Uncool

From the middle of sixth grade on, I was usually the uncool geek. Sometimes extremely so. If uncool geekiness had been an extreme sport, there are a lot of days I'd almost have won a gold medal. Why only almost? Because winning would have been at least a little bit cool.

I struggled to be cool-- at least when I wasn't lost in geeky things-- science, chess, comic books, reading, writing, and so on. I finally achieved coolness as a hippie during my college years. Then my world came crashing down. In the midst of despair at having totally made a wreck of things, I came face to face (literally) with God. He hadn't given up. He loved me as much as ever. I fell into Love's embrace.

I was promptly pronounced uncool by some of my friends. It felt surprisingly good. Over time, as I got comfy with who I am, and decided to not sweat it, and just love people, I found myself being treated as cool. Only I no longer cared. I didn't even know what to do with it. So I ignored it.

Just being able to not care if I'm cool is very cool.

You're cool? That's cool. Uncool? That's cool, too. Be you, and enjoy it. Love on folk. The ones who aren't all caught up in themselves and worried about being cool will come around.

Be cool. Whether you think you are or not. Be cool with being you. There's nobody more awesome than you.

Tumbleweeds on my Mind

Regardless of the temperature it's technically winter. All over the western plains of Texas, tumbleweeds have dried up, put their travelin' shoes on, and hitchhiked with the breeze. In high winds the weeds stampede en masse; they make lemmings look like severely introverted loners.

I grew up on the northeastern edge of El Paso with nothing over our back wall but desert. The winter winds inevitably headed west and invariably left an interlocked tumbleweed ramp many feet deep against the cinder block wall running the length of the neighborhood. The first calm weekend day, Dad and a bunch of other neighborhood men would drive to the end of the neighborhood, head into the desert behind the mass of weeds, park the cars a ways off, and spread out along the line of tumbleweeds.

After stuffing a newspaper or two into some of the weeds, each man would hold a lighter or match ready. On signal, each would light their section of tumbleweeds. A spouse or child would be in each back yard with a hose and shovel, just in case. The flames would leap 10-20 feet in the air; the whole conflagration lasted maybe a minute. Fast and furious, that's how they burn.

As a kid, it was exciting, always over much too fast. I suspect for the adults, it lasted a lot longer. Who wants to be party to setting the desert on fire and maybe burning half of El Paso? But of there was a problem, I never knew about it. Five minutes later, the fine ash was cool enough to walk through. After the first light breeze, it was gone, spread across the city too thinly to notice. But it's burned deeply into my mind.

Last month Sharon and I finally took our long overdue, first Vacation Out West together. A small tumbleweed named Dusty stuck a thumb out as we pulled over for a photo shoot, and Sharon brought him home. He seems content to just hang out, with no trace of the usual wanderlust. So far I've avoided mentioning fire around him. He seems sensitive.

Notice Dusty's color. He's a chameleon, blending into the desert to avoid predators-- mainly off-road pickup trucks and disgruntled homeowners with fire. It doesn't always work, which I suspect is why he's happy to be an indoor recluse. A brown recluse, but we are not afraid.

Thanks to Annie Hoffman Fentz for sharing the video and asking the questions that inspired this.

Faded Love Reignited (Music I Used to Love)

I hate it when I don't listen to one of my favorite bands for a while.

I love it when I don't listen to one of my favorite bands for a while and then start listening again.

I love it when I hear something I used to love, and I still love it.

I hate it when I hear something I used to love and now it just makes me cringe. "Really? I used to like that? No, I didn't. ARGH! I did! Bleah! Dog germs! I need antiseptic!" (Sorry, We just watched Charlie Brown the other night. Like good music, it's still both hysterical and poignant. I live for Snoopy kissing Lucy.)

So, here are a few songs or bands from my teens I listened to this past year for the first time in anywhere from a few years to thirty or more, and my reactions.

Red Rubber Ball The Cyrkle) - A brilliant pop song that spoke perfectly to a 14year old (it still got a lot of airplay a few years after it came out). Even though I hadn't really had a girlfriend since the 5th grade, I knew rejection. This carried me through the typical teenaged angst. I remember several glorious Sunday mornings on my paper route when this song was being played just as the sun came up. "Oh, I think it's gonna be alright. Yes, the worst is over now; the mornin' sun is shinin' like a red rubber ball..." And those jangly guitars! A big thumbs up,

Timothy (The Buoys) - I guess the basic pop structure of this song is pretty good, but the strings and horns are kind of heavy compared to the rock and roll instruments. The lyrics are pretty inane, and the thing sounds like it was recorded through a cheap, transistor radio. I suspect I mainly liked it for the sense of macabre. How many songs are about eating a friend to survive, and not even remembering it? "Bleah! Dog germs! I need antiseptic!"

The Grass Roots - Urgh. More inane lyrics, these aimed squarely at love struck teens. On the other hand, while the songs were somewhat typical pop, their rocky songs at least had an irresistible, driving beat, and some of the best horn arrangements and playing of the genre. Grill had some great bass riffs, too. Again, the recordings were geared toward cheap radios. I can enjoy some of their music; I just have to ignore the production and many of the lyrics (tough, but I manage).

The 1910 Fruitgum Company - I loved these guys. I had their 1, 2, 3, Red Light album. Only a couple of trusted girl friends (not girlfriends) knew I liked it; everyone else I knew would have spit on it (and me) if they'd known. Today, the closest thing to a redeeming feature of this album is "The Mighty Quinn". No, I take that back. Even this cover is painful to listen to (I just tried). What can I say? I was twelve. Hormones and insecurities will do this to you.

The Chicago Transit Authority (The Chicago Transit Authority( - Also known as CTA and Chicago, the first of many, self-titled albums by the Band Latterly Known As Chicago, was too progressive and short on love songs and simple songs about peace and love, and too instrumental for most people. This was the album that vindicated my choice of trombone, and made me realize how far I had to go in learning to play that as well as the guitar. While 99% of the world prefers their later albums, this, for me, is still THE Chicago album. The songs, the harmonies, the blend of traditional and experimental, the gripping horns, the searing lead guitar, they all grab me and drag me into the stereo today as vividly as they did in 1969. Four thumbs up- big toes count. (To this day, when anyone mentions "I'm a Man", it's the Chicago song that comes to mind.)

Black Sabbath - Their first four albums still blow me away. I can still listen to those straight through, back to back, over and over. Or just put one on repeat. There are several songs per album I could have sworn were Top 40 hits because I heard them so often. Most of them weren't, but they got a lot of airplay in Augusta, and a lot of stereo play at Martin O'Rourke's house and mine. They were one of the bands that defined the word "heavy" as it pertained to music. And if you ever get a chance to hear Paranoid in headphones while on laughing gas, do it! It's worth a root canal (if you have insurance).

Yes - I didn't hear their early albums for years, but bought Fragile and Close to the Edge on a whim when they came out on CD. How did I ever quit listening? Together with The Yes Album, I could while away a week with nothing else on the stereo (and have). "Starship Troopers" and "Roundabout" still make me want to get up and dance. "Cans and Brahms" still brings back the smells of dorms at Georgia Tech, the vivid reds and blues of Rich Sachleben's room. Far from "not a bad song in the bunch", there's not even a merely good song in the bunch. They're all great.

 

So, what music did you like years ago? What has held up and what hasn't? What did you listen to then that appalls you now?

All Wisdom Fled

Sharon and I had been married less than a year when my wisdom teeth launched their painful war of secession. Sharon's sister Cynthia hooked us up with "the best oral surgeon in the metro area". We had little to nothing in the way of insurance. We talked with the billing office up front and agreed to pay 1/3 by check on the day of the surgery.

In the chair. "Oooh, those are bad. This will be a challenge!" Not exactly what you want to hear when someone will be excavating in your mouth, but I was in enough pain I would have let the Hatfields and McCoys in if it would have helped.

(Queue sinister music.)

I don't recall a lot after they set me up for anesthesia, but I do recall...

• Waking up with a knee on my chest, a chisel in my mouth, my head jerking with each WHACK of the little hammer. "Unhhh!!!" "He's awake! Turn it up!"
• Waking up with a knee on my chest and my head flailing back and forth while the doctor, pliers firmly on the remains of a tooth, tried to get the stubborn beast out. "Unhhh!!!" "He's awake! Turn it up!"
• Explaining groggily to an uncaring nurse that my wife was out front and would take care of payment.
• Being told I was the patient, and ordered to go pay. Still being in La La Land, who was I to argue?
• Like a cheap maze robot, finding my way to the front desk by leaning on the wall to my right and following it:
  • I would wake every so often somewhere new since my last memory (but still in the Pastel Horror Maze);
  • Occasionally I would be sagging or half way to the floor, and have to argue myself upright and moving again;
  • I remember doing a 180 where two hallways split;
  • I had a hard time following the right hand rule through the bathroom. I'm not sure whether I went around or over the toilet and around or under sink;
  • I paused at the edge of another patient room where God alone knows what was going on, and made a leap of faith that I could cross the doorway rather than enter the room;
  • Apparently I made it.
• When I finally got to the front desk (approximately three weeks later), they tried to insist I pay the entire balance. I kept (when I was conscious) insisting we didn't have that much, that we had an agreement, and that they should find my wife. Eventually someone demanded my checkbook, filled in the amount for a few dollars less than the register balance, and had me sign it. Still in La La Land, who was I to argue?
• The guy who now had no money for gas or groceries, that's who.

Needless to say, once I got over the subsequent infection, dry socket and the other miseries that followed (I was constantly either in pain or medically stoned, so it's all fuzzy) we never dealt with this Best In Area Doctor again. In fact we steered people away from him.

If my wisdom teeth had grown back, I'd have seriously considered the Hatfields and McCoys.

When Tech Goes Bad

Years ago, when the doomsday prophets were panicking about running out of IP addresses, people talked about giving every appliance, and even every doorknob, an IP address.

Frankly, I don't want my doorknobs on the internet. I suppose it could be nice to know if a door was open or closed, especially if it opened when nobody was supposed to be at home, but sooner or later this would result in the cops sticking a gun in my wife's or my face when one of us came home unexpectedly.

And I really, really don't want hackers locking me in my bathroom. Or worse, out of it.

 

On an unrelated note, today I invented the USB fork (an eating utensil with a USB cable).

Perhaps "invented" is too harsh a term here. I conceptualized it. Actually, the phrase just popped out of my mouth. It was a half hour later that I began to ponder the many uses of such a 21st century device. Frankly, all I came up with was that if you were using your laptop or tablet as a hot plate, the USB cable would tether your fork to it so that if you dropped your fork while walking back from the couch to the kitchen for seconds, it wouldn't hit the floor.

In other words, USB forks are pretty pointless, but cool in a total computer nerd sort of way.

Look for them on ThinkGeek soon. After that, USB spoons, USB knives... but no USB ladles. That would just be silly.

A Brief History of the TV Remote Control

When I was a kid, I was the remote. I had to actually get up and walk all the way to the TV to change the volume or channel. Or stop it from scrolling. Or adjust the antenna.
Up hill.
Both ways.
In snow so deep I couldn't see the ceiling.
Gnawing on my frozen lips for food.
Fighting cannibals and zombies for those lips.
And I didn't even mind most days.
The End.
 
Inspired by a Neil Orts status on facebook.

Growing Up Miles, Pt 3 : And I Think I Can Fly

Did you ever think you could fly? Most of us have wanted to fly at some point in our lives. I've pretty much always wanted to fly. I spent a lot of time as a kid looking up, dreaming about flying-- as a bird, as a pilot, as an astronaut.... But did you ever think you could fly?

I grew up when the US was unstoppable, when we owned outer space, when we were well along the arc to interplanetary (maybe interstellar!) travel, when science fiction seemed less like fiction with every passing day. With the odd dollop of magic or fantasy thrown in (to transform into a bird or pterodactyl), I had the skies covered. We would lay in the grass or in the driveway and dream of flying. I might be a buzzard or an eagle, or I might be piloting anything from a high winged Cessna to one of the B-52 Stratofortresses that constantly flew over El Paso in the early and mid 1960s.

Or I might be on my way to other planets, other star systems, other galaxies, other universes, or just wandering the infinite depths of outer space, between any of those.

I might be an inter-dimensional being that flitted from one reality to another, walking, swimming or flying as desired or needed. I might fly straight through gas giants, or even dense planets. Maybe even suns. But not black holes. Nothing could fly through a black hole. The weird gravity would probably rip the wings right off a trans-dimensional being!

I wanted to soar through that clear, blue, infinite, Texas sky, on cloudless days, and when the wisps floated high above like too many contrails, and when the cumulus clouds stacked up like God's own bag of cotton balls, and when the rare thunderheads moved in. I wanted to fly before the dust storm, before the flash floods, and right through them. I wanted to soar on the edge of gale force winds, then turn and fly back the other way just to show them who was boss.

Some days, out of the blue (so to speak), I would be hit with a nearly overwhelming conviction that I could fly if only I tried right then and there. This might happen once every few months, or once a year. It stopped, finally, during college. One of my most vivid memories of 9th grade is sitting in band rehearsal, 3/4 of the way to the back of the room, up several levels of risers. My trombone resting on the floor, I stared at the music while Mr. McClintock berated some other section for the sort of heinous musical crime band directors berate sections for. Suddenly I knew, I knew! that if I tried immediately, I would fly. Not just could. Would.

I watched it unfold in my mind's eye. It was so graceful. I carefully placed the brass on the floor, stood on my chair, extended my arms. Heads turned. Mr McClintock quit swatting the music stand with his baton. I raised my arms. He looked angry, thinking I was mocking him. I flapped my arms once, twice, leaned forward and leapt. I soared over the shocked heads, some ducking, of my band mates, landed next to the director, then took off back to my seat, doing a tight loop along the way. I picked up my trombone, and awaited instruction...

Thankfully, I caught myself before I finished putting the trombone down. But it was a massive struggle to not attempt what part of my mind just knew was the first step-- and possibly my last chance at that step-- into a glorious life filled with flight. I agonized for a day or two over whether I had blown it. Did I mention this was in the 9th grade?

I don't recall ever giving in to these bouts; I'm sure I would have remembered the subsequent doctor's visit and the mockery at school. (I never got this urge on flat ground without witnesses nearby.)

Did anyone else ever go through this?

Or is this just part of the freakishness of being Miles?[1]

 

This afternoon I couldn't help staring at the beauty of the sky, at the mixture of clear, rain-washed blue and clouds both white and gray. P.O.D.'s "Alive" started playing in my head, and I was soaring near those clouds on the wings of a bird of prey, lord of of all I surveyed, drinking in the glory and beauty of creation from a few thousand feet up.

It was, of course, all in my head. But until the day I can really and truly fly, I can live with that.

NOTES

[1] Thanks to Whitney Fagala and Kelsey Jones for latching on to that phrase when I spoke it today. I wouldn't have remembered it otherwise!