It’s possible this was written as a rap.

Whatever it is, I found it folded up and drifting around my kitchen, as I find many odd bits of flotsam and jetsam in this house.

I read it out loud, and found myself giggling. I particularly enjoyed the garbeldy-gook at the end. The Maker is ineffable, buoyant, inexplicable. Oh, and he likes pie; don’t try to convince him otherwise.

Here’s the translation, as it’s hard to read in the photo:

Hi, my name is Seth and I like pie, So you can’t

deny it so just stop trying to make me not like pie

because it is impossible for me to not like pie

cause pie is my life

blebertiedo?

hipapotamonstrositybiltacilatantovela

I located further evidence of the claim in the driveway. In case there were any doubt.

Related posts:

1. The Legend of Starry Gazey Pie
2. The Maker Likes the “Cool” Photo Best
3. The Pie Cheese Story

Beware children! See how easy it is to slip from an ordinary good boyhood into shudder-inducing nightmarish-ness. Nightmarish-osity. Something dark that involves hissing and a small amount of drool, anyway.

I was surfing through some of my recent pictures and came across these two from earlier this year — taken on demand from the Maker, who relishes a pair or five of those cheap plastic Halloween vampire teeth. I always purchase a “Party Pack” of these (the name makes me snort) and then I’m exceedingly careful never to touch the myriad pairs I see laying around the house for the next month or so.

After about six weeks I don’t have to worry about them anymore since they’ve all been shared with friends and left at their houses, sliced and diced by the lawnmower, run through the wash and thrown out by me, or carried off by the cats. Tidy, huh?

Nobody ever talks about who cleans up after Darkness.

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The First: It’s the middle of December and it’s dead warm.
Me: It’s mad dead warm.
The Husband: It’s mad dead G* warm.
Me: It’s mad dead G beast crazy sick warm.

(prolonged stunned silence)

Me: Go on with my bad self!
The First: Don’t ever. Do that again.

*for the uninitiated, “G” is short for gangsta, which sadly, means cool. Now you’re sorry you read this, aren’t you?

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1. Just Superlative

When the last of my baby boys grew out of his infant clothes I passed all of the marvelous tiny baby things I’d accumulated to another friend who needed them.

Almost all.

One of the Maker’s tee shirts (also worn by his older brothers when they were newborns) I folded carefully — unwashed — into a little Burt’s Bees bag and stored it, along with the paper tape used to measure the newborn baby, in a small cardboard box under my bathroom sink.

I was careful not to open the bag.

Perhaps twice in the next three to five years did I lock myself in my bathroom for a precious few minutes, away from the craziness of a house with three little boys and the demands of work and motherhood, to pull out the tiny shirt and hold it to my face to breathe in the last of the new baby fragrance. That milky, drooly, nuzzly warm skin smell, with its attendant memories of nursing, patting, cradling, and time spent gazing in astonishment at yet another sleeping, beautiful child.

One day when the Maker was about 6 years old, he came to find me. “Look at this funny little shirt!” he exclaimed, waving it in the air with one dirty hand. My heart sank. No more baby smell, I thought. But then I laughed.

“Can you believe your big brothers used to wear that shirt?” I asked. He squinted at me in frank suspicion.

“It’s true,” I promised, and together we examined the little shirt. He snapped and unsnapped it, turned it inside out, and considered whether it would fit on our cat, Katie, who was making happy figure eights between us.

When I showed him how I had cut off the tags so it wouldn’t irritate the little baby’s skin, he had a sudden revelation. He’s always hated tags in his shirt. “Did I use to wear this?” he asked, astonished.

And I found that my throat had closed up and I couldn’t answer.

So instead I settled for a nod and an enormous hug, one that I knew I could come back to, long after the smell of the very last baby was gone.

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1. Olive and the Baby Jesus

I uncovered two pictures from my college years, possibly the only two that were ever taken during that period, and boy did they bring back memories. Omg! We had a vaccuum cleaner! I’m pretty sure that belonged to my roomate Lee Ann. She ironed her jeans, for heaven’s sake.

So that’s me in my mother’s University of Kentucky sweatshirt (which she wore 20 years before I was in college at University of Tennessee, Knoxville), grinning like a monkey in room 513 of Massey Hall, where I spent my first three years of undergrad before moving in with my boyfriend (whom I later married), see next picture.

Just look at that hottie! Yeah, he dug me. I guess he had brought us Chinese take-out for dinner; that would have been a major splurge for us in those days, probably why we got the camera out to document it.

And here’s what else I learned from inspecting this photo.

1. I had a Playgirl calendar. There on the wall! I swear I had totally forgotten about that. Note the strategically placed cat. That was either one brave dude or one placid cat. Not all of the models were so modest, but my roomie and I were. We routinely cut out paper doll-like shorts to tape up on the guy of the month.

2. Electric typewriter, yeah baby! It was my high school graduation gift, and it got a lot of use since most of my papers had to be turned in typed. I DID take a computer class, since that was the rage. It was Fortran, and I damn near failed the class since I was a rank beginner and all the rest of the class was budding geeks. To work on the computer we had to GO TO A LAB. Yep, we trudged across campus to a dank dark basement somewhere and WAITED IN LINE to get on one of the dozen or so ginormous ugly PCs. I decided then that I hated computers. But a year later UTK was on the Bitnet and 8 PCs arrived in one of the dorm lobbies and I was hooked.

3. Sock Monkey!! (Leaning up against the speaker, on top of my albums.) Sigh, I miss Sock Monkey. My great grandmother, the same one who made my pink pantsuit in grade school, made him for me. Wonder where he ended up?

4. Albums. CD technology came out while I was in college, and my friend Robert Bowers invited me over to his dorm room one day to hear a Billy Joel CD (Glass Houses), but I didn’t actually acquire a CD player until well after college. I can almost tell you every single artist that was in that cardboard box of albums: Rush, Prince, Eagles, Queen, Boston, Billy Joel, Air Supply (that’s right, I’m telling the truth here), Asia, and maybe one or two others.

5. Weight belt (hanging on the wall behind my lamp). I actually took a class in weightlifting. Everything other than the weightlifting in that class was stoopid,since it mostly required cutting pictures of buff people from magazines and glueing them on posters for a grade.

6. Analog clock. That just strikes me as odd, now that I’m so used to seeing digital alarm clocks.

7. Gone With the Wind. I was a theater geek in high school. I could recite many of the scenes from GWTW, but fortunately didn’t do so often. I wonder where in the heck that poster came from. Prolly the same place the lame “New York” (Theater Geek!) poster came from. (I’ve never been to NY).

8. TV! We invariably had a television in our dorm rooms, which was a huge treat for me since I didn’t grow up with one. That’s probably why I have the cart over in front of my bed rather than where ever my roomie had placed it.

9. This picture was taken in November. I can’t read the month on the Playgirl calendar, but I think I’m right on this because we didn’t have AC in that dorm, and we baked from August until October. On some magic date near Thanksgiving the radiators in Massey all kicked on and we had heat, but once fall hit in earnest we broke out our sleeping bags and blankets and piled them on. That’s the yellow inside of my old sleeping bag, and it looks like there are at least two other blankets under that.

Thanks for joining me on that little jaunt down memory lane. What weird things do you remember from your way back years?

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My recent post about Why Your Workout Isn’t Working prompted a funny chain of comments on Facebook, which I totally enjoyed. Most of them related bad food favorites, and McDonald’s was named in the very first comment (Hi, Greg!).

Sigh. I love MickeyD’s french fries more than any other fast food french fries. And back when the Husband and I were vegetarians we would, once in a while, drop into a McDonald’s for the sole purpose of indulging in these. It was a rare treat, though, and mostly we made “french fries” at home, although of course we didn’t fry them.

After the First (pictured above) was born, outings to any restaurant or fast food place were so rare that they really stood out in his memory, and were the source of endless rapture and recollection. He didn’t know any of the places by name; instead he remembered them by the food he’d experienced there. One shivery January when he was just about to turn 5 years old, I recorded this little comment, imparted with a deep sigh and some consternation, that he made to a visiting friend of ours:

“You know those french fries they have at the french fry place? I like those… One time we made french fries at home but they were made out of potatoes.”

You can kinda see his frustration, can’t you?

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I grew up in the 80’s. Wait, maybe “grew up” is too judgmental, but I did live in the 80’s. We didn’t have an Atari 2600 because we didn’t have a television. But we had a computer, so I got started with a Commodore 64 game system. The 64 stood for kilobytes, baby. We had ‘em. And 16 colors too! In 1999″Weird Al” Yankovic referenced the C64 saying,

“You think your Commodore 64 is really neato
What kinda chip you got in there, a Dorito?”

Hehe. It was true.

If I didn’t play it on the C64, I played it in the arcade, using real, live quarters or tokens in place of same. Mostly I didn’t actually play the games, I watched boys playing the games, which was significantly better, since it involved less personal humiliation.

So, for posterity’s sake, here’s a list of the 14 old skool video games I grew up with. You can click on the main links to play the games online, although not all of them work with a Mac. Leave a comment at the end and tell me which video games you played growing up!

1. Pong Release date: 1972
I have to start with Pong, not just because it’s the great-great-grandpappy of video games, but also because the Husband made a Pong game with LEDs on a circuit board in college. Which we actually played. But not for like, a long time or anything. /ahem/

2. Space Invaders: Release date: 1980
Designed in 1978 in Japan, this is a classic, the first arcade video game I can remember. The legend is that the game was so popular in Japan that it caused a coin shortage. *Facebook friends: you totally have to click through to see the Human Space Invaders video if you haven’t seen it already. (I wish FB would import my vids, but it doesn’t.)

Oh, here’s a little Space Invader cartoon for ya, too. Good times.

3. Asteroids: Release date 1979
Word is that Universal won a bidding war (there was a war??) to movie rights to Asteroids. I can’t think why this wouldn’t be a great summer blockbuster. Oh, wait. Yes I can. Maybe I’ll wait for Candyland. Or maybe I’ll poke out both my eyes with a fork.

Asteroids also inspired a bad joke in National Lampoon’s Vacation. (I don’t think you’ll be glad you clicked through. I’m sorry I even embedded the link. Really sorry!)

4. Centipede: Release date: 1980
That was a damn creepy spider!

5. Defender: Release Date: 1980
A game much like Space Invaders, only your ship flies over a horizontal landscape. It was my first experience with a navigator preview screen. I thought that was brilliant. (Still do.)

6. Dig Dug: Release date: 1982
We had it but I didn’t play it much. I didn’t like those ugly red and yellow and gold stripes, I think. But the “inflate the monster until it pops” was ingenious. I can think of aaaall sorts of clever ways to use that little effect.

7. Donkey Kong: Release date: 1981
Still one of the toughest arcade games around, I think; I never got past the first screen. But I loved watching the documentary King of Kong.

Um, why is the gorilla named “Donkey”? Wait, don’t answer that.

…Aaargh. I had to know so I wiki’d it. It’s safe for work.

8. Frogger: Release date: 1981
This is the stupidest frog in history. It can cross the road but not the pond. What an idiot!

9. Galaga: Release date: 1981
It was like Space Invaders, but it had a theme song! (Which sucked!) Oh, and it had scoring updates, like a pinball machine. No innovation there, but golly we were grateful.

10. Gauntlet: Released 1985
Maybe the first era of the MMORPGs of today. All of us D&D geeks wanted to be Warriors, Wizards, Elves, and Valkyries.

11. Joust: Release Date: 1982
All those dropping eggs, so few omelets. Who could NOT love a flying ostrich? Loved it. The flying harpies (buzzards) were cool, too.

12. Lunar Lander: Released 1979
Waste of time, but we didn’t have enough ways to waste time. Land your ship on the pad. There. You’re done! Well, not as easy as it sounds, but still.

13. Missile Command: Released: 1980
Protect your city or be disintegrated. I was mostly disintegrated.

The Ms. Pac Man video below is Aqualung’s Atari 2600 review of the game. (Did you remember that it was originally dashes, and not dots, that the Pac family ate for dinner?):

14. Ms. Pac Man: Release date: 1981
Fruit and pretzels! Blinky ghosts! What could be better? The Husband could play this for hours on a single quarter. There was a tabletop version in the lobby of his dorm in college. I spent many nights there, watching him play. I couldn’t have gotten him away from that game for any amount of Cheetos and Mountain Dew.

Oh, and the Pac Man franchise spawned it’s own song, and you haven’t lived unless you’ve clicked through to enjoy it. Actually you have, but you still need to hear it. Don’t you?

Okay, kids! Leave comments and share your passion, confess your crimes, and spread your wisdom! Or ignore this post and get back to work.

Image by kurtxio on Flickr

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The Best Jersey Number Ever from Lisa Creech Bledsoe on Vimeo.

This is a short little story about the First that I hadn’t thought of in years, but it’s a great one because it’s just so like him to think of something like this!

Facebook friends, just click on the link above (or the “view original post” link) to see the video.

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It was hot as hell on August 17th, 1977, the day I accidentally saw Elvis dead.

It was the year that Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind hit movie theaters like a neutron bomb, the year that Rocky won an Academy Award for best picture.  I had my first kiss that year — at Skateland, under the disco lights — an abysmal experience. It was a year for events of cosmic proportion.

I had grown up in Memphis, steeped in the tradition of Beale Street, the Memphis Queen, and rhythm and blues. I knew who Al Green was, and I’d wired up my own little crystal radio set so that I could lie in bed at night and listen to ELO, The Bar-Kays (a Memphis group), and Boz Skaggs on WHBQ. I’d heard Elvis before, of course, and knew dozens of people who’d seen him tooling around the city in one of his Stutz-Bearcats, but I wasn’t a particular fan; Elvis and Graceland were just a part of the place I grew up, same as W.C. Handy, the Orpheum ghost, and the muddy Mississip.

I was in no way aware of Elvis’s slow, drug-hazed decline nor his ignominious death. I was eleven, going on 12, and had already been (badly) kissed. I had no idea that 300 National Guardsmen had been called in to deal with the 75,000 fans who had converged on Graceland and were camped outside the distinctive ugly wrought-iron gates, hoping to be allowed in to see Elvis laying in state.

I was, however, forced to tag along with my mother, who (also unaware of the Elvis insanity) went to visit her friend Martha, who lived not far off Danny Thomas Boulevard. Martha had a teenage son about my age, and after the adults had settled in the kitchen with iced tea, we decided to do some urban hiking. We headed out through the back yard and into the light woods that fringed their neighborhood; it was about 3 in the afternoon, and as humid as a steambath. I was wearing my favorite pair of bell-bottoms and a tee-shirt with a groovy iron-on (all my tee-shirts had groovy iron-ons). The bell-bottoms I remember especially because as we hiked out, we shoved our way through some deadfall and came upon a chest-high rock wall topped with jagged rocks or barbed wire. To an eleven year old, a rock wall says Climb up! rather than Stay out!, so we clambered over, and naturally, the seat of my jeans caught and I tore a two-inch L-shaped hole in them. I was wearing white underwear (all my underwear were white) that managed to escape the talons of the fence, but still I was deeply mortified to be in the company of a boy I barely knew with my jeans ripped and my underwear showing. In later years I would cultivate this fashion, but at the time I was far too eleven. In even later years, my own children would cultivate this fashion even earlier than age eleven. But I was talking about dead Elvis, sorry.

I was still flushed with embarassment when I began to notice the change in our surroundings. Urban wooded trash had given way to smooth expanses of groomed pasture. I could see what looked like a tidy barn just ahead, and some smaller outbuildings. We hiked amiably in silence, making our way toward the barn, then on past, toward nothing in particular. Everything was strangely, persistently quiet. I guess I was aware of the two-story Colonial house rising up in front of us, but I was eleven, and my underwear was showing, and it didn’t seem important. So it was a considerable surprise to me when some security guards materialized and came striding quickly over. “You’re not allowed to be back here,” one of them said, taking hold of my elbow and directing me firmly toward what appeared to be a back entrance to the house in front of us.

I found myself with absolutely nothing to say, but I had the sense of being caught up in something far bigger than myself (that was how I always felt). My recollection is that we were taken through a kitchen into a foyer-like area and inserted into a shuffling line of people. I didn’t realize what was happening until I saw the open casket, sitting there like a giant, buffed-up asteroid, and Elvis Aaron Presley, bloated and pale in his white suit, blue shirt, and white tie, incontrovertibly dead.

I stopped, stunned, in front of the casket. A woman moaned behind me, and a guard pushed us all along. Horrified, I averted my gaze from the dead man, who only barely resembled the rock star I knew. I stared at the floor in front of me as we were hurried out past tremendous heaps of flower arrangements (later I read that it took 100 vans to cart them all away), past the stone lions, and down toward the front gates.

“Why wasn’t there shag carpet?” I wondered inexplicably. Even my family had lovely burnt orange shag carpet, and we weren’t fashionable or rock stars.

And turning to the boy I’d arrived with, I asked, with more than a little sense of displacement and worry, “Do you have any idea how to get back to your house from here?”

Image in the public domain

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The Ice’s Cat Gene from Lisa Creech Bledsoe on Vimeo.

This is one of our family’s favorite stories about The Ice. We’ve told it so many times that now he tells it. I added a little bit here, and also let Henry the cat have his say. Oh, and it’s actually true that he said the words “kit-tee” and “me-ow” and darn it, even “Dad-dee” before he ever said Mama. Sigh.

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