| |
| ||||||
|
bulls and china shops Freshman English class. High school, not college (though there were several of those several times, mostly because of my fondness for slipping out of said classes early to find a movie theatre to tuck myself away into, or a mostly empty slope to go screaming down before the after-work ski crowd showed up). A not-so-hot year for yours truly; I’d just moved with my family from Channelview, Texas, to another suburb of Houston, this one called Humble and anything but. There are two suburban classes in the Houston area, those with money and those who wish for it, and the difference between the two is fairly extreme. Channelview was a one-time farm town that got overdeveloped in the late ’70s and never stopped to consider the failure of said development while it continued to build new retail strips across every available field and pasture. Channelview ran right up on top of the Buffalo Bayou, wrapped its arms around oil refineries, established a series of ill-kept markets and department stores, and gave up on ever achieving much more. This is where I spent eight years of my childhood, the long sameness of it all broken up by adventures: the man who broke into the house with a shotgun while I was home alone, seven years old; the dead man who lived at the bottom of the swimming pool in the backyard; the drifter who slept in the woods across the street and who chased W. and I screaming from them; the teenagers who chased W. and I down for taking potshots at their classic car; a brief escape from my elementary school tenure to dine with the governor at Spindletop, one of those not-so-unique-anymore rotating restaurants (the governor — damn, I forget his name, but he predated Ann Richards and Bush, the Sequel — had a steak and wine; I had a hamburger); adventures in death-dealing and vandalism with pellet rifles; brushes with fame by association. Rusted pickups, people whose junk drawers overflowed and swamped their front lawns, kids who appeared at school one day and disappeared forever two weeks later, where being affluent meant having a freshly-washed car and a prefab home. That was Channelview. Humble was all about excess and the green, and the green was everywhere, money splashed about on luxury cars, luxury homes, luxury children, rich green lawns, lush green trees, the works. Fancy country clubs and golf courses (I think Tin Cup was shot on one of these courses). Gorgeous, inaccessible girls in Rockies and sleeveless shirts, with carefully fashioned wild hair fixed in place with sixteen bottles of AquaNet while driving their sixteenth-birthday-gift Lexuses and Acuras to school. If you were born in Humble, you never left, and so the cliques and class divisions were rigid by the time my future classmates were five years old. I arrived and spent two years — after which the family packed us off for Alaska, where people aren’t made of plastic so much as damp earth — bouncing off of bumpers like a ball on a snooker table. There wasn’t any way to crack my way in, and I was never really the sort to try too hard anyway. J. and I were good friends, and he was one of the lifers who did his best to forcibly insert me into his little crowd. It didn’t work, and he tried every scheme he could, including passing me off as his half-brother from up north, which went over so easily that I ended up with a coattail personality completely separate from my actual one. Anyway: freshman English. The teacher was a short, thin-haired man named Y., effeminate and flighty, who split his time between following curriculum and trying to teach us a respect for the finer things. In his case, opera and classical music. Which doesn’t go over well in a Texas town, even a fairly wealthy one: the most cultured Texan would still rather get drunk at the Astrodome on a summer afternoon; it’s just a matter of whether they’re sitting on a tailgate or in a private box. I’ve got to give Y. credit, though; he deviated from the reading curriculum, got himself in a little bit of trouble for it, but he inadvertently taught me a love for classic science fiction, particularly Childhood’s End, which I’ve read a dozen times since, and and even a little fantasy. That year I read The Martian Chronicles for the first time, and have chewed through it a couple times a year ever since. Alright, so: culture. Y. arranged for our class, thirty or so advanced placement English kids, to spend an evening at the opera, and dining in an exclusive five-star restaurant. The opera was Madame Butterfly, the dinner a choice of veal or lobster, the dress code formal. J. and I arrived in Wranglers, Justins, brush poppers, dinner-plate-sized buckles, steel-laced belts, the works. Y. just about had a coronary, but I think he took it as a challenge: he would step up to the plate and show we two punks exactly how wonderful opera could be, and we would be ashamed, and apologize later. The thing is, we didn’t dress in defiance (okay, perhaps a little), but hell, neither of us owned tuxedoes, weren’t going to rent them. We didn’t expect everyone else to. The night was a disaster, the opera incredibly long, the meal absolutely too fine for my dumbed-down palate, the space between rows in the opera house too narrow for my lanky chicken legs, the distance from where J. and I sat too great for even the hardest-flung Everlasting Gobstopper to reach the stage. Two weeks later the school held a talent show during lunch period, expanding the usual forty minutes to two hours to accommodate all of the performances, and we saw everything from The Kid Who Would Later Sign With Sony doing an enthusiastic cover of John Michael Montgomery’s “Be My Baby Tonight” (particularly hilarious for the fact that the kid was an absolute geek, looked even more out of place in the cowboy getup than I did, and was fawned over by the entire cheerleading squad, who joined him onstage for his routine, cooing as he danced all herky-jerky around, mimicking the music video) to a faculty band desperately trying to pull off “Purple Haze”. The final act of the show was a duet: a lady history teacher whose name I don’t know, and Y., who appeared onstage in an iridescent turban, silk shirt, jewel-colored cummerbund, curly-toed sultan shoes. The two of them sang “A Whole New World,” the song from Aladdin, and you know, even from the last row of the auditorium, those Gobstoppers sailed straight and true, hit the mark every damn time.
| | 
 Subscribe to RSS feed My Flickr photostream My Twitter feed  exit musicwaiting, seeingthat faint sensation of losskninjathe boondock skeinshow to be betterthe chime-maker’s nemesissome things change, some don’t, etc.ohh hahh ohh hahhdamn you, mollyView complete archive
  Lust, CautionDouble IndemnityIron ManForgetting Sarah MarshallThere Will Be BloodGone, Baby, GoneLive Free or Die HardThe Indian RunnerThe Iron GiantContactAn Inconvenient TruthX-Men: The Last StandSuperman ReturnsEnigmaNobody's FoolLook, Up in the SkyNumb3rsMission: Impossible IIIHeavenThe AbyssThe Constant GardenerThe Mosquito CoastThe HustlerLimboGrizzly ManThe VerdictSuperman ReturnsElizabethtownBattlestar GalacticaYou Can Count on MeRolling Roadshow 2005The American PresidentMy DVD collection
 01. dreaming of falling02. marvelous descent03. a conversation04. the colors05. huffnagle island06. a hundred million07. sixty-six stories08. anyone earthbound09. a girl named eleanor10. a route obscure and lonely11. a certain stillness12. this is jack13. wide flat lands14. going home15. girl unscrewed16. slow rehabilitation17. twenty-three stories18. a far-off point19. fifteen years quiet20. a one-beer fella21. luminescence22. one-sided conversation23. hearts big and stupid24. nineteen seventy-eight25. first light26. a hundred years27. too long to stop now28. plainswept29. a widower in training30. spies and assets31. thirty years and then some32. leaping over couches33. cricket song34. eleanor's first kiss35. like so much ballast36. too much37. the longest wait38. the second ice storm39. rocket summer40. waiting41. wax wings42. breakup43. tough beans43. the heavy gray sea
| |  welcome to sxswthe last omelettesummer of '69firewalker with melady bewarehow to drink winefish waffle beanbagssmells like granny fannysimple requeststudent of okinawan historyoperation dinner outstraight on til morningbillions and ... eh, whateversighton the subject of overtimepermafrostedthis morning on the waythree days laterrally, monkeygrowing shamessmall moves, captainbored beyond beliefso well, so strong, so slowthat was a good dayamazing storiescracked your codevarieties of experiencehate it when she does thatmost likely to wear tightsshould've been a cowboymean old menand scenetime-traveling head-puncherwhat're the odds?big k daysthis base will explodno place like50/100/buh-byefurther baseball conversationslongest last rites everwatch the skieswho needs sleeprogue agentred shag carpet and iced teafuck you, murphyslow driftpyro, singular possessivedecompositionwide-eyed wonderoctober morningnational pasttimewordplaymovie buff extraordinairean approximate transcripti wonder if neil simon had a catteach my feet to flyunexploredold girlfriend
  AchewoodAlligators in a HelicopterArt of the Title SequenceThe Big PictureA.V. ClubBinary BonsaiBluishorangeBrand NewCollision DetectionConsumeristCynical-C BlogThe Daily FigureFacetiously MeFast CompanyFirelandFool's ParadiseFtrainHacking NetflixIn the Kitchen with KristieIn One Ear...Looks Good Works WellKathleen EdwardsMark SimonsonOblivioOne Good MoveOur Secret HandshakePhotoshop DisastersPhysical InterfacePosterwireRoger Ebert JournalRyan KeberlySarah's SketchesThe Snowsuit EffortThree-Letter Word for ArtTomorrow MuseumTraditionally Modern DesignsUnreasonable FaithWarpspireWired - EpicenterWired - Geekdad The Eleanor SketchesMy FlickrSketch GalleryThe Dialogue ArchivesManualBest Fiction, Vol. 1DS on Archive.orgHosted by Kionic 9rules member | |
| ||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||
