciting walking down deserted streets with a handful of produce with my nerd army. It was exhilarating running through the sleeping city, hiding in people’s backyards, wondering if this was the time we’d get caught. Sort of like when I discovered skating and would pull off long grinds and railslides down the curbs of the streets I had egged a few years earlier. There was a point where you can feel momentum taking over and you are purely responding to physics and gravity. That split second where you feel weightless, not knowing if you were going to pull off your ride or fall on the pavement was an amazing feeling, and one of the few I found that replicated being a little asshole.
I’ve never had my house or car egged, but if I did, I couldn’t really get too mad about it. It’d just be the scales of justice.