I had an elevated opinion of my interests in explosives as something much more high-minded than the annoying, jackass kid screwing around with fireworks that I was. No, I appeared to myself more like a Mr. Wizard (popular TV science kid’s show of the ’50′s and early ’60′s) or the latter day Mythbusters, conducting experiments in the impermanence of matter. I would always say: “What would happen if we…” and then go blow it up.

Stand back from this story, kids, and don’t try this at home.

My two favorite weapons of crass destruction were those deadly old standbys, M-80′s and Cherry Bombs. After all my teen years acquiring those items illegally from Ohio, you’d think I’d be minus a finger or two, or been tagged ‘Stumpy’ by the neighborhood kids but all my limbs and digits remained intact because I also had a healthy fear of their power. Fascination and fear go hand in hand if you have any sense of self preservation.

M-80′s were the acknowledged powerhouse but Cherry Bombs were waterproof (fuse and all) and having that extra special trait opened up a host of possibilities around the water theme. For instance, I liked to put water in various metal containers to see what sort of blast might displace the water to such an extent that it came apart.

Let me be clear. This is a stupid thing for a kid to do. There is a lot of powder in these things and blowing up metal objects is like sitting around in the back yard playing with hand grenades. And yet, I did it, and repeatedly, sometimes doubling the charge. The idea was to dream up a scenario (decide on what to blow up, figure the necessary size of the blast), light the fuse, drop the Cherry Bomb(s) and run fast and hard. I had a big backyard so there was plenty of room to run and still witness the results.

Initially, I blew apart a few metal wastebaskets, spewing water everywhere and ripping them apart at the seams. Then I found an old teapot, small but just big enough to get a Cherry Bomb taped to a small rock (so it sank to the bottom) through its opening. This would be a very confined space so, we theorized, the blast would have a lot of compression and the water nowhere to go; meaning that if we were to stumble on the ‘run away’ part of the experiment, there was a decent chance we could make a trip to the ER.

It exploded with unbelievable force and actually tore apart the metal crimping that adhered the bottom of the pot to the top, leaving a trail of water beads and shooting the dismembered top more than 200 feet in the air. Try as we might, we never found the top half of the pot even though we watched its descent into the vacant field next door. Imagining a Cape Canaveral scenario, we decided that it must have burned up upon re-entry.

Obviously, all of this had nothing to do with celebrating the birth of our nation. Not only that, but the nation, as I knew it on our block, was not kindly toward my pyrotechnic experiments. My next door neighbor, Mr. King, was a really good guy but, unfortunately for him, he was surrounded by a houseful of boys on his right, a houseful of girls across the street and Wernher von Braun on his left. The guy had nowhere to go but down into the bomb shelter and there were several occasions where he expressed his displeasure over my July bombing run.

All these years later, I can sympathize with his shell-shocked plight and wonder why he never played the ultimate trump card and called the police to stop my illegal blasts but, as angry as he would sometimes get, he refrained from sending me into a life of juvenile incarceration. He was a good neighbor and I was a myopic, disrespectful dumb shit. I thought I was entitled to set off nerve-destroying fireworks in my backyard. Isn’t that what we fought for in the revolutionary war…fireworks displays?

While I was constantly fascinated with water explosions (I even tried the lake), I also made forays into buried charges beneath a battalion of plastic army men and machines, and eventually took to the air in a stunning exhibition of the frailty of cheap wood.

My friend, Bobby, and I decided (actually I decided and he assisted) to strap an M-80 onto one of those inexpensive balsa gliders and let the splinters fall where they may. First we rigged the glider, Scotch taping the bomb in place and then I shimmied up the tree around 25 feet or so. From there I would light the fuse and toss the plane into the air while Bobby watched from below. Making a couple of dry test runs (sans lit fuse) we quickly realized that the smaller gliders we were using suffered from the weight of the M-80 so we went back over to the dime store (a couple of blocks away) and got one of the big gliders, not only with a larger wing span and fuselage but a wind-up rubber band propeller to help sustain the flight.

The tree was about 10 feet from the house but I’d be sending it out towards the backyard where there was plenty of room for its eventual destruction. Everything was set and the test run was a complete success so I went back up in the tree, farther up this time, wound the propeller, lit the fuse and let it go. At first, it sailed beautifully out of the tree, sparks flying from the fuse, both of us in delightful anticipation of the great blast.

And then, it turned.

Balsa gliders are notoriously fickle. There was a slight breeze and the plane began to bank and turn back toward the house, right where Bobby was standing. There was a moment where I flashed upon a life behind bars, having killed my boyhood friend with a weapon I devised and delivered from a tree top. Bobby still had those young legs to rely on and took off running but the maniacal suicide plane turned every time he did and the way it followed his every move started to make me giggle because it looked so Buster Keatonish. I know, I know, amuse yourself with a predicament like this and you’re flirting with a trip to hell, but I couldn’t help it. I was both appalled and entertained at the same time.

Finally, Bobby dove out of harm’s way and the glider exploded with a deafening thunderclap and there it was…50 cents well spent. Bobby was a bit shaken but unharmed, declaring that next time he would be the one in the tree and I could run around the yard in fear of the balsa-blaster. But testing was temporarily suspended after Mr. King came out in his back yard to tell me, in more gentile wordage, what a crazy fuck I was and why didn’t I go do something useful.

I’m not an authority on children but, if I’m not mistaken, flirting with danger is pretty routine for a kid, and flaunting authority is a close second. I wouldn’t have been doing my kidley duty if I weren’t tempting fate. Even though he had no children, it’s likely that Mr. King understood that, but I’m sure that tidbit of knowledge didn’t make the noise any more palatable. In his place, I’m calling the police and shutting the ammunition dump down.

I liked Mr. King’s style when he’d finally blow a gasket and had to tell me about it. He was like a cranky Wally Cox and it would just all come spurting out in a stream of frustration which was both instructive and entertaining. As I’ve gotten older and looked into the crystal ball of my future I’ve been practicing some of Mr. King’s classic old style rants and figure I can use them when I’m finally confined to the front porch with nothing to do but bitch at the neighbor kids.

I was 3.

While most, if not all, children at that age lack the knowledge and dexterity to handle such a chore, I moved around the kitchen with the grace of Fred Astaire and before long had settled upon a classic menu: eggs, toast and coffee. It was, of course, the fabulous ’50′s and there was no reason to go beyond the basics; just make a good, solid American meal.

I began my project at 5:30am Sunday morning and, having little concept of time, planned on a meal time of 6:30. Also, wishing to make this a semi-formal affair and remembering the old phrase ‘fancy pants’, I went the extra mile and actually put some pants on. Then I went about assembling the necessary food items from the fridge, selecting the proper fry pan, utensils and prepping the toaster.

Finally, I located the can of Maxwell House coffee and tried to deduce how an adult might make a pot of coffee. Pot, check. Coffee, check. Stove, check. Water? I was not sure about the proportion of water to coffee. In fact, I wasn’t sure about the proportion of coffee, period, but went about tossing in an approximate amount along with an approximate measure of water and cranked up the burner to an approximate temperature for an approximate time.

Since the toast was going to be the easiest task (because what 3 year old can’t make toast?) I concentrated on the intricacies of frying eggs in a pan. I’d never had the occasion to do that before but assumed, through my superior intellect, that one had to extract the egg from the shell and then toss it in the pan. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen it done on TV, watched others perform the task, or read a detailed essay in the Ladies’ Home Journal. I didn’t know how hungry everyone would be so I splurged (hell, it’s Mother’s Day!) and cracked open nearly all the eggs in the carton.

When everything was complete to the best of my knowledge, I went to gather my parents, still asleep from their late night adult lives, and while my father appeared a bit resistant at first, I explained my efforts and called upon their celebratory selves to join me in a festive breakfast created as an homage to my mother on Mother’s Day. Slowly, they gathered themselves together to see the good deed I had done.

“Happy Mother’s Day!”, I exclaimed, waiting for the plaudits I knew were to come. My mother replied, “Oh my!”, with almost delirious surprise, but my father only stared at the kitchen with what can safely be termed ‘awe’, which I interpreted as reverently impressed beyond speech.

Sounds good, right?

Now, at this point the story tends to differ between my mother’s recollection and mine but I believe, due to my mother’s advanced age, my account is likely more accurate so here it goes:

Then we all sat down at the table I had properly set between food preparation. I poured their coffee, politely offered fresh squeezed orange juice to any who wished it and served our entrée. I recall them being a bit too voracious to speak through the consumption of such delicious fare but some of the comments went like the following.

Mother: “Son, I am deeply touched by your wonderful gift and amazed at your remarkable skills in the kitchen. You are surely the most talented 3 year old in the world!

Father: “Yes, son, I was always a big fan of yours but this food is almost better than your mother’s…ha,ha! From now on, whenever you want to toss the ball around or spend some quality time, just ask and I’ll be there. Thank you for being you.”

My mother went out to tend to her garden. My father went to work on his stamp collection and I cleaned up the kitchen until it sparkled. What a wonderful start to a great day.

My mother’s version mentioned coffee grounds everywhere on the floor mixed with broken eggs, a hearty pat on my backside for a nice try and my father grumbling something all the way back to bed to sleep off the prior evening’s indulgence, but I don’t think that’s right. I should know, I was there.

Happy Mother’s Day, mom…and, once again, you’re welcome.

In the story, 10 More Musical Bookmarks, where I related the tragic tale of record destruction at the paws of my toy poodle, Pepe, I mistakenly named the wrong perpetrator for, as my mother reminded me tonight, by the time of the great record disaster, Pepe was gone and Princess was on the job.

So, Pepe, even though I wasn’t your most ardent fan (I always hated your yapping), you don’t deserve the desecration of your memory just because I have a memory like a sieve. For that misrepresentation, I’ve gone back to the aforementioned piece and made the proper corrections and your reputation as a little, annoying shit is restored. For the sake of time, however, I’m making no changes to the picture that supposedly depicted you in the act because, frankly, we weren’t particularly accurate with your portrait in the first place so the picture could be any of a thousand poodles.

Anyway, sorry, Pepe.

I should never have dropped the charges...

As to, Princess, the real criminal in this sordid story, I should have remembered it was you all along because you were a miniature. A toy poodle like Pepe would be staring at a record the size of his whole body but YOU were just big enough to clamp down on that plastic like a Grizzly on a deer shank. After some more recall it dawned on me that the 3 records described in the story were only part of the destruction…there was more.

On that fateful day, another classic 45 record was demolished and when I found the broken remains of Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett’s “Monster Mash” I knew that an old friend had been taken from me and Halloween stood in potential ruins. But I guess some poodles lack tolerance for music they don’t understand or was this just a random act of violence?

Perhaps you were sending a message in response to me chiding you for your loss of bladder control when you’d greet us at the front door. C’mon, you had to know that I wasn’t going to be happy with you treating my pant leg like a passing tree trunk. You had anxiety issues. I mean, didn’t you ever wonder why we kept you at arms length when you got excited? I got tired of changing shoes…and for that you decided that Frank Sinatra must be silenced? Shame on you, Princess.

Or maybe you figure we should have looked the other way while you went on your merry sex romp with a stray in front of all my friends. Do you have any idea of the humiliation I suffered that day just because you and ‘what’s his name’ decided to hook up like a couple of box cars? Hell, ya, my uncle turned the hose on you. Years later when I went into therapy, the terrible image of the laughing neighbor kids…laughing and laughing and laughing. Was it for the hose thing that Little Eva’s “Locomotion” was derailed?

And, no, we didn’t have much money in those days and couldn’t afford to get you spayed but my mother fashioned a wonderful makeshift sanitary belt for you to trot around in. Maybe you thought you, being a poodle and all, were just too good to wear homemade gear and deserved designer wear? For this you gnawed on an innocent recording of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence”? No bullet could have hurt as bad as those vicious teeth sinking into a fictitious historical pop song.

You see, this is why I never liked poodles. They take themselves WAY too seriously.

Smaller version of me rec room jamming to the big bands

The only child’s goto move is ‘alone time’ and much of that was spent sifting through mountains of albums, unconcerned with genre or style, breathing it all in like fresh air on a spring day. When I was old enough to play my dad’s records and, moreover, when I was old enough to buy them myself, I listened to anything and everything and within every genre it seemed there was something there for me, some sort of random gem that spoke to me.

I think it’s usual for most people to be attracted to certain specific styles and that’s how artists find their audience and listeners find their favorites but, for me, there was value in nearly everything because it always seemed like a big room of relatives all joined at the hip. Genres drew inspiration from one another and the linage of music was exactly that; artists and composers who studied their predecessors with the same intensity they examined their contemporaries.

One big ball of energy is how I viewed the whole of music and I could be inspired by any branch of it and while my tastes appeared on the surface as an improbable mish-mash, I always felt like to exclude something was to lose something and I just had to hear it all. My only requirement is that it had to be quality work but that never seemed to be a problem.

The result of this audio love fest was, for example, an evening of selections like this: Peter, Paul and Mary – Late Again, Jack Teagarden – “Basin Street Blues”, Dinah Shore – “Buttons and Bows”, Jimmy Smith – “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy”, Jerry Lee Lewis – “Great Balls of Fire”, London Philharmonic – Bruch’s ‘Scottish Fantasy’, 4 Seasons – “Sherry”, Errol Garner – “Misty”, Beach Boys – “Good Vibrations”, Gershwin – Porgy and Bess, Dave Brubeck – “Blue Rondo à la Turk”, The Ventures – “Walk Don’t Run”, Dave Dudley – “Six Days On The Road”, The Beatles – “Within You Without You”, Otis Redding – “Respect”…you get the point.

So I sat down there on the couch, in front of the old Zenith stereo cabinet record player, night after night, losing myself in the wealth of variety, learning instrument techniques and vocal harmonies and a pile of other essentials that I’ve ended up using almost every day of my professional life as a musician.

As a kid I didn’t share all of these things with my buddies because rock and roll/pop was their thing, as it was with most of my friends. I was pretty sure they didn’t care about my eclectic choices and I didn’t think they’d get it if, after listening to the new Neil Sedaka song, I just slapped on an old Jimmy Durante recording. I was confident that I’d be mocked and then I’d have to get pissed and toss the lot of ‘em out of my lair and so I kept these preferences to myself because, well, I get me.

This was somewhat of a curse because I desperately wanted to share all this bounty with other people. I remember in college, somewhere in my 3rd year, an ex-girlfriend of mine came over to my apartment and, knowing she was a musician herself, I played her one of my favorite big band/blues recordings, Jack Teagarden singing “St. James Infirmary”, a live performance while Teagarden was playing trombone (and singing) in Louis Armstrong’s band in the late 40′s.

I got so ridiculously excited that she was listening to this that after it was over I went into some weird dissertation for the next 20 minutes on his stylistic vocal choices and broke down the trombone solo and on and on and on, and then I caught myself. It was probably how she was looking at me that snapped me out of my rambling trance but I suddenly realized that I was that kid with the new bike, wanting to ride it all over the neighborhood to show my friends.

I was embarrassed…but only a little.

Especially when you’re younger you expect everyone to be as enthused and moved by the things that move you and, of course, that’s rarely so. There was one person that did have some of that same Renaissance approach to the arts and he wasn’t even a musician. My friend, George and I, pals since Kindergarten, became quite close during our high school years and, seeing a kindred spirit in me, he was not the least bit hesitant to show me what he was into musically.

But as much as he loved James Brown and John Lennon, he took the entire recording experience to another place with his passion for…speeches. Technically, this wasn’t music but to his ears it was a concert and I’d go over there some days and he’d be listening to Martin Luther King’s masterful oration and he’d know the speech word for word. OK, he lost me a little bit with UCLA basketball coaching legend, John Wooden, and his locker-room motivational speeches but it was music to George’s ears and he would explain to me the life lessons Wooden was imparting on his players.

Still, no one in his family quite got what he was doing except me and that’s primarily why we were such fast friends. George was just as passionate about those speeches as I was about my musical menagerie and, in the end, we both derived inspiration from these recorded works that was unobtainable in any other fashion. More about George later.

I think the larger point to be made is regardless of the nature of that which brings profound joy into your life, grab hold of that thing and find a place for it in your heart and make it a source of power you can depend on. That’s what the arts are for, to lift our incomplete souls out of the crapper and onto the runway, and I’ll always be grateful for my little rec room and its endless gifts.

1) Ry Cooder – “Yellow Roses”: I’ve had an irrational love for this 1955 Hank Snow classic ever since I started tooling around the streets of Portland, Oregon and playing my 1976 cassette of Cooder’s Chicken Skin Music; caterwauling at the top of my lungs, “But I’ll still love you, though yellow roses say goodbye”. It’s the quintessential broken hearted dirge that is chock full of schmaltz and hang-dog sentimentality and I absolutely cannot tell you why, to this day, Cooder’s version of this song is so permanently lodged in my ever-accommodating mind. 35 years later I’ve finally given into its Trekkian tractor beam and begun performing it live in my act.

2) Aretha Franklin – “Dr. Feelgood” (from Live At Fillmore West): I’ll never forget bringing this great album home from college in about my sophomore year and playing it in my mother’s living room and assuming that she would grasp the unbelievable power of Franklin’s vocals. Instead, she looked up and remarked, “She sure does scream a lot”…Oh.

3) Randy Newman – “Marie”: From 1974′s Good Old Boys, this gem of a song sat in the middle of a theme album about the redneck deep south. It is one of the most hauntingly beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard, ironically surrounding a sad, pathetic. drunken attempt at expressing love. Although, I didn’t quite share the subject’s abject failure, I looked at it in the greater sense as an anthem for people’s often spectacular inability to know how to love another person.

Controversial artist rendering depicting Princess as innocent bystander

4) Gene Pitney – “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence”, Frank Sinatra – “My Way”, Little Eva – “Locomotion”: These three unrelated 45 singles are lumped together by mutual circumstance, as they were all victims of a 1969 heinous, unprovoked, murderous spree by our toy poodle, Princess. In particular, getting over the loss of the Pitney and Eva records was so traumatic that I shunned that vinyl destroyer until her final exit. The fact that she didn’t choke on the shards disproved, for me, the theory of ‘instant karma’.

5) The Tokens – “The Lion Sleeps Tonight“: We had a tunnel that ran under the busy street that led to our grade school. They built the thing because the wee ones were getting routinely mowed down and then, of course, they staffed it with Safety Patrol kids, which was a cool job with a cool belt and about the same authority as hall monitor…keep in a straight line, no talking. I wrangled my way onto the Safety Patrol. This was a long, cavernous, concrete tunnel and when all the kids had finally cleared the tunnel and I was sure I was alone, I sang “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” because the falsetto part sounded awesome in the massive reverberation.

6) Yma Sumac – Legend of the Jivaro & Voice of the Xtabay: Because I had unusual tastes as a kid, in 1958 I brought these two albums into my second grade class for ‘show and tell’. Yma Sumac supposedly had some royal Inca heritage but what was not supposition was her amazing 5 octave voice and the wild, exotic vocals she brought to the Latin American rhythms. I’m not sure what my classmates thought but then I didn’t much care. I just thought they needed to know something outside of the monkey bars.

7) Camille Saint-Saëns – Danse Macabre: I’d always loved the graphic spookiness of this French tone poem and the story it was based on, an orchestral interpretation of the dance of death, complete with the sounds of the skeletons and other assorted creepy crap. When I was a senior in college I talked my sociology prof into letting me run one of the lectures about music and I played this piece after turning the auditorium into complete darkness. While in the dark I went about collecting wallets and purses and ended up with enough money to pay my next semester’s tuition. OK, every thing’s true except for that last part but you’ve got to admit; what a great idea for a fund-raiser.

8) Clyde King – “Wolverton Mountain”: For unknown reasons, since I bought lots of other 45′s there, this song reminds me of Kresge’s dime store when I was a kid. I bought my first single there, “When I Fall In Love” by The Lettermen, but this short-lived country hit brings back vivid images and even the smell of the store. If you had 39 cents, the music world was open for business.

9) Steely Dan – “Pearl of the Quarter”: At my mother’s place during one of my college summer breaks and I heard this song one morning on the radio. Little did I know this was just a gateway drug to the endless genius of Donald Fagen and his ability to mainstream what were essentially jazz chord structures into memorable pop creations. It was brilliantly executed and never replicated.

10) N.E.R.D. – “Hot-N-Fun”: For the past few years I’ve been running a dance party for brain injured adults in foster care. Long after I’ve surrendered the ability to get funky and I’m sitting around wondering where my knee cartilage went, this ‘get your ass up and dance’ bass line will remind me of the wonderful people I worked with and just how cool it is to let your body get lost in the moment. Life is all about the ‘groove’ and this song has a great one.

Toby was about 13 at the time we got him, and I think that his former owner would have been happy with the fact that a child was there to play with him and that my mother was willing to cater to his preferences. Toby was a fairly gentle dog and I liked him but Mrs. Smith had spoiled him as to his habits regarding cuisine.

Anti-family-terrorist exercises with Toby

Dog food in a can or bag, or any other such container was rejected outright and Toby would pull a prison-like hunger strike and just walk away whether he was famished or not. It would have been so much more authentic if we’d sewn him a little orange jump suit and stenciled some random numbers on it. Then he could have played the part to the max and we could have taken the suit in as needed in relation to the number of days he ignored dog food.

But, no, my mother thinking that since we’d accepted responsibility for Toby we’d also be obliged to keep him alive, so she acquiesced to his demands which were a tad unusual. Apparently he’d been raised on only two food items: candy corn (you know, the little goofy orange things at Halloween) and fried liver.

The liver had to be prepared fresh from the butcher, straight to the dish, so every single night my mother had to whip out the frying pan (he wouldn’t eat it raw) and have that lovely fried liver aroma floating through the kitchen. When I was a kid I sort of liked liver and onions but I think that having it hit me in the face on a daily basis ended any future interest.

So Toby got his liver and then we were supposed to toss him a few candy corns whenever he or we were in the mood. That dog could knock down candy corn like a Jello-shooting college student at a frat party, basically making him a sugar/liver junkie. I don’t know if that contributed to the ‘incident’ since he was a relatively calm dog but we can definitely establish that he was into guarding his ‘interests’.

My dad (father #2) and Toby got along pretty well but one night around 2am, as was not unusual, dad stumbled in from yet another alcohol fest at Club 99, pretty well smashed and reeking of beer and cigarettes. From previous stories you can see that my dad’s demeanor completely changed when besotted and I’m only guessing here that this contributed to Toby’s confusion at just who was coming in the front door.

To compound the problem the house was completely dark and my dad couldn’t find the light switch. To make things worse, Toby had cataracts so I’m assuming that seeing things in the dark wasn’t the first sensory radar he counted on. Anyway, my dad barely slurred the “Hi, Tob…” when Toby lunged like a lion on a gazelle and locked down sideways on my dad’s jaw, piercing both cheeks and drawing blood.

After my mother got the light on and the mistaken identity revealed, I’m assuming that Toby felt some remorse but maybe not. Maybe he was making a statement about my dad’s behavior and, not being able to put it into words, could make his strident point and pretend that it was an accident. “Hell, it was dark…could have been a burglar for all I knew…I didn’t know what I was doing…I was hopped up on candy corn”, he might have said in his faux defense.

Pure conjecture on my part.

Fortunately, we knew that Toby had received his rabies shot so there was no worry of my dad having to go through the painful array of rabies shots that are sometimes administered after a dog bite. Nevertheless, Toby had made his mark and it must have left him in a real sour mood because he started getting snippety with the neighbor kids, even leaving a dental impression on my neighbor friend, Mike.

After a couple of years, Toby retired to the great doggy beyond but, I must say, after he took out the drunken version of my dad I felt a little safer at night knowing that if you didn’t belong in my house, Toby would take care of things.

Note to Toby (wherever you are): if you happen to run into my dad you might want to fashion a little apology but it’s totally your call, ‘awesome defender of the realm’.

Since I’ve become quite a fan of randomness, here are several of mine in no particular order:

1) Chris Montez – “Let’s Dance”: Me and a buddy were always looking for a place to ‘camp out’ since that gave us the go ahead to talk the puberty talk and speculate on what we would do if we did have a girlfriend, but mostly it was an excuse to stay up late until we conked out in mid-sentence. I was about 11 when my mother’s boyfriend parked his unseaworthy Cabin Cruiser reclamation project in our backyard so we camped out in that thing and listened to Chris Montez swamp the AM airwaves all night. That organ riff will be in my head forever.

2) Joni Mitchell – “Shades Of Scarlett Conquering”: In my mid-twenties and outside a Portland, Oregon cafe/club, flat on my back on the floor of my open doored van, headset on and blubbering like a baby because my then girlfriend was doing a boy tour of the club which didn’t include me. What a wuss. A little more maturity and I would have been doing the same thing myself but oh, poor me….what a wuss. “Shades…” may have been a curious song to use as a ‘blubbering’ catalyst but nobody writes angst like Joni and this was a good one. Did I mention, what a wuss?

3) Roy Orbison – “In Dreams” and The Entire Catalog: About 9 or 10, in my babysitter’s basement listening to 45′s and discovering the unbelievable magic of Roy Orbison thinking, WTF (maybe not that exact abbreviation), who sings like that? These records belonged to the older brothers in their family but they were a revelation to me. Orbison had these curiously nerdy looks and a sonic voice that went on to haunt me for another 50 years. When “Blue Bayou” came out in ’62 I used to put my transistor radio under my pillow at night and wish to hell I could sing like that. I woke up with a lot of dead batteries.

4) Ray Charles – “Ruby”: I spent tons of time in the rec room of our basement sitting on the couch listening to records and day dreaming. I did it so much I could have qualified as Howard Hughes’ Vegas roommate. If there was ever an anthem for my self-reflection dungeon time it was Charles’ achingly brilliant version of this song that I bonded with.

5) Richard Wagner – “Ride of the Valkyries”: One of the great favors my dad (father #2) did through my elementary school years was to leave an eclectic collection of records in the basement for me to find and absorb. I may have had little of him but I had plenty of what he was about. Frankly, “Ride of the Valkyries”, the musical vision of the mad warrior chicks on horses, flying out of the heavens used to scare the shit out of me but it was a cheap thrill I loved. Years later when they used the piece during the helicopter gunship scene in the movie, Apocalypse Now, it was the Vietnam war that was scaring the shit out of me.

6) Tommy Dorsey – “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You”: Speaking of my dad (father #2), this song always triggers immediate flashbacks to him; the smell and touch of him, the kind parts of him, the talents he possessed are all unleashed from this recording. I recall sitting in the legendary Stanich’s Tavern in Northeast Portland some time in the late seventies and while everybody knocked down their Stanich burger and brew I melted into the jukebox for 2 or 3 minutes or so. It doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing.

7) Edgar Winter’s White Trash – “Save Our Planet”: I was working at a college radio station when I discovered this soul/blues/R&B/Rock and Roll/gospel masterpiece and I’ve never listened to another album that sustained such raw energy and, by random association, captured how intense my personal motor was running at the time. There was a period of time during those school years where I rode this album like a surfboard from one crazy-ass endeavor to another. I just listened to it again just now and I think I need a nap.

8) Bobby Day – “Rockin’ Robin”: We’re talking the 1957 original here and it was a song that my next door neighbor, Madelene (in her late teens at the time), loved. Now I had a kid crush on Madelene so discovering that she liked this song turned it into something else entirely. I was about 9 or 10 and she’d come over to watch me on occasion and in an effort to please I’d play that 45 over and over and even embellish it by playing my drum set live along with the record. I set that record on the dedicated 45 player and it played in constant repetition until the grooves turned white and the record eventually disintegrated into dust…pretty much as people do.

9) Doris Day – “Que Sera Sera”: I cannot think of this 1954 ditty without thinking of my mother who hauled it around the house like she owned it, waltzing from room to room trying to find ways to stylize it more like Doris. I, on the other hand, being a 6 or 7 year old prankster, was lying in wait behind the hallway pillar until she’d come crooning by and I’d jump out and scare the Doris Daylights out of her. I’m still making up for that one.

10) Curtis Mayfield – “Choice of Colors”: This is a dual purpose piece that established 2 very prominent memories. First of all, my dear lifelong friend, George, and I were nuts about this song in high school, especially what it said about humanity and racism. Secondly, in the late eighties my girlfriend and I were lying in bed late at night tossing songs to each other and I kicked out “Choice of Colors” and she proceeded to sing every last lyric. That was when I knew I loved her without reservation and began the lobbying effort to marry me.

Well, that’s just a scant 10 of mine…if the mood strikes, perhaps you’d like to share 1 or 2 in the reply mode below?

I looked forward to it because I loved the decorations, the ritual of trimming the tree and the holiday accoutrement that would bring the whole house into the season. This was a solitary endeavor that didn’t include my mother because the idea was to surprise her when she returned home, usually on a Saturday night after a date, coming into the driveway and getting that first glimpse of the neon picture window.

As much as I enjoyed the doing, I enjoyed the element of surprise because I worked it from the ground up so there was no hint of what to come. After we’d finally retired that magnificent specimen of the late ’50′s and early ’60′s, the aluminum tree with the ever revolving color wheel, there would be no tree waiting in the wings and so no giveaway as to what, when or how.

From the time I was old enough to manage the entire operation I got hold of her schedule, waited until she left and began the process by hiking to any nearby tree seller, buying something I could manhandle and, with no car at my disposal, would drag the tree however many blocks back to my house through the snow. Youth served me well in those days because if I tried that today, they’d find me the next morning, face down, having made at least a valiant effort before the coronary.

That’s why now we just take it out of the box.

The other thing to take into account were the dimensions of the tree stand which I had to visualize in my head because the damn thing was made out of cast iron and would be like hauling a boat anchor and a tree and, youth or not, I wasn’t up for that. So, as I usually do with everything (tape measure be damned), I eyeballed it and then matched the picture in my head to the prospective tree and usually came out remarkably close. Also, I had to get the height right but that was a much easier task.

After pulling the sacrificial vegetation into the garage I got a hacksaw and made the angle cut on the base so it could suck up water once in the stand and then left the inevitable trail of pine tears as I dragged it up the stairs, into the living room and up on the stand. I put plastic down on the carpet under the stand and filled it with water and added sugar to hasten its consumption, keeping it fresh for the duration.

I was like an anal retentive Martha Stewart (seems redundant, doesn’t it?) and followed my own setup protocol by the book every year. The only difference between Martha and me was that all the narrative took place in my head, the melting pot for nearly everything I did growing up.

Tree skirt, lights, ornaments, icing, in that order and, voila, the tree filled the picture window like a Christmas TV special just waiting for my mother to get the first glimpse as she pulled in later that night. After that, it was on to the wild cards; the various figurines, lighted hangings and occasional snow spray window stencils (although I abandoned that after awhile since it was such a bitch to get it off the window after the season was over).

My favorite tchotchke was a foot and a half high plastic snowman (looking a bit like Frosty) singing carols from an open book and illuminated by an appliance size light bulb in the back. I loved that crazy ass thing and still wish I had it but it’s run off, just like Frosty, never to be seen again. But while it was in my rotation it was the knickknack of all knickknacks, displayed prominently on top of the television set. There was something about the ethereal glow that it gave off that really sealed the deal on the feeling of Christmas.

After I’d spent the entire evening getting everything just Martha-perfect I was ready for the unveiling and so I waited…and waited…and waited a little more until she pulled in and walked in the front door. And there I was poised in front of my creation like Betty Furness hawking a refrigerator and just as pleased with myself as could be.

I turned that attic box of shit into a wonderland, all by myself and, every year, I was pretty proud of my work. Of course, my mother was always surprised (or faked it well) and complemented me on the arrangement but, thinking back on it now, it feels like a lonely affair. I don’t think I acknowledged that to myself way back then but, in truth, I was taking a communal celebration and internalizing it.

I’m not trying to romanticize what I never had but I think families, as completely bonkers as they’re capable of being, do feed our need for a shared experience, and maybe it’s worth walking through a minefield to achieve that. My childhood reflects none of that and so, as my wife so often laments, I have missing parts to my social machine. Sometimes I don’t communicate effectively because I’ve already talked it over with myself and we’ve come to an agreement, but maybe that’s not the best way to celebrate life because you can end up with nothing more than your own reflection.

Now, at Christmas time these days, when I’m with my fabulous niece and nephew and the large cast of kooky characters in my wife’s family, it can turn into a dysfunctional circus to be sure, but I also think how much it all takes me out of the twisted lump of synapses in my noggin and makes me a part of something larger than myself. That’s something I never knew growing up.

The other night, watching the TV comedy, 30 Rock, Tina Fey’s character had a very funny reaction to the chaos of her boss’s family Christmas dinner party, an event she was using to avoid spending Christmas with her own relatives:

“You know what I learned tonight? As hard as you try, no one can escape the horror of Christmas so it might as well be with your own family. I’m going to go get a bus to White Haven now and I should be home just in time for Aunt Linda to try to prove that she’s sober by holding someone’s baby while cooking.”

So, even though you may have constant feelings of flight and may want to run screaming from family gatherings, think of the example of my little half-baked celebration spent alone. Christmas was meant to be shared not incubated so get a bus ticket and put yourself in harm’s way…

It’s Christmas again.

Originally meant to be published in the December 2010 edition of Stag Magazine, the mag’s previous demise has canceled this clause of the ‘Rudolph Contract’ leaving the story completely open to whomever has the gall to tell it; i.e. me.

I tell this tale not because I wish to crush the magic of the original telling (with the fog and the sleigh and this and that) but to present the enlightenment of truth and, truth, as they say, shall make you nuts. I mean, the fact that our youth glorifies those teenage miscreants who prance around in their underwear, use foul language and allow their hormones to run wild means the societal gloves are off and we’re (me) duty-bound to bust out Red Nose as well.

First off, the way the original “Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer” song was written caused a tremendous public relations emergency at the North Pole because there was a measure of ‘unwelcome’ detail as to Rudolph’s whereabouts and what exactly was the reason for his legendary nose. Santa eventually forced the song’s writer, Johnny Marks, to do some intensive editing and the results are the time-honored 1949 classic recorded by Gene Autry.

However, there remains a couple of clues buried in the song to lead one to the actual account:

As the song says, “all of the other reindeer, used to laugh and call him names. They never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games”. And why might that be? The song suggests that all the reindeer were either cruel or intolerant of others that didn’t look like themselves but we’re talking all the other reindeer and I don’t think there’s a person alive who believes that Santa’s beloved magical reindeer were bigots! No, sir. What the song fails to mention is Rudolph’s ‘time away’ as mother used to put it.

In more obvious terms, Rudolph was known to imbibe for periods up to 3 or 4 days at a time and these benders slowly brought about a typical rosacea of the nose, exacerbated by constant consumption of alcohol. Reindeer spokesman, Dasher, explained the feelings of most of the reindeer group although he was the only one to grant an interview:

“We’d be playing, you know, our reindeer games and having a great time and, bam, in swaggers old Rudolph, stinking like whatever gin joint he slept in the night before and looking to piss on our good time. Of course, we never let him play with us. Bad vibes, man, very bad vibes. And laugh at Rudolph? Hell no, we were too freaked out to laugh. The laughs were coming from the elves who thought we should sign away our privacy for a new reality show.”

And then one Christmas Eve, Santa and the team got into some heavy fog over Australia and the only thing Santa could barely even see was Rudolph’s glowing honker and so Mr. C took the lush from last in line to the leader of the pack and, suddenly, Rudolph’s billboard malady becomes an asset and the stuff of song.

The impact of Rudolph’s bad behavior is the same as in thousands of dysfunctional families across the land. Most of the family sidesteps the perpetrator, preferring to avoid confrontation while others, Santa in this case, find the member’s dysfunction useful while ignoring its destructive qualities. Sure, a couple of reindeer see it for what it is and say something but they’re up against an impenetrable wall of Holiday songs, coloring books and that Fred Astaire animated TV special.

So, have we learned anything here at all? Not much we couldn’t have guessed, as it turns out, other than the fact that there’s always some dumb shit who gets a free pass while making everybody else’s life miserable.

The trail of personalities making bad choices continues to be adored by our unenlightened youth: Britney, Lindsay, Paris…and now Rudolph.

What do we find out next? Peter Cottontail: hopping down the bunny trail or oddly jittery?

As for the strep throat, it was nearly every year right about the time of this writing through the first week or so of December. It’s almost as if it were not a random infection but a tradition as regular as a birthday or the 4th of July. That’s why I am convinced that my body was running a self-inflicted routine, having nothing to do with my will to stay healthy or my distaste for penicillin.

It always began with the customary complaint that my throat felt like ‘paper’, whatever that description meant, and followed with a fever, the mandatory trip to the pediatrician and the inevitable shot in the ass. Why the penicillin had to be fired into my butt cheek I never quite understood, since the infection resided in the opposite direction, but it always was and for the next day or so I had to lean on my good side to avoid the discomfort. My mother was quick to get me that shot because she was wary of rheumatic fever, that which strep morphs into if left untreated.

Now I’ve always thought that I was an innocent bystander in all of this because why would I wish this sort of nonsense upon myself and have to go through that nasty shot and have to be absent from scho…

Ah, and there it was; the clear answer to this disease’s amazing regularity. Clearly, upon reflection, I wasn’t giving myself enough credit for ingenuity because I deserved the Junior Nobel Prize for inventing, long before it was an established convention in academia, the ‘Christmas break’. This is the increased time off surrounding the actual Christmas holiday currently instituted in most schools and colleges around the country. Back during my school days time off for much beyond the observed holidays was rare indeed. I was operating during a historical period in this country where education was valued more than vacation. Imagine such a crazy and responsible philosophy and why my plan was so deviantly brilliant even though it appears the work of an idiot savant.

Most of the kids were getting time off. I was getting time and a half.

All I had to do was get strep each year right before Christmas and I had extra vacation time. Of course, I couldn’t go outside and play and there was still the ass shot but the other perks were undeniably attractive: day-long cartoons, Etch-a-Sketch marathons, Silly Putty stuck to the blanket, a snooze here and there, and meals delivered to my door. It was like relaxing in Cancun, except without the sun, surf and fresh air.

But how does one get strep-throat on demand? It’s a frigging virus! My subconscious must have been so dialed in to this scheme that it knew how to put itself in harms way and at the proper time to boot. That’s one high strepping, health taunting, school skipping booyah, my friend. To nail this thing year after year at approximately the same time is an impressive feat of viral control that even Jonas Salk would be proud of.

I wish I could have given myself credit at the time it was happening but I hadn’t a clue as to what I was pulling off. I was just a dopey kid with a magic virus and a sore butt. So, you’re wondering, other than the near perfect yearly strep acquisition, how did I deduce that I was steering the good ship Streptococcal Pharyngitis?

Quite elementary, my dear Watson. My mother, tired of the ritual passion play, decided to take a wild swing for the fences and announced that if I got strep throat again I was going to be punished. Now this was certainly an odd approach to a child’s malady but damn if it didn’t work…either that or I just outgrew the thing, but I never got strep again as a child.

Now you can toss certain facts around, like strep is the cause of 37% of sore throats among children and cases usually occur in late winter and early spring, but what’s the likelihood of a kid being able to pinpoint their annual demise right before Christmas and resolving the issue just before the actual holiday arrives so as to avoid being sick on December 25th?

Pure ‘Christmas Break’ genius, my readers, pure genius.