French Class Moments

Ever have one of those occurrences where you finally get something. Maybe it was something originally required of you to get. Maybe it wasn't. But I recently had one. It involved the comic strip Non-Sequitur. The one that replaced The Far Side in my local newspaper growing up. I just "got it" the other day.

*Not this particular entry, but the name of the comic as it were. I get this entry; it's mildly funny. I just pulled it from some random place on the Internets. Non-Sequitur never quite replaced The Far Side, but was an adequate comic.

Still, nothing compares to Calvin and Hobbes. Nothing replaced it. Here's the final, saddening and maddeningly glorious final entry:

Imaginations Of The Playground, Pt. 3

Isaac is a giant fan of the Playground. Ours, two blocks from the house, offset behind a school, features a long, vastly unkempt field one must traverse to get to the Playground. Isaac, excited and expectant, tries to get across the field. He never can. The ocean of grass is too large, too difficult. So he is inevitably carried to the destination. His energy conserved, he will begin to play on the smaller of the two playgrounds. Systematically conquering its slide by swinging dangerously back and forth then shooting himself down the slide. Only once has he overshot the slide. And did so with a great smile.

From this point, Isaac conquers the larger playground's slide. He climbs the half-parabolic wooden steps to the platform, leaps up to the next platform, then across the metal grating and onto the top of the slide. From the tippity top he yells "Hello" to all who will hear. He is on his mountain and looking down on us all from the apex of his incredible journey. Then, circuitously, he unleashes a glee-filled yell rife with static electricity as he plummets towards the slide's mouth. At this point, I either catch him or he semi-lands on his feet in the scattered and damp wood chips. Then, repeat.

Maybe we throw in a stomach-first ride on the swings. Perhaps a daring crossing of the metal, chain-linked ladder that lies parallel to the ground. And sometimes we just stand and watch and look around. And we always say "Goodbye" when we leave.

I am left to ponder this imagination. One that dares to see jungle gyms and slides and monkey bars and swings as jungle gyms and slides and monkey bars and swings. Not that seeing things as they are presented, as tokens and elements of immense joys, is naive perception -- it is, I realize, a great opposite.

Imaginations Of The Playground, Pt. 2

He has glasses. Those clear-framed ones with the semi-thick lenses. This little boy, no more than 10, wears un-boy like khaki shorts and a khaki button-down top. He also has a dark brown cowboy-like hat and a plastic, play-whip. And the playground, empty, except for his sister and Isaac and me, is his own installment of Indiana Jones.

There is the giant, looming snake pit that requires strength to swing across via the precipitous monkey bars. Evil-doers and monsters plague him, afflicting him with uncounted blows as he ascends and circuitously descends the red slide. Luckily he has this whip, store-bought, long coveted and undeniably needed, especially as they surround him at the slide's delta. He manages to escape and runs, swinging and whipping his arms about, across the cement desert to the more secluded and bastioned younger-kids playground. But his enemies follow. They chase and he fends them off, deftly managing to secure the prized artifact meticulously hidden by his now tether-ball playing sister. And back he runs.

He has his own sound FX. His own soundtrack that mixes plangently with the Star Wars theme. And I am left to ponder this modal imagination. Where the jungle gyms and slides and monkey bars and swings are grand artifices and obstacles and enemies that threaten to destroy humanity. Not that I think fending off imaginary bad guys is an un-heroic task -- in fact, I imagine, a great opposite.

Imaginations Of The Playground

Four kids played loudly out at the neighborhood playground. The one that sits in the cement lot behind the school, dedicated to a 10-year-old boy who must have tragically passed in 1990. These kids played their version of "House". The game that glamorizes adult-hood to pre-teen eyes. Each part of the playground was an aspect of the house. The mom requisitioned the slide set-up as her "room" of the house. The eldest girl, who decided, after much consideration, that her name was Trinity, had partitioned off the exoskeleton, shell-shaped jungle gym as her room.

The scene they re-enacted set-up like typical picket-fenced, suburbia magic. The mom and other daughter tended to the mundane tidying of the AM in their room, while, for her birthday, the dad (and only male in the troupe lest you impart a reverse Victorian scenario) had gotten Trinity a bike. He brought her over to it, stashed in the "living room" that typically was the picnic-tabled habitat of the warm afternoon school lunches of spring, fall and summer. He covered her eyes and she acted surprised while the mom and daughter shouted accolades and then other suggestions for better playing out the scene. Eventually, it all sadly broke down when Trinity folded back to her real-life persona, took her actual bike and sped off over a disagreement with the "mother".

I am left to wonder and ponder, standing in the dull brown wood chips, this modal imagination. Where the jungle gyms and slides and monkey bars and swings are merely appendices to a house where kids can enact the boring events of adult-hood. Not that giving your child a bike is a banal gesture -- in fact, I imagine, a great opposite.

Christmas Music, Bad Metaphors, Bad Headlines

A local Christian music station has given itself over to playing Christmas music already. It posits the reasoning rather brilliantly, in the little used metaphor. The music faithful listeners will hear, for the Christmas season, will be sung by artists that the station does not typically give airtime to. Their hope is that this will attract new listeners, which has worked in the past. To wit, they say: "Think of it as cleaning your house before guests come over." No. That's just wrong. It's more like renting a furnished apartment down the block and then cleaning it and then having guests come over. Maybe I'm just sensitive every time my surname is invoked.

Why do we have to play Christmas music? Why? At this point, hearing it, already, is like being invited to someone's house and it's not been cleaned.

The country is up in arms over this. So. They flew private jets. Would you rather have had them drive their Beamers and BMW's and Hyundai's?

This story was frontpage on CNN.com yesterday. Awesome. Inspiring. Only the headline was questionable because it read "Woman receives new lung from stem cells". Which, while not incorrect, reeks of agenda because, asking most people in the country about stem cells and they think the only type of stem cells are the controversial embryonic stem cells. When, in truth, there are more viable and potent stem cells in our own bodies. Yet, the average "logger-on" sees this and thinks, "See, if Bush wasn't an idiot, this would be SOP in America. America Rules! Bush is an idiot! We love America! Change is coming!" However, the stem cells were her own. You'll find that in the 11th graf.Why push forward with funding embryonic stem cell research, which, regardless of religious belief, is scientifically ethically dubious, when there's this method, that is more viable?

Finally, I just saw this when looking for one more thing to go off about. Obama's already ripped Nike's failed "I Can" sobriquet. I say go after VW with something like "American's Wanted." Or, there's the 2004 Red Sox motto, "Idiots" that I'd be okay with pirating. Maybe some take on the Mac-PC campaign and we can have, infused in the music bed, a catchy pop tune that will then become a sensation. Or, maybe, "Nothing Runs like a Deere in the Forest or in ANWR or Utah because there's no way we're drilling for oil on our own soil." There's the politically charged and insensitive, "We bring good things to life."

I need to go listen to some Christmas music; and clean my house.

America, Be Proud!

America rejoices today. Justice has been served.

Elliot's Hot Dogs

Describing the nuances of a what makes a hot dog good is like applying Shakespeare to Dumb and Dumber (I could; let's try. Hmm. It's a movie of Infinite Jest. There. I did it. Shakespeare to Dumb and Dumber. Yup. Well. Big Gulps). 

Maybe it was the compressed, fried and manually flattened rolls, the thin, flimsy, dripping wet sponge hot dogs they recklessly pulled from the metal vat, the relish sacked in the soggy space between the two, or the tangy, tart and lick-your-lips goodness of Ipswich Ale Mustard (available online!) that leaked over the waxen paper.  Eating an Elliot's Hot Dog was a noble cause. One of those food indulgences you suffered the slings and arrows for later on. 

I always got three Hot Dogs with the Works. "Three dogs with the works," I'd say. Whether it was at the end of a senior-year day of high school, a snack before an evening church service, breaks in-between Driver's Ed class, or at the end of a long, long out-of-the-way stop from West Virginia, I always got three dogs with the Works (Ketchup doesn't belong on a hot dog. See, someone wrote a book about it. I'm not wrong. You just don't put ketchup on a hot dog).

Best Hot Dog I've ever had. Alas, I knew them well.

Oh, and Dad, I know you didn't like Elliot's Hot Dogs. Not a bit. But if you say "Methinks I smell a rat," well, that just wouldn't be nice because I'm feeling a little lost right now because they closed my favorite place in the whole freaking universe to eat, a place where I spent a lot of my childhood eating at and now that place is gone and I'll never eat there again and so it feels like a huge part of my childhood is gone and just cast aside like it means nothing especially when it's been like two years since I last had those three dogs with the Works and it was like 10pm when I had them in a hotel room and so I don't even think I enjoyed them that much and I didn't get them from the real hole-in-the-wall by the church where I really like to get the hot dogs from the place, where, you could probably quote Hamlet at any other time and I laugh and I'd be like "Yeah, that place! Wow it was a dump!" but I'm just not gonna be like that this time because they closed Elliot's and didn't even tell anyone they were gonna close it so a lot of other people didn't get to enjoy their last Elliot's Hot Dog cause they just didn't know and I think if they knew they would've enjoyed that last hot dog and they wouldn't feel lost and really vulnerable right now. Like me. So, Dad, don't say that.