Friends, Trains, & Tiny Pink Cars

          Last week, my good friend Carmen left behind her cramped, ashy apartment in the Bronx, closed the window that overlooks the green swells of the Harlem River, and came to visit me in California.

          Carmen and I have the oddest things in common.  We are equally talented at trivia games, and equally, um…enthusiastic at basketball.  We both, as kids, read this crappy YA series (about gymnasts) that could only be found in used bookstores.  We both can be perfectly entertained for an hour by throwing one rubber ball up a staircase to dislodge another rubber ball.

          Our plan was to visit the wine country, where my family lives, and then the L.A. area, where her family lives—with a long-awaited side-trip to Disneyland.  I asked myself what my favorite moments of our journey were, and this is what sprung to mind:

Carmen saying, “I can’t believe your family has a room full of dirt in your house!” (We do.)  “That is the coolest thing!  Nobody’s house just has a room full of dirt in it!”

Riding Amtrak, over the course of one long Monday, from Santa Rosa to Irvine.  Our porter for the longest leg of the trip (Martinez to Bakersfield) was a flustered but friendly man.  “We’re jam-packed today,” he explained breathlessly.  “If you girls want to move to the dining car permanently, it’ll free up some seats...”

So we sat in the dining car for eight hours, sipped coffee, and stayed entertained by reminiscing about the gruesome ways you can die in Choose Your Own Adventure novels.  We watched the Central Valley roll past the rectangular window beside us.  The dry, flat, endless Central Valley, full of oil refineries and scummy aqueducts where Carmen, as a child, was persistently forbidden to swim.  And fields. 

Fields. 

Fields.

Even the cherry trees, in their dizzyingly uniform rows, were coated with dust.

“Hanford!” Carmen exclaimed midway through our ride.  “This is near where I grew up!”

The distant hills, as bare of trees as sheet metal, glinted in the winter sun.

And finally, watching Carmen drive into the twilit fog, in a tiny pink car.

That, I must explain, was at Disneyland.  I was going to see her again in about eight minutes, once we’d both finished the Autopia loop.  I’ll never get over the cutesy surrealism, though, of watching her speed aggressively away in a car designed for Minnie Mouse.

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I’d like to describe what I thought might happen during Carmen’s visit.  I had this idea, beforehand, that we would, on the course of a road trip, stay in a mysterious wigwam and make hand shadows against the walls.  I have no knowledge where I got the image: it rose from the unplumbed depths of my imagination, where the best characters and dialogue dwell incognito. 

Needless to say, it was a bit too weird to come true—and I can’t say I regret that, considering how I’ve always sucked at hand shadows.  Still, whenever I think of what did happen during Carmen’s visit, its underbelly is this strange moment that didn’t happen, but persists in my mind.

Maybe there was something special about those hand shadows I imagined. Maybe they were a communication from a Danica in an alternate dimension, who is currently trapped in a wigwam and representing her situation pictographically. 

Probably not—but in my trade, it helps to keep an open mind.

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          Friendship is a wonderful thing.  You know that someone is a true friend, a teacher once told me, if you can show up on their doorstep, shout, “I killed the Mayor!” and they let you come inside.

Stick with your true friends—those kindred souls who you can play six (count ‘em, six) different board games with you during a five day span.  Those awesome individuals who will bike with you in out of the way wine-towns, or tell you the name, when you ask, of the main character in The Ewok Adventures.  Those lovely folk who obsess over a house having a room full of dirt.

“No, really!  A room full of dirt and spiders?”  She nodded enthusiastically.  “It’s the coolest thing ever.”

          “Wait ‘til you see the secret crawlspace under the deck,” I promised.  Carmen’s eyes widened expectantly.

I’ve fallen out of contact with some great people, great friends.  I regret it, but I’ve made peace with the fact that separations happen.  Sometimes, they seem inevitable.  Through it all, my family (another bunch of awesomely quirky people) and close friends have stuck with me.   

All I can say to them is, thank you.  Thank you for making me feel comfortable to be my own peculiar self.

Real Doors

There’s a fountain that I’ve deduced must have existed.  

It stood in a corner of my dad’s garden.  It was stone, and had a broad, tree-like base, from which sprouted a carved castle.  This castle had miniature windows in its miniature towers, and a door that I remember constantly trying to open.  Actually, that’s the wrong choice of words: I knew it wouldn’t open (it wasn’t a real door), but I think I checked every once in a while to make sure nothing had changed.

The stone castle had a moat surrounding it, which, when I was very small, actually contained water.  I mostly remember this moat being dry, though, because at a certain point the gears that allowed the fountain to circulate liquid stopped working.  So the fountain I remember had a dry gulf around its castle, a trench, an abyss; and there was no bridge across it.

Moss worked its furry way into all the small nooks and crannies of the building.  Into the hollows for the windows it went, and into the tiny cracks between the “cobblestones”  in the ramparts.  It was the lingering traces of this moss that convinced me, a week ago, that the castle had been real: there’s still a half-circle outline of its base, in moss, on the ground where it once stood.

When I was still fairly young, the base of the castle cracked, and my dad got rid of it—took it to the dump, most likely.  I’ve had other things on my mind for the last fifteen or twenty years—so it might not come as a surprise to know that, staring at that half-circle of moss on the ground, I was flooded with an incredulity that the fountain I’d suddenly remembered wasn’t something I’d made up.

            It must not have been a dream.

            Some people are blessed with exceedingly sharp, detailed memories of their childhoods.  Agatha Christie was one of those: I’m reading her Autobiography right now, and she’s already filled up two hundred pages with description of her life before she turned fifteen.  Greg is another one: he’s told me all the facets of his favorite childhood game (it involved Legos, and was called, I believe, “Hobo Escape”).

My memories of being a kid, on the other hand, are spotty at best.  I know I had a wonderfully happy childhood—but I also know that I focused most of my attention on books, and those are the things I remember.  There was a time when I could have told you the author of every book I’d ever read.

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            This is a line from my poem “The Murk-Journal (or Once Beyond a Time)”, which is very good, and, in a perfect world, would be published soon. 

And the door in the valley, creaking there free from going anywhere

           

Doors: doors that open, doors that don’t open, doors that open but don’t lead anywhere, closed doors that, if opened, might lead somewhere Other (with a capital O): isn’t that what imaginative fiction is all about?  Ursula K. Le Guin says that fantasy, as a genre, is a cluster of metaphors that we keep re-hashing because they seem to reveal something important about our cultures, or epochs, or identities.  Thus a British professor of Icelandic Studies invented, during World War II, a war-ravaged Middle Earth where chaos could be defeated with one profound nonviolent gesture: letting go, ultimately, of an enchanted ring.

            Seems rather pertinent, historically, doesn’t it?

For me, the most important metaphor is a door

creaking there, free from going anywhere, that wouldn’t open.

The harder I try to visualize the fountain, the less I can.  The door to the past is usually closed, just as the passageways to many of life’s possibilities are usually closed—which is why we have imaginations.  Maybe I’m a storyteller because I’m afraid of being limited to one lifestyle or point-of-view, and thus, to a certain extent, immobilized. 

Maybe I’m a storyteller because I’ve always wondered what lived in that fountain, behind the closed doors.

We keep the important lessons of the past with us, at least, even if we don’t always remember where we learned them.

Greendale School Pride

            A great travesty is being wrought upon the viewing public.  The show Community has been taken off the air.

            NBC says that this is just a mid-season hiatus, and that the rest of Season 3 will be resumed, and completed, in the near future.  I don’t trust NBC, but I hope that they’re telling the truth.  Community is one of the most charming, intelligent, inventive sitcoms I’ve ever seen.  It tells the story of seven adults attending a place called Greendale Community College, where the mascot is the Human Being, and the most important lessons are learned outside of class.  For example:

·                                   

                     How to bounce on trampolines.

·                                  How to tell if you’re trapped in an evil timeline.

·                                  How to survive paintball wars.

·                                  How to save Christmas.

The show centers around the exploits of Jeff Winger, “the liar”, a former lawyer who actually faked his Bachelor’s degree.  Joining him in each episode are Annie “the day-planner”, Britta “the needlessly defiant”, Troy “the obtuse”, Abed “the undiagnosable”, Shirley “the cloying”, and Pierce (Chevy Chase) “the dickish”, also known as “grandpa flatulent.”  Or so the characters are described in the Dungeons & Dragons episode—when they must make heroic battle for a fellow classmate’s self-esteem.

All of the characters are likeable: even Chevy Chase, playing a rich old racist who just wants to be loved.  Abed, furthermore, has Asperger’s syndrome and a movie-obsession: which translates to the fact that the show can, through his perspective, suddenly become a mafia flick, a batman satire, or stop-motion animated.

Joining the main characters for most episodes are the Dean of Greendale, a “pan-sexual imp” whose greatest hunger is to have Greendale be regarded as a normal school, and Chang, the group’s Spanish teacher-turned-psychotic-groupie-turned-security-guard.  One of the best moments with Chang (and there are quite a few), is when we find out that he’s living in a storage closet and pretending a dismembered mannequin leg is his wife.

Oh the times, the times I’ve had—vicariously—at Greendale!  The movie parodies!  The paintball fights!  The pillow forts!  The KFC-brand rocket simulators!  It will be a sad day if Community is cancelled (and not just for the monkey that lives in the college's air ducts).

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            I asked Greg to describe his favorite clip from the show, and this was his response:

Several characters are creeping through the school’s basement, trying to escape zombies (a.k.a. their classmates, after consuming infected taco sauce).  Suddenly, the scene is split by a blood-curdling shriek.

“Oh,” Jeff Winger gasps in relief, “it’s just a cat.”

The cat yowls again and leaps at them.  They duck.  “It’s just that cat again, guys,” Jeff says, trying to calm everyone down.

The cat launches itself at the humans a third time, claws and fangs bared.  Jeff’s forehead breaks into a cold sweat.  “Hurry!” he yells.  “There’s a crazy cat down here!”

            “The reason I like it,” Greg explained later, “is that it captures in one scene how this show takes the clichés of other shows and turns them upside down.  The writers of Community just seem to have so much creative freedom.”

            Here’s another typical exchange (made during the final battle of an epic, Star Wars-themed paintball game).

            Jeff Winger looks to the left of the camera, a noble gleam in his eye.  “No matter what happens, we’re going to meet in a better place, people.  It’s called Denny's.”

            “I don’t know how to get to Denny's!”

            Jeff snaps his gaze down at the recalcitrant soldier.  “Then I guess we’ll meet in hell, Leonard.”

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The first episode that I saw of Community included the information that the Dean was writing a novel called “Time Desk”, which featured (obviously) a time-traveling dean.  My favorite line in the whole series is later in that same episode, when, having committed an irreparable wrong, the Dean takes off his hat and moans, “Oh, that this beanie were a time beanie!”

Even the last episode aired, the 3^rd season Christmas special, was amazing.  Quick rundown of the plot: the group is almost brainwashed, through carefully-targeted song-and-dance routines, into being the new Greendale Glee club.  Luckily, Britta is an awful singer, and breaks the trance right before the group is convinced to make Glee their way of life.  It also comes to light that the advisor of the Glee Club, a man who smiles way too often, killed his last group of vocalists with a bus.

Troy and Abed (the most nerdly of the main characters) spend their time watching movies like “Kick-Puncher” and “Inspector Spacetime” (a blatant pastiche of Dr. Who), and then reenacting them for fun.  Annie (the hyper multi-tasker) and Britta (the former anarchist) get up to all sorts of school-related shenanigans.  Shirley tries to convert everyone in the group to Christianity, while Pierce explains the rituals of his faux-Buddhist cult.  Jeff (played by The Soup’s Joel McHale) spends almost every episode trying to A) preserve his good-looks, or B) manipulate everyone into doing his work—and ultimately (every episode) learns something new about the meaning of friendship.

No mere blog can capture the geeky brilliance of Community.  So let’s rally, everyone, and save Greendale!  Go Human Beings!

Advice from Dove Chocolates

            Advertisements, while a seemingly-omnipresent aspect of our modern lives, have often struck me as bafflingly stupid.  Last year in San Francisco, for example, every public bus seemed to have a picture of a disembodied hand reaching for a box of McDonald’s french fries, next to the logo, “Gotta have it.” 

This picture might, actually, be a concise representation of obsession—the mindless hand, the fries seemingly accessible but always barely out of reach.  I found it interesting as an allegory of consumerism—but why on earth would anyone think that it would make me want to eat more fries?  Am I supposed to react as if that hand were about to steal my fries?

I grew up almost without television: all we had was a shoddy antenna connection that, on a lucky day, got three channels.  It was enough for my dad to watch the occasional football game, and for me, joy of joys, to sometimes catch an episode of The Simpsons.  I watched plenty of movies (VHS), but there’s no business like TV-show business for propaganda.  Since I didn’t get a crash course in marketing ploys as a kid, I spend most of the time I’m subjected to commercials staring like a bewildered foreigner.

            There’s one commercial currently running, in fact, that consists of about thirty seconds of women screaming.  These women are shopping—and because they didn’t shop at JCPenney (we are asked to believe), they get such wretched deals that they want to do nothing with their lives but shriek themselves hoarse.  That commercial just makes me want to scream as well—not hit up the discount department stores.  From the perspective of JCPenney, this seems counterproductive.

            In fact, I’m much more likely to make a mental note not to buy the products of advertisements I see, just because the assumptions they make piss me off.  Why do commercials assume that, because I’m female, I would be mortified to be seen in public with slightly blemished skin? 

One thing I’m most likely to crave, however—be its advertisements as moronic (or ironic) as they will—is dark chocolate. 

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I admit it: I’m among the many Americans with a chocolate addiction.  Dark chocolate is the way I roll; and staying at Greg’s house, there’s always a secret supply of Dove dark chocolates in the kitchen pantry.  Normally I wouldn’t trust a chocolatier whose other main product is soap, but these little foil-wrapped candies are special.  The reason that they’re special is that they give terrible advice.

Unwrap a Dove chocolate, and the inside of the wrapper is bound to say something like, “Indulge every whim.”

Oh really, Dove?  Every whim?  What if I had the whim to buy a VW bus, pick up a load of quirky hitchhikers, and head down to Tijuana to start a cult based on the worship of Cool Ranch Doritos?  What if I had the whim to try to control parakeets with telepathy?  What if I (gasp) had the whim to give up chocolate?

Another enthusiastic little confection told me, “You’re delicious.”

            Perhaps they mean ‘delicious’ in a perfectly innocent sense.  Perhaps it isn’t a threat of cannibalism.  Speaking as a person who’s read a lot of pulp fiction in her life, however, I could point out that “you’re delicious” is something vampires say to the ingénues they stalk through the night.

Then there are the obviously untrue statements.  Example: “Calories only exist if you count them.”

Oh, okay.  So if I eat only chocolate, but forget how to do math, I’ll never gain weight.  That’s like saying, “My boyfriend only exists while he sleeps if I’m watching.”  It sounds, in fact, like overwrought philosophy:

“I, the Self, am the center of the Universe, and the Universe had no reality separate from my perception of it…”  Yech.  Did I mention that philosophy is one of my least favorite subjects? 

            Some of the Dove aphorisms are unexpectedly depressing.  “Chocolate won’t let you down,” they say. 

I read that aloud to Greg, and he grabbed my arm.  “Chocolate’s always there for you,” he insisted in a tearful voice.  

“Chocolate won’t leave you,” I added, with the same level of drama.  “Not like you’re bastard husband.” 

Chocolate won’t wreck your car, and then flake out on child support.  “Chocolate,” Dove tells us, “loves unconditionally.”

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            The Dove wrappers are optimistic, misguided, and insidious.  Perhaps, however, I’ve underestimated them.  Perhaps they'd stumbled upon the most clever marketing ploy of all: I did eat a tremendous amount of those little confections while writing this post.  And now that you know they exist, you’ll be tempted by Dove chocolates every time you pass them in the store.

            Well played, you soap-makers.  Well played.