THOUGHTS ON THE DEATH OF MICHAEL JACKSON

Michael Jackson died yesterday, although he’d been a walking corpse of a man for many years. To say that he’d turned himself into something beyond human, beyond any sense of normalcy was sometimes an understatement. He pushed the publicity bandwagons to their breaking point with tales of giant castles, Elephant Man bones, and dating Madonna and Brooke Shields in a completely celibate manner.

Madonna. Celibacy. That’s a weird guy.

I read my first Michael Jackson death joke about 10 minutes after finding out he was dead via cable reports. The joke was part of a comments thread on The Onion’s AV Club page, an amazing collection of brilliance and snark that often has insights about popular culture that are brilliant and offensive in the same sentence. So, here’s the sentence that actually caused me to laugh:

“Well, he’s having sleepovers with Baby Jesus now.”




Sorry for the pause, I was listening to “Rock With You” again. It’s pretty much impossible not to sing along with that one. It has a much softer melody than most of the other dance songs on Off The Wall, and a series of call and responses on the chorus that define “smooth”. It builds well towards it, too, the way the massed vocals sing “Feel that heat”, and the song pulls back, dropping everything but the percussion and Michael singing “And we can ride the boogie” with the hihat cymbal emphasizing the off-beats. The chorus uses the beats between the phrases in a way that makes the responses even more powerful. When Michael sings “I wanna rock with you”, there’s a mild snap of massed fingers and percussion that creates a single beat pause before the choir sings “Allllll niiiiight”. “Rock With You” is great in that it never boils over – never is anything but remarkably smooth. The tension created by the propulsion of the beat and the lack of caterwauling works fantastically to create a mood of anticipation. The song sets up the idea of rocking with you, but does not yet rock with you. That’s the next few songs. He’s the seducer here, and, back then, we all knew what that meant: get McKinley laid! It did not mean sleepovers with children in the same bed as a 40-year-old man.

(physical shudder)

I have a child who’s 7 years old. I never thought I’d be a parent, partially for biological reasons (way to go prostrate treatment!), partially for personal (ain’t nobody gonna break MY stride), but I have one, and she’s awesome. All parents say their kids are awesome – well, decent parents do – but E-beth is truly cool and awesome. She’s polite, nice, genuinely appreciative of everything and everyone, and doesn’t judge. While I’d love to take credit for all this, most of that has to go to my wife Lori, who, after I quit OU, has had to spend a lot more time around Elizabeth than me, which means she’s getting to be the child’s teacher of taste and manners. Smart move, fate.

We try to support her as much as we can, but also want her to be a kid – a paste-eating, crap-leaving, mess-making kid. She deserves the right to be a child.

And so did Michael Jackson.

I can’t begin to imagine the abuse in the Jackson household. We’ve all heard tales of Joe Jackson driving his kids into tearful fits, picking Michael up by his feet and slamming his head against the ground, and generally treating him in a manner we now call Child Abuse without even thinking about the definition. And that, unfortunately, is what will be lost in the whole shuffle to “understand” Michael Jackson: that his story mirrors the way child abuse has been dealt with by our society.

When I was a kid, children’s entertainment took on a particularly educational, left-wing stance. Sesame Street and other children’s educational television suddenly popped up with messages of equality and empathy, echoing the left-wing themes of the late 60’s. These messages were ingrained into a lot of Saturday morning cartoons, and much of it is mocked for its over-the-top stance and insistence on a moral, no matter how goofy the show’s premise might be. The last episode of Land of the Lost? A cavalry soldier and a Native American learn to help each other. Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids – a criminally underwatched show nowadays – dealt with the harshness of inner city life as realistically as possible for a kid’s show. Drug use, stealing, poverty, ice cream after a tonsillectomy – all these subjects were discussed on the show, and things didn’t always turn out well for those involved. The Super Friends routinely took on various racial and political ideologies and showed how they were flat-out wrong, and then Superman saved us from the Liquid Light – a liquid so corrosive that it can eat through everything but the ground it slides down on towards a city.

Michael Jackson had a cartoon, too, as part of the Jackson 5ive. Ever seen it? It’s a piece of shit – one of those Rankin-Bass/Filmation cartoons that featured so much repetitive animation that, even as a small child, I recognized its lameness. The Jacksons were so busy, they didn’t even do the voices of themselves. Think about that: Michael Jackson, a person obsessed with childhood and everything tethered to it, wasn’t even allowed to do the voice of his own cartoon character. For the record, Diana Ross – the “discoverer of the Jackson Five” – did her own voice when she appeared. It may have been the episode where Michael and the boys did some farming. How craptastically disappointed would you be if you found out there was going to be a cartoon of your (fictionalized) life, but your dad wouldn’t let you be in it?

While a lot of the shows from that period haven’t aged well for that very seriousness of approach, I still admire what they were trying to do. Women’s rights, open-mindedness, charity: these were the traits pushed in a lot of these cartoons and children’s shows, before the 80’s when the rules regarding children’s television – and all of television itself – were trashed so stations could sell more airtime for commercials. Who to blame? Those people who saw capitalism as the way to improve everything and broke down as many barriers as possible that stood in the way of people making money. Nope, not everything was improved. Love those 24-hour infomercial stations and the constant selling of subsidiary products on TV shows? Great. Please leave. For those of us who see constant advertising as a soul-crushing experience, I’ll buy yez a beer at the Reunion tonight.

So, along with other social wrongs, child abuse was one of the subjects these shows dealt with, and sometimes with a clarity that put news reports to shame. So I grew up, and society began to understand what a horrible thing it is to beat the shit out of your own kids. Way to go, humanity. What the hell took you so long? Moral Relativity?

(In a horrible piece of irony, Janet Jackson, sister of Michael played an abused child on Good Times, and I’m assuming she brought a lot of real-life experience to the role.A bit more on her later. Just a bit.)




Ooh, here comes “Billie Jean”. In the same way that “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Strawberry Fields Forever” show how you can take pop music and make art out of it, “Billie Jean” is a momentous event. It’s an amazing thing – a song about stalking, lying, the dark side of celebrity, and parental responsibility that you can dance to. Set up as one of Jackson’s paranoid fever dreams about how celebrity can bring out the freaks, the song is about an accusation of parenthood. Jackson is terrified that the child might be his, because it will destroy everything, and he fights and fights to find ways to ensure, factually, that the kid is not his son. He denies, denies, denies, and then “the lie becomes the truth” and he cracks.

Whether or not he is actually the father is not important. What’s important here is the denial. He refuses to accept the idea that he is the father of a child. He rails against it and blames everyone but himself: the media, the machine, the woman. It’s the second song on Thriller to discuss the probability of having an unwanted child. The first is “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin'”, which reminds us that if you can’t feed the baby, don’t have the baby. In “Billie Jean”, if you don’t want the baby, you rail against everyone and everything but never accept the possibility that you are responsible for the child.

The music of “Billie Jean” is what most people want to talk about: that bass-line, the spare use of guitar, the scary-movie string cues. The bass line gets us into the song, although a drum beat that sounds more like someone walking down a dark street introduces us to it. The bass line is almost an inversion of the Peter Gunn theme, and shouldn’t work as a funk bass line because it’s too busy. But it hits the One hard enough to work. Then, the “ooh…ooh……ooh…ooh” vocals come in. The effect is staggering, creating a dark psychic landscape right out of a film noir, and that’s before the strings come in to counterpoint the melody and make the song even darker sounding. There’s no escape from the depth of the song. It sucks you in to a world of stealing and shadows, where you can be a pop star and have no happiness because of your constant paranoia, and where a child can be used as a bargaining chip to gain money from innocent people. Well, that’s if you believe the kid is not his son. I certainly think he is.

The song slowly builds and builds, adding layer and layer of instrumentation until you get the controlled chaos of the end, where everything’s playing at once, and the singer’s wailing over the backing vocals, and the guitar line keeps coming in, and the chaos keeps generating, and…is never released. We just fade out. Quincy Jones obviously deserves a lot of credit as producer of the song, but Michael was in charge by this time. If it sounds like this, it’s because he wanted it to. “Billie Jean” is as complex and heartbreaking as pop music gets. More than Dylan, who peered into the abyss and decided he wanted out of that shit, Jackson comes from a world of shit, and still lives in it during this song. He returns to this theme in other songs – “Dirty Diana” is the most obvious – but never wallows around in it the way “Billie Jean” does. God, I love that song. It disappeared right after “Beat It” hit and Thriller slammed its way into the subconscious of every American, but, by then, Michael had moved onto the more fun, flippant sounds of “PYT” and “Thriller”. “Billie Jean” sort of disappeared as the funner songs on the album took over the narrative.

By now, you’ve probably realized that I’m pretty affected by Michael Jackson’s death. Like a lot of people my age, I grew up with him as a constant presence – radio, Saturday morning cartoon, The Wiz. When Off The Wall hit large on the charts, it was cool to see him make the transition to being an adult singer, and I liked that someone who was still very much a kid could do so well. Thriller underwhelmed me when it appeared. While “Billie Jean” was obviously brilliant, I didn’t like “Beat It” or “Thriller”. They were too conventional for me, the guy who kept trying to get people to listen to Zappa, Oingo Boingo, and Elvis Costello in middle school and beyond. So while I became less interested in Michael Jackson, everyone else got too interested.

Has there ever been a person as popular as Michael Jackson was during the 1980’s? I mean, besides a dead religious figure, has there ever been anyone that popular worldwide? The man ate with presidents, helped Eastern Europeans learn to dance, and tried to feed the goddamned world. That’s how big Michael Jackson used to be. For a while, you could not escape coverage of him on TV. MTV – after Jackson finally broke the color barrier there – played his videos non-stop, including that over-hyped mini-movie of “Thriller” that brought a crashing end to the world of cheap, do-what-you-want music videos that used to play all over the channel because they needed stuff to fill up space. Myself, I could watch Costello drunkenly flailing around motel corridors all day – a lot more than I want to watch the video for “Thriller”. But the world had changed. It wasn’t enough to have a decent video; it had to be an event: cue the flowing curtains, white horses, and glowing children’s eyes. Jackson also brought entertainment news to the forefront like no on else before him – especially as he started his move from eccentric to crazy during the years following the release of Bad.

Jackson never did anything close to even the filler on Thriller after that.

Stories of Jackson’s weird shopping sprees, glitzy outfits, and the constant presence of children painted the man as batshit crazy years before Lisa Marie, skin-bleaching, and nose problems.




“She’s Out of My Life”. Awesome song. Beautifully undersung until the passion is needed, with as minimal of accompaniment as the song can take without bursting like a soap bubble. If someone sang this these days, there’d be glissandos and other fancy vocal shit all over it, not to mention the auto-tuning, which would eliminate Jackson’s very real breakdown during the last few lines of the song. This isn’t a song he wrote, so it’s a bit more personal about these feelings than Jackson’s own attempts to talk about heartbreak. This song gets it right on almost every level, from the adult understanding communicated in the lyrics, to the way the melody goes up and down the scales like a child’s sing-along. At one point, Michael pushes the volume up and sings “Damned indecision and cur-sed pride”, but doesn’t quite release the pent-up emotion until the end of the phrase, which is “’Kept my love for her/locked deep inside”, and he lets it all loose in a controlled burst, taking the word “deep” and extending it as long as he can without breaking it and holding the “eee” sound until he sings it through clenched teeth. His own pride killed his one true chance at love, and he knows it. Nothing he can do but stand in place, rigid, without revealing any emotion until he has to. The power of the song is that his tentative delivery is the same tentativeness that kept him from admitting his love, and, obviously, the guy has learned nothing but how to feel bad. He can’t even break out of his depression to express genuine rage and sadness. It’s a crushing song and was the first song I listened to after hearing he’d died, and I felt sympathy for him. Lori tried to make an Arrested Development joke, and I quietly shut her down. Jackson had earned some seriousness from me, and, aside from the jokes at his expense that were all over the place within 10 minutes, I tried to keep it serious, which is hard to do when you’re talking about a man whose best friend was Elizabeth Taylor, another person whose abused childhood and early traumas turned her into a basket case.

“They fuck you up, your mom and dad”, goes the poem. As hard as they (now we) try, a parent can’t help but bring some of their own baggage into their own relationships with their children. Who knows how Joe Jackson was treated as a child? Parallels between Jackson’s childhood and Brian Wilson’s childhood are so close, is it even necessary to say that great pain can create great art, but great art isn’t enough of an achievement to justify it? Wilson spent years in therapy to deal with his problems, and seems to have come out the other side intact and better. But he had one thing Jackson never had – a pause. Wilson’s life slowed down considerably once The Beach Boys became nothing more than a nostalgia act, so he had time to step away from the limelight and get some of his shit together; Jackson never did. As he got older, he got more exposure, and as his popularity grew, so did his eccentricities. From around 1983 to 1990-something the man was everywhere – somehow. He never got a break, and never gave himself one, possibly because he never got one as a child – not even to do his own voice over for a cartoon based at least partially on his own life. Now, why would someone like that become a control freak?

I don’t think Jackson had sex with the many kids he was around. I think that at some point, he lost his ability to tell whether or not right and wrong mattered in his world. He was an abused child, so he wound up trying to be the best friend he could to every child in the world, going so far as to try to end hunger in Africa with a song I find nauseating, at best: “We Are the World”. But in his obsession to help kids, he simply regressed and became one, with the same sort of solipsistic sense of self and lack of social niceties. I this, he began to practice a form of self-abuse that defines self-hate caused by abuse. Did Jackson ever understand that what he was doing was wrong? You can’t be a man in your 30’s and 40’s and have sleepovers with children; it’s simply not appropriate in the same way that a teacher/student or boss/intern relationship is wrong. It’s a use of power that is wrong – turning a relationship that should be about nurturing and educating into sleep-over buddies and damn the consequences. At most, I think Jackson played “Doctor” with the kids in the same way young kids would do so, with a level of innocence and curiosity that a child would have. Jackson wasn’t a child; he was a full grown man, and that sort of behavior is inappropriate on every level.

So who told him not to do it? By the time Jackson was doing all of this stuff, his family of hangers-on had used his celebrity to become celebrities themselves, including dear-old abusive dad, Joe. They sure didn’t stop him. What about his – face it, no one told Jackson to stop doing it, or at least no one told him with any authority. His parents could have tried, but they lost that opportunity – the opportunity to teach right and wrong – the moment Joe Jackson realized he could get rich by exploiting his kids, especially poor Michael.

It’s hard to jump back and forth discussing Jackson’s abuse and the abuse he himself performed without sounding like a schizophrenic. But that’s what the cycle of abuse does – replays itself into rote routine until someone stops it. Want a literal metaphor? Take the ending of Kubrick’s The Shining, a movie that is about the cycle of abuse in society, even more than it is a supernatural horror film. The ending – different from the book for both technical necessity and support of theme – has Danny fleeing from his axe-wielding father, who now has a chance to kill off the main person who ruined his life – his kid, who obviously forced him into an unhappy marriage with a flake of a wife, and ruined his chances to be a best-selling, world-famous author. Jack Torrance is living out his dream – a dream of revenge against all those who screwed his life up but his damned alcoholic, barely talented, selfish self. But Danny’s smarter than that. He starts walking backwards in his own footprints left in the snow, and eventually jumps into a hiding place and covers up the footprints that show him heading to it. His father follows the footprints and is caught up, forever, in the redundancy of the hedge maze. Danny has literally walked backwards through his own steps to break the cycle of abuse. He and his mom will go on to better lives, with the aid of huge amounts of therapy and a frozen-dead psychopathic father.

Too bad it wasn’t Michael Jackson who had the opportunity to break the cycle. Instead, he’s raised his kids outside of the real world that hurt him so much, and so they will internalize his own faults and fuck-ups unless they get help. But considering the people surrounding them, I can’t see that happening. Kids, don’t watch TV for about a month. You’re not going to like what they have to say about your father.

While Jackson got nuttier and nuttier, the idea that his actions stem from abuse began to drift away until he stopped being a person to most people, and became a thing to point at, like that crazy woman who talks to her hand and walks the streets of Norman. She must have been somebody, at some time. For almost 20 years, Jackson’s existed as Michael Jackson the fucked-up nut, and not Michael Jackson, the Artist. It’s weird to have taught students who thought Jackson “turned” himself white, and was no longer “black”, as though identity is nothing but your skin color. Instead of a cautionary tale of what abuse can do to children, he’s a freak child molester – no evidence of it whatsoever and vindication in a courtroom haven’t dispelled that notion at all – whose body is so plastic and fake he no longer counts as a person, but as an object of ridicule and Boo Radley-esque horror stories (“Why, once, I seen him walking on the moon!”).




“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” is on now. As the lead-off track for Thriller, it’s a bit of a wild card, a shuffling skitter of an electronic percussion beat with lyrics that seem to be about all of these things: Jackson railing against someone trying to cement a bad relationship by having a child; the way someone else is treating this person, much like a “buffet”, where you take all you want , but don’t necessarily eat (need) all you take; and a “dammmit, you’re amazing, regardless” song. Towards the end, everything but the background singers and handclaps drop out, and a chant starts up: “Mama-se, mama-sa, mama-coo-sa”. It’s stolen from an old Manu Dibango song and pretty much is there for dressing, as it’s actually translates as a call to dance and have sex, in the original (Makossa is a slang word for “dance” in Cameroon). It’s supposed to be a chant to get women to have sex, but Jackson just has it there because it sounds cool -- hopefully. Otherwise, it’s hypocrisy in action.

Now that Jackson’s finally dead – and I say “finally” because he’s been dying in front of us for years, and few people tried to help him stop and instead pushed him onwards as long as they got money and the opportunity to be a “hanger-on” (Jackson family, I mean you) – maybe we can concentrate on his accomplishments more than his history. The man took popular music and – like Elvis and The Beatles before him – stretched its possibilities and creativity to the end. Unlike The Beatles, whose back catalog gave him the cash cow he needed to buy most of central Walachia for a picnic ground, Jackson kept trying long after he should have stopped. Unlike Jackson, Elvis was still beloved by everyone after he died, since the really freaky stuff he did hadn’t leaked out. Elvis’ weirdness was tempered by the fact that he kept it at home and didn’t display everything for the whole world to see, like dangling Lisa-Marie out a hotel balcony because he was so happy he wanted to show off his kid to some fans below for their approval.

And that’s ultimately the tragedy of all of this. Michael wanted everyone’s approval, since he didn’t get it from his father and family. He wanted to be the biggest star in the world because he thought that would mean everyone would love him. Instead, he got approval when he was making us happy, general disapproval when his music got less and less interesting to listen to, and then complete disavowal once the really fucked up shit came out.

He died on the verge of a comeback, so they say. What that word means in this context is a bit weird, since in this case, “comeback” meant “doing some big concerts to dig himself out of debt”. He wasn’t trying to revive himself musically, he just needed tons of money to pay things off. So his search for approval became a life and death matter for him, and he ultimately lost it, although, if he could see the way the world is reacting to his death (and Mark Sanford should be on his knees thanking God that the media isn’t at all interested in him anymore), he’d be happier than Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn at their own funerals. Lester Bangs, the late, great rock critic, wrote a piece about Elvis’ death that works as one of the greatest elegies ever, but also as an understanding of how Elvis’ death meant society was changing, becoming more and more individualistic, and, therefore, less empathetic to other people’s views and beliefs. Here’s a long quote from it, included because it’s one of my favorite bits of writing, and because it takes up space:

"If love is truly going out of fashion, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each other's objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation's many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis's. But I can guarantee you one thing; we will never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won't bother saying goodbye to his corpse. I will say goodbye to you."

Bangs was wrong. There was something else we could all agree on: that Michael Jackson was a very talented man who was completely fucked up. That mutual recognition of his insanity also tied us together, since, no matter what, we could all agree that Jackson was fucked up beyond belief. There will never be another person like him, in that regard, and no one who deserves our sympathy more right now. The man’s story is a walking tale of the horrors of child abuse and the effects it has on those involved. However, at some point, he lost our sympathies and became a thing to be mocked and ridiculed. He never stopped being an abuse victim, though. Most people just stopped caring about what caused his weirdness and just concentrated on the weirdness.

Which is why we probably won’t learn anything as a society because of Jackson’s death, except that there’ll be a chance to re-evaluate him as an artist rather than a freak in many people’s eye, since he‘s no longer there to distract us from him. Michael Jackson’s story is a cautionary tale of how families can hurt each other for personal gain, and abuse can turn a happy child into a freak. We don’t want to face him that way because, as a freak, it’s so much easier. His surprise death probably won’t do anything but remind people that, for 20 years, Jackson’s been considered less an artist and more of a reclusive, pedophiliac, self-hating "thing". Everything before that is unnecessary, because it disrupts our ability to make Jackson a scapegoat for our own fallacies. Who’s to say we wouldn’t act the same once we were famous – so famous everyone on the fucking planet had an opinion about us? And once he had enough clout to get away from his family, why wouldn’t he retreat into a world of a fantastic childhood, to counter the one he actually had? He turned them all into hangers-on, their own talents and ambitions crushed by the weight of being one of Michael Jackson’s siblings. Only Janet, who ran away earlier and to other talented people, seems to have escaped.

So, for the death of Michael Jackson, I’d like to reprint, without permission, the full text of “This Be the Verse”, the Phillip Larkin poem I started to quote earlier:

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.”

It’s a dark one, and ends with the idea of the cycle of abuse as a permanent thing, unless you take the easy way out or simply don’t have any kids to pass on your own neuroses to. Some of Jackson’s work is this dark, and reflects a part of the man he would try to stifle or make overly maudlin instead of dealing with it head first in songs like “Billie Jean”.

As that one starts over again, I wonder how the song would be received now, with all the knowledge of Jackson’s past and his weirdness on display for everyone to see. Nowadays, it would be understood that Jackson was talking about one of his deepest fears and confronting it, not necessarily in a successful manner. Back then, he was this cute guy who had finally grown up and was finally talking about sex. How far we’ve come. We understand now that abuse exists on many levels in our society, and many people are still abusing the guy, by telling jokes about wine, sleepovers, and plastic surgery without a damned care for the way he was brought up, and his inability to escape his demons. Make no mistake, there are a lot of very sad people out there who cared for Jackson, and many of his fans are going to be in hysterics, and they should be cared for, not mocked. They have their lives and loves, and we have ours. And even if there’s a disagreement on how the guy should be perceived, those in mourning should be respected. We’ve had enough fun at the guy’s expense, now let’s listen to his music and let the freakish recluse disappear into time. We’ve had our fun, and he didn’t, no matter how hard he tried. Goodbye Michael Jackson. Sorry I wasn’t there for you.

Pop Culture and Christmas -- 6 1/2 Short Blogs about Music and TV for the Season No One Can Agree To Disagree On Anymore.

1. My favorite Christmas song is "Joseph, Who Understood", by the New Pornographers. It's sung from the point-of-view of Joseph, the least sung about guy in the Bible, who hears the townsfolk of Galilee belittling his status as a father and husband because, to them, he's a cuckold. Joseph's response is to talk to Mary about this. He understands that "Some things are bigger/ Than we know", but still needs to know "Mary, is he mine?" It's a beautiful pop song, full of glorious choruses and harmonies, and background cadences that work both as a Greek chorus and an answer to Joseph's questions. By the end, he's singing "Mary, He is mine", which is why the title of the song is what it is. "You're Asking Me/ To Believe/ In Too Many Things" is as heartbreaking a line as ever written. "Mary, He is mine" is the determination of a father to do the right thing. Glorious. Go to iTunes and buy it now. It's a buck, for cryin' out loud.

2. After that, it's the BC Clark jingle. For those of you who have never been inside the state of Oklahoma over Christmas, BC Clark Jewelers has been around for a very long time, and is older than the state itself. At some point, the gods smiled upon the commercial songwriters of central Oklahoma, and they came up with this gem of a jingle that is almost impossible to get out of your head, once heard -- and you cannot live within the state lines without hearing the song over and over for the month of December. Then it disappears, back into the vault to be reissued next December. Never re-recorded since its original version, it sounds beautifully retro and timeless AND works fabulously as a commercial, placing the store in historical context and providing you with the information you need to go spend money there. It never gets annoying, and no matter how many people are around, they will all start singing along when it's played on the radio. You can be arrested for not doing so in some of the smaller towns in Oklahoma, as a variation of their old "sundown" laws. BC Clark Jewelers should not be confused with the Trust House Jewelers, who aren't around anymore, and who used to sponsor a lot of local late night television. This led to Godzilla movies being interrupted every 15 minutes by a picture of their French Market Mall store, and a Muzak version of "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" playing as the owners displayed horrifyingly expensive, tacky as hell jewelry for you to buy. Late at night.

3. There are so many worst songs involving Christmas that I could write entry after entry without my usual sardonic glee and just display pain -- the pain of Magic 104's already horrible station going Christmas since some time in late November. There's nothing like 24-hour, constant, enforced merriment to make you Grinch out all over the place. Worst thing I've ever heard: any of the myriad versions of "Mary, Did You Know?", which is answered "Yup, she did." Didn't you read that book? Almost any Christmas song written especially for a movie made in the last ten years also falls under this umbrella, especially that piece of shit "Where Are You, Christmas?" song that Faith Hill sang in that even shittier version of How The Grinch... Ron Howard plopped on us from above. Magic 104 is a constant pain in my side. It's the station more people agreed to listen to at work, so it is played constantly. I have NPR on at my desk, but am not always there, so I get to listen to Magic 104's playlist, as selected by (in my mind, at least) their typical listener: a conservative 30-ish, low 40's-ish female secretary with three kids who thought Bon Jovi was the height of rock and roll in the 80's, but is too scared to listen to Top 40 radio now because it's all hip-hop and rap. She loved Garth Brooks at the time, and CARES about the contestants on American Idol. Think "Debbie", Frank Zappa's hypothetical teenager who is the focus of record companies' promotional departments, but grown up and almost 40, and you've got it. Magic 104: ass-kissing radio for your home or business. I also get to listen to Bill O'Reilly every day, in part because I believe in free speech and listening to those people you vehemently disagree with so you can understand where they're coming from. Also in part because the guys at work like to hear me yell back at the radio. "That's bullshit!!!" is another big Holiday tradition.

4. At one point I could recite all the lines, sing all the songs, and perform all the voices of the great Rankin/Bass classic Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer. Let me say this again; I could do them on command, and do so now without being asked. Many's the person who has heard me do this and looked wide-eyed at the weird person speaking like Yukon Cornelius. Rudolph is to me, and for many people my age, THE Christmas TV special. And how did this happen? Seriously? How does a stop-motion puppet show from the late 60's come to dominate every other Christmas Special around it? Is it the message, that you should accept people for who they are and understand that every person is special in some way? Is it the songs? I mean, who doesn't love the timeless beauty of "There's Always Tomorrow For Dreams To Come True"? Or the remakes of almost-blacklisted folkster Burl Ives' classics "Holly, Jolly Christmas" and "Silver and Gold"? No, what makes Rudolph so timeless is that the special helped create a whole chunk of Christmas mythology, and inhabits its world so completely, that it's hard to imagine Christmas without an Island of Misfit Toys, or the hope that the ones we love will simply accept us as who we are. That makes Rudolph, the character, a cipher. He can represent any minority group you want, and any hero you need. He's a tough deer-of-action who is polite, caring, and flies when people like him. And Hermie may be the best gay Jewish puppet role model ever. The fact that you can buy the entire cast of the show at auction is one of the weirder realizations of my adult life.

5. The Charlie Brown Christmas Special has finally fallen victim to enforced nostalgia, for me. Now, they spread the 24 minute cartoon out to an hour, with more commercial breaks than you'd think possible in 60 minutes, and ram a few shorts in afterward to keep you watching -- and in order to fit in more commercials. The CBCS, as we hipsters call it (only me), is also the only special that really tries to downplay the festivities in favor of a discussion of the theme of Christmas. For many people, that means the Story of Jesus's birth -- and ONLY the story of Jesus's birth. For the special (and this has to be read a bit into it, as I never got high enough with Charles Schulz to ask him), the theme is the way Capitalism has destroyed the original meaning of Christmas, and has "created" a new, commercial and status-appointed meaning. Fogged up in the mist of ideology, time, and people bitching about "Lack of Tradition!" and "Tannenbaum?!" is the thing I remember most from the Story -- that Jesus's parents were willing to defy death in order to bring the child into the world. That selflessness (and let's not forget that Mary didn't really have much choice in the matter) and generosity (the two of them allowed that Jesus was their child, even though God was the father) is faintly echoed in Charlie Brown's pick of a runt-of-the-litter Christmas Tree, that he likes in spite of what everyone else says, and in spite of what everyone else thinks he should purchase. Linus eventually steps in, as he usually does, to provide some sense in those chaotic times, and simply recites a few lines from The Bible that resets everyone's bearings. Jesus, he points out, was a Gift. Be happy with the Gift. Selflessness is the reason for the season.

But the ideology gets a bit crossed here. Linus seems to be saying that the gift of Jesus is what's important to remember, that it is the meaning of Christmas. In one sense, he's right. Christians are supposed to celebrate Christmas as the birth of their Savior -- the Savior of the World, for them. But the holiday is so much more than that. For those of us who aren't Christians, it's a pause for breath, a chance to take the year as a whole and celebrate those things that make life worth living. For you, it may involve religion. For me, it's my family and friends, and the hope that people can continue to be as selfless as Jesus's parents, and do unto others, etc. The CBCS isn't quite sure how to work this all out. After his tree is rejected by his selfish compatriots, Charlie takes it to his house. He'll love it as it is, so there. He's much better than you, and is self-important enough to know it. His attempt to make the tree more palatable -- the ornament from Snoopy's prize-winning Christmas doghouse display that Mr. Brown (sounds like Mr. Shit!) puts on it -- only succeeds in hurting the tree, and he runs off, screaming. His "friends", who have followed after him, possibly to see if he'll commit suicide, give the tree their "love", which for Linus is the gift of his security blanket, and for the rest, the moving of ALL of Snoopy's decorations onto the tree, thus making it as pretty as all the others BECAUSE THEY'VE MADE IT THAT WAY. Far from being an acceptance of the tree as it is, the Peanuts cast remakes the tree in their own image, and it is accepted. Hell, they even serenade Charlie Brown as some sort of "keeper of the flame", when Linus is the one who got everyone to shut up for a minute and think about the "meaning" of Christmas. The blanket around the tree should be enough, but it isn't for Shermy and the rest. Charlie bought the tree, and they made it less individualistic, just so he and it would fit in better. At the end, it just looks like every other over-decorated tree in the world, and not "itself" anymore. Rah frickin' rah. As dark as Peanuts got, I think this point might actually be what Charles Schulz is trying to get at, but, again, I never got high enough with him to ask. Dolly Madison cakes for all!

Next up, a Marxist revaluation of the Cold and Heat Misers.

6. Without doubt the saddest AND sappiest Christmas song is "Same Old Lang Syne", by schlockmeister Dan Fogelberg, he who told us about his penis size years before doing so was hip: "Longer". (See! I told you there would be dick jokes!) This 5 minute opus about a rock star who meets an old high school girlfriend in the grocery store is not the set up for Time Chasers, but the saddest of all Xmas songs: the reunion that turns into the Big Suck. Filled with little details about frozen food and drinking in the car, the song represents nostalgia past, present, and future in a nice Christmas Carol-ly sort of way: the Future, in that the song is about the inability to recreate the past, either in action or feeling, so it's best to look forward; the Present, in that the damned thing is played on Magic 104 every hour, and because I am about the age of the main character now, so, watch out, nostalgia fans!!; and the Past, which takes some back story.

We used to have dances in high school, back in the day when I danced not to attract the opposite sex, but to have fucking fun! Really! I follow the idea that if music makes you want jump and down, then jump up and down! Forget the embarrassment that comes with trying to impress someone with your dancing, just do whatever the hell you feel like. Dancing is the greatest thing ever for those who want to express feeling through dance. All that said, I am one of the greatest disco dancers of all time. Hands down.

Anyway, as one of the final slow songs of the evening, you know, the one where you're supposed to finally wind up with the person you have true affection for and stare MEANINGFULLY into each other's eyes and postulate on "For us, what happens next?", "Syne" is the greatest song, since it is about the time AFTER the relationship, after you've had your final dance with someone and they -- and you -- have gone on to other things. For those of us who had an eye on the future, it became the song to dance to and ponder deep, philosophical thoughts about the end of high school, the beginning of adulthood. It can be the first understanding of the power of nostalgia -- even before you've earned it. "Syne" allows that feelings never quite disappear, but are replaced, and either submerged completely, or re-interpreted ("I shouldn't have been a jazz musician after all!"). So you get a feeling of nostalgia just from hearing the song, because you once danced to it with someone you said you liked a lot, maybe loved, and now aren't with. Nowadays, the song simply takes me back to the time when I thought deep thoughts about relationships instead of actually having them; when I "acted" instead of doing. It's nice to think that teenagers are self-aware in high school, but in most cases, we were doing what we thought we were supposed to do at the time, instead of actually doing something because we wanted to do it. High school is a time of role playing, not introspection, unless you're role playing the part of an introspective teenager, which is, again, a role (and then you become a Goth: "Burn! Burn! Burn Hot Topic! Don't let it steal your soul!").

And that's why "Syne" is so sad. These two people are trying to connect with old parts they used to play, but that time is over. It'd be nice to recreate some magic every once in a while, but a lot of times, there isn't magic, just nostalgia. My nostalgia for the song "Same Old Lang Syne" is on many levels, from remembering people I used to dance to during it, to the genius of Darren Penrod, who put it on last on the slow-dance/make-out mix tape most of us copied to have as our own. You know, the one that had a lot of Journey, Styx (Styx?), and The Eagles, whose "Wasted Time" is another one of those instant nostalgia songs, but isn't Xmas-related, so it's not in here. It reminds me of a time when I thought I actually knew a lot of stuff, but it turned out I knew shadows of things, like owning the guidebook to Plato's Cave and expecting it to provide the true experience, rather than just being promotional material. I strongly believe that graduating from high school causes a sort of mental illness. You're grouped in with a bunch of people for up to 13 years, and then -- POOF! -- you're not. Set up. Fail. Suddenly, you don't see that guy with the cowboy hat in the hallway anymore, or hear Darron Dunbar's magnificent, wonderful laugh, or see Cindy, or ineffectually criticize everything decent with Mark, go "Myeh!" with another Mark, or slow dance with whoever happened to be closest and cutest when the right song came on. Good days, high school. Too bad, as the saying sort of goes, that we aren't adults when we experience it, so we can understand the beautiful tragedy of it all: fraudulent, meaningful, pointless, incisive high school.

So "Same Old" re-creates, for me, that realization, late in my high school tenure, that I had spent too much time trying to do what you're supposed to do in high school, and not enough time actually enjoying it, which is, of course, part of the teenage experience, too. Oh, to be the un-enlightened person who looked at high school with less pretentiousness and less shit-headedness. Oh, to patronize some more. Oh, for the days when I didn't have to worry about so much shit that it becomes hard to be a part of one's life, and not an observer. Well, that's what adulthood is for -- to figure out the world. And you have a long time to do it. Adulthood lasts the rest of your life, which means you have a lot of opportunities to figure out stuff, but as you get older, less time to enjoy the knowledge as you try to pass it on to someone younger than you who is in the same trap you were "at that age". At the end of "Same Old Lang Syne," the protagonists part, and the snow turns to rain, which will wash away the beauty of the Winter Wonderland and return us to the rest of the year. Christmas is a time for reflection and exhaling -- lots of exhaling. Far from there being a War on Christmas, we rush towards the end of the year faster and faster each year, hoping the exhalation process starts earlier and earlier and lasts longer. Crappy Christmas music starts blaring out of radios a little earlier in November each year, and each year, Wal-Mart tries to push Xmas on us a bit sooner. I realize that some people are concerned about the death of Christmas, which is the dumbest fucking thing ever. No, it's more dumb than those Christmas commercials that try to convince you to buy the stuff you want instead of being happy with just getting a gift. And I know that Bill O'Reilly's greatest Holiday wish is to run around with a claw hammer bashing in the skulls of any and all who don't celebrate Christmas the same way he does every year: fucking mountains of hookers on top of a running chainsaw. But that's his deal, and he's wrong about Christmas. What he's really worried about is being passed by, about not being a part of something. He doesn't want his way of life to disappear, so he forces the world into his own mold, and tries to compress it into a shape, much like using a Play-Doh extractor. He's doomed to fail, thank God. As history bypasses us and makes it more difficult to actually be involved in a moment of history than ever before -- witness the "instant historocity" of the Obama election, and he hasn't even taken office yet -- we are forced to concentrate on the mundanity of our own lives, and try to force events into narrative conventions so we "get" our lives. Well, there's nothing to "get", no "meaning" to extract. There are lessons to be learned, for sure, but not everyone gets them. Christmas is a time of beautiful impermanence. It comes, leaves a trail of destruction in its wake, makes us happy for a few weeks, and then is gone until next year. Snow falls, sits on the ground, then melts or gets washed away by the rain. Presents are wrapped, and the wrapping paper is ripped and tossed in the corner to get at the thing inside, then winds up in the garbage can, unless you reuse it, which is a stupid idea. Whatever event you thought was incredibly meaningful in your teenage years turns out to be useful for creating nostalgia, that beautiful feeling that nothing will ever be the same again. Damn, I hope so.

6.5 Hey, Merry Christmas everyone. Happy Holidays, just to make sure everyone gets a shout out. While my sarcasm meter may be off the charts right now, the one thing I really want to do right now is thank all those people who have been and those who are still a part of my life. I hope you're happy. I hope you succeed at something. I hope you are loved by someone and love someone back, even if it's a love without all that fluid passing. I hope you can be the person you want to be instead of the person someone else wants you to be, or that society wants you to be. I hope you're not judged, and I hope you don't judge. If you're religious, remember that you could be wrong. If you're not religious -- ahem --, remember that you could be wrong. Share a gift with someone for reasons other than selfish ones, and love the gifts you receive because they were given for this reason: Appreciation. "The worst thing in the world," the amazing songwriter Peter Case once wrote, "is to be unwanted/ To be used up and thrown away." Like wrapping paper. So take your time unwrapping things. Someone spent some time making the gift look pretty, and you should take your time in order to appreciate the thought. If you are alone this Christmas, and I've been there myself, appreciate the incredible feeling of independence and the fact that you're leading an alternative Christmas lifestyle. Break a tradition, and try to create a new one. Whatever the heck else you do this holiday, try to be nice to someone. Happy Saturnalia, everyone. I mean, Happy Kwanzaa. Sorry, I meant, Happy Hanukkah, all of you. I mean, have a nice life. Breathe deep and exhale slowly, since you have another full year heading at you faster than you'd probably like to realize.

OKLAHOMAN HISTORY X

Well, Barack Obama was elected president last night, a moment that scares, humbles, and thrills me to the core. This country has been divided by politics for too long, and maybe this is a sign that – because voters crossed both party lines and other, media-created ones – we can heal some of the fractures.

I will not hide the fact that I voted for Obama, and that a part of me felt proud to be able to do so. However, he’s not the candidate I initially supported – that’s his new VP – and, far from the evil “liberal” tag people have tried to paint him with, he’s a moderate, and moderates don’t necessarily get as much done, because they don’t push as hard. I apologize to all the moderates – 2, maybe 3 people read this thing? – out there, but I am reminded of a joke my Constitutional History professor told in class, when he explained why he flat-out hated moderates, which, strangely enough, is very similar to a “how many blanks does it take to change a light bulb” joke I invented years earlier. Here’s his joke, paraphrased, or rather, misremembered and recited to myself in an attempt to not screw the damned thing up:

A dam breaks and a wall of water is heading towards a bridge with hundreds of people on it. What does a Conservative do about it? “The wall of water is a necessary correction in the amount of humans on the planet.” What does a Liberal do about it? “We must throw an enormous amount of money in front of the water to stop it from hitting the bridge, and then build a newer, not-yet-designed-but-better bridge next to it.” What does a Moderate do about it? Nothing. All the people die and water crushes through everything while they’re trying to please everyone.

This was, of course, his reason for being a Progressive, and not a Moderate, a political position someone had inquired about.

His name was Dr. Crockett, a 70-ish year old man who taught the two-part Constitutional History class one night a week, for three hours a night. We rarely stayed past the first hour, and if we did, it was because we were giving our Supreme Court presentations in class, and, since there were about 80 of us in there, they could go all night. He also took smoke breaks every 15 minutes, and coughed up chunks of what must have been his remaining lung every five.

It was a great series of classes. One thing most people don’t know about me is that, along with my Film and TV degrees, I also have a History degree. With honors; 4.0 and shit. One of my personal favorite moments in time to study is the year 1848 and the European Revolutions that threatened to change the social order completely, spreading equal rights across a group of countries, and which were put down violently. Historians refer to it as "The Year The World Could Have Turned, But Didn't." I got my multiple degrees by stacking classes, taking history classes as Humanities classes for my Film and TV degrees and vice versa.

The “work” you did in the Const. Hist. class was research Supreme Court cases. This meant you were assigned 2 cases per semester, and you had to get up in front of the entire class and explain the case, along with historic precedence. Sometimes, this was really boring, and you might only need 5-6 minutes to explain the Interstate Commerce Clause and how it dealt with state-to-state rail transportation. Other times, and this means when I got my “randomly” assigned cases, I got Roe v. Wade, or Gideon V. Wainwright, and that meant basically teaching the class for half-an-hour while Dr. Crockett coughed and wrote notes, and giggled at whatever jokes I could make. Yup. Jokes around Roe v. Wade. I did ‘em. They mostly involved swimming vs. paddling, but one was about the Texas judicial system, which I compared to the Nuremberg Trials, only backwards. He thought that was funny as hell, and coughed and spluttered approvingly. I also stated my political position on the issue of abortion (I’m pro-choice, but that’s another couple of entries, and I’ll summarize by saying that having a choice means you don’t have to do something, either), which I thought was mighty “vaginal-sy” of me (why is it that you have to have “balls” in order to show nerve? Does that mean all women are spineless cretins?). The rest of the class looked at me like Keith Olberman into the camera during a “Special Comment”. Or an OU fan watching us lose to Texas for the third time in four years. And what the fuck is up with that?

The two of us had one extended conversation, at the end of the second class, when I had gotten my paper over Eugene V. Debs back with a nice “A” on it – earned, damn it – and a comment about my R.V.W. joke that said something along the lines of “Nice to know someone who’s willing to voice an opinion that’s not popular in a place you can’t drink in.” I decided to thank him for that, and apologize to him for using the class as a bit of a soapbox. He coughed and chuckled, possibly both at the same time (coughled?) and said not to worry about it. He asked me why I wrote the paper over Debs, since he’s a historical figure who, while once a viable presidential candidate from inside jail (for speaking out against WWI), was disappearing from America’s collective memory. I admitted that I admired the fact that he stood for what he believed in, and never traded his position of authority for anything other than results. The man walked the walk and talked the talk. I admitted I wasn’t a Socialist, and that I thought humanity would never be ready for the amount of altruism and empathy true Socialism requires; you have to know why you’re giving up certain things and agree to do so in order for it to work, which means you have to care for your neighbor, sometimes, more than yourself. We’ll never get there, I said.

Cough. Cough.

"Well, you’re probably right. But it’s nice to know that some people have enough faith in people to think they might be able to do it. Sometimes just knowing those people can make the difference.”

I also told him about my research into Oklahoma’s history, and how Socialism was once a relatively big part of Oklahoma’s initial government. We elected some real Socialists, and everything. There’s a very radical, leftist part to the early history of Oklahoma, which I thought was interesting, considering how right-wing the state had swung during my lifetime. Mmm-hmmm, he muttered. “But let me tell you about Oklahoma’s ‘radical’ nature.” He then proceeded to tell me about the one big anti-war protest held on the OU campus during the Vietnam War.

“Oh, it was big – a couple of thousand students and teachers all gathered around, with signs, bullhorns, songs and everything. Then, the police showed up and told everyone to leave.”

Cough.

“And they did.”

He laughed at this, and I did, too. He’d told the story like a great comedian, building up the size and ferocity of the crowd, which immediately gave in the moment someone in authority told them to. The punch line was both hilarious and telling, and his point was clear; no one was willing to go to jail, and no one was willing to fight back. The “protest” was all about following the crowd – everybody else is doing it, so why can’t we? (“Linger” begins to play). The leftist movement at the start of the 20th century wasn’t just a few fanatics and bath-avoiding people at the time; it was a full blown movement, and Debs was a national hero, not just “that ass-hat” who wants to get laid at a peace rally. Oklahoma, he was saying, followed trends, it never started them. When it came down to the business of implementing anything, ahhh... there’s the rub. As soon as Socialism was destroyed as a political force nationally, it died here, and never raised its head with any import again. As the country moved further to the right during the 80’s and 90’s, so did Oklahoma, up to where it is today, about as far to the right as you can get without meeting yourself on the other side – a bit less Conservative than North Korea, but not quite as far left as Jasper, TX. Eventually, the state will shift back to the left a bit, as the country always does after the turn of the century, but it will never get as far to the left as its early, radical days, because those progressive, radical days will never return to the United States. Never. Never ever ever.

(Not that those early days were some sort of leftist paradise here, oh no. But imagine trying to be elected as a Socialist candidate in Oklahoma right now. “Hi. I’m David Murphy, and I’m running for office as a member of the Socialist Party.” “Are you fucking kidding me? Officer!”)

One thing I’ve noticed about Oklahoma in the past few years is how openly hateful it’s become towards anyone who slinks past Moderate into “Liberal.” There are many reasons for that: the abundance of ultra-conservative talk radio, which more rural Oklahomans are going to listen to, since it’s the only thing out there, except for NPR, and they don’t listen to it because it’s “biased”; the continual bullshit of this being the “heartland” of America, because it’s in the middle of the country, and has all that small town blah-blah-blah-whatever, which is supposed to be what America should stand for, not those evil cities, where nothing good can ever come; and what I call the “squeezing the air out of the bag effect”.

The “squeezing the air out of the bag effect” is illustrated as follows: you want to put something in a plastic bag that seals and ship it in a box. So that the bag takes up less space, you want to get the air out of it, so you close the end and press the air inside towards the seal, so that it will eventually get pushed out, leaving you with less air in the bag, so it takes up less space in the box. Before you get the air out, though, it bulges towards the end of the bag you’re pushing towards, which gets harder and harder to squeeze out. Think of that as a group of people who refuse to turn with the tide: Racists, for example. As these people get squeezed out as society progresses and understands how bad prejudice and racism are – not to mention how fucking stupid prejudice and racism are – not to mention how incredibly stupid the justifications for prejudice and racism have become -- not to mention how embarrassing it is to remember how naïve and stupid you can be when you’re uninformed and don’t know what words like “jigaboo” mean, goddamn I used that word so often before I actually knew what it meant that I’m about to throw up on the keyboard as I type this – I’ll start the sentence over now. As these people get squeezed out as society progresses and understands how bad prejudice and racism are, they’ll bunch up where they can and get harder and tougher in their stance as they’re pushed out of society. That’s a decent sized portion of Oklahoma for you; pushed to the extremes as the rest of the country moves on, and, because they can’t understand why they’re wrong and are too fucking caught up in “lost lifestyles” and “lost ways of life” to understand that there’s a reason why those things are LOSING, that they become more ingrained in their ways, instead of questioning them, which all human beings should do every once in a while.

It’s easy to either dismiss these people or ridicule them, and there are perfectly good reasons to do both, but in doing so, all we do is create a “siege mentality”, where all they do is associate with people who agree with them, and have their beliefs entrenched further. This solves nothing. It proves nothing. It makes people feel even more like outsiders than they already do – earned in many ways, of course because they're fucking bigots -- but that doesn't mean you stop trying to reach them. Lead by example, and you never know what you can accomplish. I heard a quote last night that, of people who considered themselves prejudiced at one time, being regularly around the person they were prejudiced against, such as at work or school, 90 percent of the time, it eliminated the prejudice. There are dozens of real-world examples we can use to prove this, from the person Derek Vineyard (American History X) is based on, to Malcolm X, on whom the film Malcolm X is based.

Now, I've tried this before. If you read the previous blog, you remember that I dated a red-haired beauty who turned out to be a bigot. True that. She did, in fact, hide her prejudices from me because I stated up front in our relationship that I didn't like prejudiced people. I guess it's a sign that she actually cared about me that she hid it as long as she could. It finally came out after we went to see that damned Wong Foo blah-blah-blah movie, where the magic gay people who are played by stridently (vocally so) non-gay actors save a small town from itself. Afterward, I said the movie was okay. She said, "Yeah, it was okay, except for all the gay stuff." Picture me, eyes wide open, yet another revelation dropped in my lap. I decided to stick around and try to change her by example, and this turned into what the interweb peoples call an "Epic Fail". She eventually got to where she was talking about shooting Bill Clinton, and I knew I had to get out, which led to the, again, embarrassing-yet-necessary answering machine message.

I made a choice I hated but needed at the time, and something I wish I'd done earlier in my life, when I was much more tolerant about what people said about the "Others", which actually means I didn't have the vaginals to get away; I wanted them to be my friends because I hate loneliness.

Let me tell you, loneliness is much better than pettiness.

When I began grad school at OU and started teaching, I decided that it was time to make sure I walked and talked the walktalk. Conservative students? I let them talk. Liberal students? I let them talk. Bewilderingly silly sorority girls who wanted to keep midgets as pets? Yuppers. (Oh, no shit. This happened. Greatest quote ever? "It's always sad when somebody dies. Especially midgets.") The idea here was to give everyone a legitimate voice; the idiots would hang themselves, and the serious ones would get a soapbox. The rest might learn a little bit of tolerance to other points of view besides their own. I talked about Doctor Who. Every once in a while, I taught some writing. Greatest compliment I ever got was from a student who told his counselor that he felt students could talk about anything in my class, no matter how much I disagreed with them, and they would be treated fairly. I loved teaching. I miss it dearly.

(Goddamn certain people.)

So, while watching John McCain's concession speech last night, I felt sorry for him. I don't think McCain's a bigot, or anything like that. I think he allowed himself to be coached by people who felt that the "Squeezed" peoples would take the vote, and not the squeezers. They were wrong, and John McCain's reputation will never recover. He came a hell of a long way with his speech last night, where he said exactly what needed to be said in exactly the right way, making him almost Shakespearean in his tragedy; Othello never got such bad advice. What we need to do now is build on what HE said. Obviously, Barack Obama's election is a sign that things in this country have gotten better. But make no mistake, complacency will kill this event. What McCain said about this being a historical event is right, and something many of the people who voted for him will have to understand. I know some people who voted for McCain who feel very left out of this event. While Obama's victory is historical, they see that, but they also lost a presidential election, and that means that, no matter how much they may understand the importance of this election, they can't enjoy it, because they lost.

Now is not the time to throw this in their faces. Now is not the time to squeeze against those who can't see this as anything but a lost campaign. Now is the time to engage in two of the things that America seems to have lost over the past few years: Empathy and Altruism. These two things, these two unselfish parts of our psyche have been in short supply the last few years, deadened by a constant negation in the manner our politicians have acted, and also by those who used recent events to greedily take more than what they might have honestly earned. Folks, there's a difference between having money and having all the money you can get. Selfishness and greed are Un-American and "not good". The Drive to Succeed is what we learn about in the history books, and that is why we cherish those people who, upon making their fortune, use it to help others. Those jackasses who can't live with less than 200 million dollars, and who will do anything to attain it want one thing: Independence. And power. Two Things. And the status those levels of income can provide. Three things. There are three things...oh, fuck it.

Now is the time to change the way we talk to each other. Instead of referring to all Republicans as bigoted bastards, we need to understand that in doing so, we are no better than those people who saw Obama getting elected last night as a sign that the country is headed to hell in a hand basket. The key to getting people understanding how stupid prejudice is turns on one question: How many of the people you are against do you actually know? How can you say all black people are shiftless and lazy when you can't possibly know more than .000000000000000000001 percent of them? And the same with Conservatives, or Republicans, or whatever side you immediately roll your eyes about when they're mentioned?

The country's moving back to the center again, and I hope Oklahoma doesn't take too long to follow suit. The important thing is to make this more than just a fad to follow, like protesting "The War", being "Socialist", or wearing flannel. Please, don't wear flannel again unless you're cold, or you're a lumberjack. Come the fuck on, people.

What has to happen is a change in the way America sees itself. Far from the perfect, City-On-A-Hill that's always mentioned by people, and which is almost always misunderstood or misused, we are a bunch of human beings with roots from all across the planet, possibly the first country that can claim that. And, in that, it means we are literally citizens of the World. Not as in the "One World, One Government" stuff many End-Timers scream in terror about, but as in America IS the World, in a microcosm (maybe not so micro). For better and for worse, the rest of the world looks to us. What we do now with this opportunity is how the rest of the world will turn. We can come together, embrace our differences and how those differences make us better, and, thus, make the world better. This cannot be a fad -- something that's hip and cool one minute and then ridiculed on one of those fucking Vh1 (I mean, the "List Channel") "Remember the 00's?" specials.

If it is a fad, then we need to ride it as long as we can. Maybe we can get it from cool to crap to kitsch so fast we can turn it into nostalgia. Maybe then we'll remember the things we have yet to do as the time the world got to a turning point.

And it did.

Cough.

THE STALKER OF THE HORRID DEPTHS OF HORROR

(as a way of dealing with what was/is actually a pretty emotionally and mentally traumatizing event, I’ve decided to write this blog entry as a tribute/parody to/of the great horror writer, H.P.Lovecraft. For those not familiar with his work, I suggest reading these first:

http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/thedunwichhorror.htm
http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/thethingonthedoorstep.htm
http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/thewhispererindarkness.htm

Of course, you might decide to read more of that instead of the blog itself, which is pretty cheesy and full of denial, and the approach I’m using means only this: I. Am. Still. Dealing. With. It.)


THE STALKER OF THE HORRID DEPTHS OF HORROR

The darkest parts of the universe contain some of the most foul and reprehensible creatures known to man. It is, perhaps, only our predilection for covering up the horrors by denial and repression that allows us to survive such things. For myself, I can only hope my memories are crushed -- shattered beyond recognition soon, for the human mind is not built to survive the tests and despairing wraiths of the festering pools of horror I have been subjected to. If deadening blackness waits too long, my mind will eventually shatter under the weight of too many times at the key hole, too many times at the window, too many times at that little...hole thing... in the door, you know, the thing with the lens that bends that allows you to see who’s at the door – the peephole, that’s it! Too many times at the peephole, waiting, listening for the sounds that might come by....

putt, putt, putt. putt, putt, putt.

I was once a student at the College of Rose State, located in the City of Midwest in the state of Oklahoma, which is a part of the States United in America, on the continent of America (North), sitting plainly on the planet of Earth in the Universe known as This One. A friendly place, its fountain wet and sparkling with the lights underneath the water in a technically brilliant display of wet light. The buildings sit full of people during the day, but closed and empty at night, possibly to allow sleep to release them from the possible horrors that could possibly exist somewhere on its campus. No man knows.

For four or five years this campus was my home away from home, since I did not live there, but at home, a place not on campus, making, therefore, the campus not my home. It felt like one at times, and I had developed a friendly banter with its occupants and temporary visitors one might call dialogue.

“Hey, Dave!”
“Hey, what’s up?”

We spoke to each thusly, these others and myself.

At the time of this horrid tale, I was recovering from what would come to be known as the Relationship I Needed To Get Out Of But Couldn’t. A young, red-haired beauty had smitten my heart, and I was hers, heart and soul. After a few happy months, during which we saw each other frequently, my heart grew 3 times as big, full of the love I had for her, and hope for the future it might contain.

Alas, it was not to be. The woman turned out to be possessive and a bigot, and had concealed such personality “quirks” from me until familiarity bred ease of around-ness, and she dropped her guard. I, for once, was traumatized, knowing my strong feelings for her would make it difficult to leave. After months of mental anguish and physical exploration, I knew I had to leave, but how? I knew that if I was in her presence I would never be able to utter the words I needed. So I did it on her answering machine. A spineless move I admit, but what else you gonna do?

Thus freed, I spent the next few days both pining for and yearning against the young woman, whose face I saw every day until I took her picture down from the bookcase. I begged off the dating scene for a while until I could get my bearings straight, which I did by looking down and seeing where I was. “Healed!”, I proclaimed myself. But my proclamation was incorrect. I was not healed, just alone – alone and lonely. And horny. Very horny.

One day in late October, I was venturing around the Humanities building, where I spent most of my time, due to the fact that many of my friends were there, and I had a lot of classes in the building. I entered the computer room through the door, where a Spanish immigrant woman I was acquainted with was typing away, and a woman with shorter hair sat with her back to me, typing, as well.

“Hey, Anna. What’s up?”
“Oh, hey, Dave. How are you doing?”
“Oh, okay. How’s your grandmother?”
“Oh, she’s fine.”

It was at this point that the other, non-Spaniard woman turned over to look at us. Her short hair and glasses proved the fact that she was a short-haired woman -- with glasses.

“Hey, Anna? Who’s this?”
“Oh, hey, (her name removed to avoid accidental incantations of some sort), this is David.”
“Hi.” (me here)
“Are you a student?” (Her)
“Yeah, last year of a two-year program stretched out to five.”
“Nice to meet you.”

She turned and returned to her typing. Anna and I went into the main broadcasting room for a class we had. It was a class in... NEWS FEATURE PRODUCTION! And kinda fun.

That Friday night, I dressed myself to the eights and planned to attend a campus theatrical production, something I enjoyed doing, since I was the campus theatrical production reviewer, and took my job very seriously, handing out stars and everything. I noticed some friends in the audience who were not Spaniards, nor immigrants, and sat down next to them, for the familiarity of friends can often overcome the weirdness of... the... inside place with the thingie in the lobby. The short-haired woman was among them, dressed nicely, and looking very cute, I might add, if the horrors of cuteness can cover the deeds of the black soul. And we’d just met, too.

After the play – a fantasia that Jeff Tiger completely stole, I went to take my leave of the group, when the short-haired woman with the glasses asked if I wanted to meet up with some people to have a drink at a restaurant nearby. Lonely from my broken heart and horny in my soul, I took her up on the offer. We went to the restaurant, drank, and talked. The conversation was pleasant, as pleasant as conversation with a militant vegetarian can be. Yes, she was a vegetarian, a militant one. As I just said.

Drink combined with more drink combined with horniness to produce what is known as a “make-out session” in my car back on campus, where I had driven to reunite her with her mode of transportation – a small, blue farm truck. The kind with the flat bed in the back and cab all the way front – like the British ones. Before things got too far, I righted myself, said I’d had a good time, and prepared myself for what was next.

“So, would you like to do this again?”
“Sure.”
“I’m free Wednesday.”
“Okay. What do you wanna do?”
“Let’s get dinner. Do you like Flip’s?”
Flip’s was/is an Italian restaurant in Oklahoma City, with a large vegetarian menu.
“Sounds good,” I said. “How ‘bout I pick you up here and I’ll drive?”
“See you then.”
We separated then, slightly disheveled, and exchanged phone numbers. We also decided what time we should meet, since that was something we needed to know.

She got in her little truck and drove away, her vehicle making a noise that I thought was cute at the time, but which now reverberates in the moldy passions of my soul:

putt, putt, putt. putt, putt, putt.

Between the time I had sucked face and the time of the date, I’d had second thoughts. I definitely wasn’t ready to get involved with someone emotionally, since my heart was still bruised and battered from the Tyson-like beating it had recently taken. I decided that if the date went well, then I’d continue to see the woman, but deep down, I knew this was not the time for such things.

We met and headed to Flip’s.

Dinner was comfortable, full of small talk and black bean soup. Eventually, she said something that told me I needed to cut this off, quickly.

“You know, there are a lot of vegetarian dishes you might like. I’d love to cook some for you. You could come over and I’ll cook.”
“Sounds nice,” I uttered, knowing that any more would give her the idea that I was interested.

I drove her back to campus to drop her off, and realized I needed to end this now.

“Hey, I’m sorry to do this, but I don’t really think I can date right now.”
“Oh, what’s up?”
“I just had to get out of a relationship that really wasn’t right for me, and I thought maybe I was ready to go out with someone again, but I’m really not. I’m sorry about this. It has nothing to do with you or anything like that, it’s just that I think I’m going to deal with myself for a while. Okay?”
“Well, we can just hang out, right?”
“Sure.” A BIG mistake. I had left an opening – an opening that I wanted never to be filled, but which turned out to be big enough to drive a farm truck through.
“Okay, well take care, and I’ll see you around campus.”
“Okay, and I’m really sorry. I had a good time tonight, but I’m just not ready to date anyone, yet.”
“Well, I’ll keep in touch.” She got out of the car and closed the door, walking over to her farm truck. She got in and drove away.

putt, putt, putt. putt, putt, putt.

What I said was truthful – I had no intention of dating anyone for a while, and just wanted to lose myself in a series of meaningless sexual encounters, not taste delicious black bean soup at her place. “That seemed to go well,” I thought, and headed home.

Over the next few weeks I began to receive letters from her – letters that were full of friendliness, slight flirtation, and advice for how to deal with my problems. I smiled as I read them, and filed them in the plastic container I kept my more impermanent, scrunched up papers, before I took them out to the big, green, roll-able trash bin. If the letters seemed to be coming more frequently than they should, I was too busy with school and work to notice.

Eventually, the letters still kept coming. She began to hang out in the broadcasting lab more often than normal, since she wasn’t actually a part of the department. After the 9-10th time I “accidentally” ran into her there, I began to avoid hanging around the lab socially, and only showed up to do my work – a change in my social nature I assumed would be temporary.

The letters still still kept coming – one of them a card-slash-puzzle, with a picture of the something-I-can’t-remember on it. I began to realize that my plan was not working, and that I’d have to avoid her even more. I kept the letters, for some reason – a reason my subconscious may have been preparing me for – the horrors up ahead, around the turn, over by that grey house on the corner – no, not that one, the one with the white fence and the – yes, that’s it. Those horrors.

I continued to avoid her, sneaking around the broadcasting lab when I could, ducking around corners, and slipping into the radio booths for a chance at sweet, sweet privacy. I was invited to a Christmas party at her house and politely declined, stopped answering phone calls from her and politely saying I was busy – every single time, and never, ever ventured across campus without looking around first. At the time, I was not quite self-aware enough to notice that I’d altered my normal daily patterns – a sign that should have been obvious, much like the big, golden arch that announces your arrival at McDonald’s. There would be no delicious fried pies for me, though. I was in for a rude awakening, and not by alarm clock, but by Tiger.

Jeff Tiger was a photographer for the paper, and also enrolled in some broadcasting classes. He was a cool person – cooler than most everyone I knew. His sense of humor dry as the dust on the bookcase I’d neglected to clean and smart as all get out. The Spring semester had just started, and I was delighted that my eternal college enrollment was about to end – this chapter, of it, at least. I showed up at the lab and joked about it “being safe?”

Jeff seemed weird -- like a weird tale. He walked over to me and spoke softly. There was no stick to be seen.

“Hey, there’s something you probably need to know.”
“What’s up”, I asked, head slightly cocked with my usual quizzical look.
“Let’s talk somewhere else.”

We walked to one of the empty radio booths and he revealed to me something I was not prepared for. He had attended the woman’s Christmas party, as had a few other students I was familiar with. What they had seen there and what they had experienced had dumbstruck them enough that they seemed not to think I needed to know this, or were too scared of the consequences to reveal the horror to me.

Indeed, they had gone to the party at her place outside of town. The hostess without the most-est had given them the obligatory tour of the dwelling, which was normal until they all got to her bedroom.

There, on the wall, covering much of it, was a collage of photographs of me, taken at various places and events for the school paper and not used, but here blown up and assembled into a larger, more bigger picture of obsession -- obsession with me. While many of the guests thought this was weird, they said nothing, possibly to avoid upsetting the host, which is something you should avoid at parties. After the consumption of much alcohol, she took one of the pictures off the wall and began rubbing it on her privates, saying how much she wanted to fuck me and how we’d made out before and it was “totally awesome,” or something like that.

Jeff looked up at me, and I’m certain my face had lost all color, and since I am white, that’s not necessarily as impressive as the large brick that fell onto the floor – shat from my very insides.

It all came crashing around, Keyzer Soze-style, until I had the picture in my head – a picture I would most definitely not be rubbing against my privates. The letters, the “accidental” meetings at the lab, the puzzle-letters – all were signs of obsession. One make out session and some laughs had produced infatuation, for want of a much harder term to actually admit to at this point in the story.

“Are you shitting me?” was my response.

Now, my avoidance was filled with more than mere avoidance – it was filled with despair. This despair yanked at my soul with a tight grip, spilling my fears into the open for all to see. This was fucked up. I'd heard about this sort of behavior, but it was usually the other way around.

Now I ventured around campus even fuller of awareness, noting every time she seemed to show up in the same building I was in or at some event I was participating in. I noticed that I had lost my joy at my impending graduation. Attending classes now became a game of militant vegetarian and mouse, but this time, the vegetarian might eat the mouse, with a black bean soup for an appetizer. The weather seemed colder somehow, as if it was winter, which it was.

At night, I couldn’t sleep, for my ears were now aware of a noise that I had heard before, but which I now recognized:

putt, putt, putt. putt, putt, putt.

Was she actually driving by my house at night? To see if I was home? The answer, it turned out, was yes. I found myself listening for the sound of her farm truck before I passed into merciful sleep, looking out the window from a crouched position to see if – horror of horrors – her truck was out there. If there was a knock at the door, I looked through that hole-thingie to see if the visitor was her, knowing I would have to pretend to be either dead or too busy to actually answer it.

This went on throughout January, into February. I played avoidance, and she was winning, if the point of avoidance is to avoid, which it is. I finally realized that I was being Stalked. Stalked. Stalked. Stalked. Stalked. Stalked. I heard the

putt, putt, putt. putt, putt, putt.

of her truck in my dreams, and they became nightmares.
I decided I needed help. I contacted Darryl, a man who headed security on campus, and personal acquaintance from a few classes and asked what could be done about it.

“Well, is she really following you around on campus?”
“Yup. It’s really freaking me out.”
“I bet. Well, have you thought about getting some kind of restraining order, or something like that? Using legal means to deal with it?”
“No. I don’t really want to do that.”
“Well, we can do a couple of things. If you want, I can arrange it so that you have an escort around campus...”
“Really? You can do that?”
“Sure. It’s part of our job. You’d be amazed what kind of fucked up people want to scare their wives or girlfriends.”
“Jesus, this is fucked up.”
“Yeah, sorry. The other thing we can do is simply make sure there’s a security guard present by your classrooms when you come out, and not necessarily escort you around. They’d be there just to kind of watch out for things.”
“That would be cool.”
“No problem. Sorry, man.”

And, with that, I knew what was happening was far more than just a spurned person trying to hook up with me – it was Stalking. I was being Stalked. If man is the most dangerous game, and I am a man, then my dangerousness was being overpowered by her Stalkingness.

I continued to go to work and school. At the time, and now again, I worked in north of the City of Oklahoma, many miles from Rose State’s campus. I assumed she had no idea where I worked, and, thus, did not concern myself with her possible appearance.

I could not have been more wronger.

One Wednesday, about 30 minutes before I was to leave work for the day and head to a Jean Claude Van-Damme hockey/terrorist movie, I looked outside. Her truck was parked in the lot.

“Jesus Christ,” I softly uttered to myself.

The woman was still in the truck, waiting, waiting, waiting. And waiting.

“I do not fucking believe this.”
George walked up, a German immigrant who worked with me.
“Who’s that? Your girlfriend?”
“Oh, fuck no. I can’t believe this.”
How did she find out where I worked? I had never told her about my job. Eventually, it would be revealed that she’d used her – ummm- position to look up some stuff on the college’s computers, including my emergency and work numbers.

I decided confrontation would be my only chance here. I figured I was safe, since the building had lots of people in it who might help if I screamed loud enough. I clocked out early and walked up to our secretary.

“Hey, I’m going out to talk to someone. Could you watch out the window and call the police if anything happens?”
“The police?”
“Yeah, this witch has been following me around and somehow she’s found out I work here.”
“Want me to call them now?”
“No. I’m just going to walk to my car and leave. If she follows, I’ll drive straight to a police station.”

I walked out towards my car. Her truck door opened, and she got out. I tried to avoid contact, but when she got close enough I yelled:

“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Well, since you’re not answering my phone calls or ever calling me back, and since I can’t seem to catch you on campus, I just wanted to talk.”
“Do not come to work to see me again. Do you understand?"
“Well... I just wanted to talk.”
“Seriously, leave me the fuck alone. Okay?”

I got to my car/sanctuary and got in. I looked back. She got in her truck and drove off. I waited a minute to catch myself and stop shaking, and stared down at the steering wheel and dashboard. This was getting out of hand. I looked around again for her truck, and then drove off, looking backwards every time I could, waiting for the sound that now filled my head at night, regardless of its actual presence:

putt, putt, putt. putt, putt, putt.

I enjoyed Sudden Death as much as I could. There’s a really funny scene involving a fight between Van-Damme and a large penguin mascot in an arena kitchen that is awesome, but other than that, the film’s pretty pedestrian. I drove home, looking around, listening, hoping that she’d gotten the message.

At home, I continued my routine of looking out the window, listening for the

putt, putt, putt. putt, putt, putt.

of her truck, and peering out the door-hole thingie. I was not doing well. Coming off of a relationship that had become too painful to continue with and which I had gotten out of in an admittedly cowardly but necessary manner, I was emotionally and mentally vulnerable, and this was not helping. I had stopped going out in case she showed up at the same place I was, and even the weekend S&M sex club visits had lost their luster. The ass-spankings I provided were lackluster, probably. I don’t know, the ball gag kind of helps cut out any complaints. Do we really need to go into this aspect right now? I’m trying to vent here, okay? We can get into my time as a paid dominant later. Shit, that cat’s out of the bag. Anyways.

I began to feel as though I needed to talk to her employer. Before I did this, I decided to talk to Karen, a friend who taught at the college, to see if she knew who I needed to talk to. I went to her office and we chatted away. Outside, even though it was mid day, it was dark. Snow was beginning to fall, and the usual “will classes be cancelled” talk was starting to go around. It might get nasty out, they said, so we watched the snow fall from her office. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Humanities office door open. It was her, the Stalker, I mean. She sat down by the front door, making it so that if I left, I would have to go by her. I was ready to leave, by then. I told my friend what was happening, and she walked out of her office nonchalantly, in an attempt to size up the situation.

“She’s just sitting there. Of all the nerve.”
“I can’t take this much longer. What do I do? I don’t know if I should call security, hide and try to wait her out –“
“Hell, I’ll call security.”
“Hang on. Can you dial upstairs?” (to the lab, where I had a class later)
“Sure. Here.” She handed the phone to me as it rang. As luck would have it, class was cancelled. I was done for the day, and could leave. Good, I thought. The snow was coming down pretty hard, and everything outside was white, pure. Unlike this situation, which was not.

“Okay, I’d better do this.”

My friend told me she’d run interference, and “escort” me out of the office by walking with me. Hopefully, this would throw the Stalker off and I’d get away. As we headed past her and out the office door, towards the exit, we were followed. I exchanged a look with Karen and told her that if I didn’t call her later, to please call me and use the secret “ring once, stop, and then call again” signal we’d worked out so I’d know it was her and not the Stalker. I left out the door, and was followed.

Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch, my shoes went as they trudged on through the snow towards my car, which was parked in far Hyboria.

Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch went her boots as she followed.

She started to catch up.

“David!”

I didn’t acknowledge.

Louder. “David!”

Head still down, coat closed tightly against my body, multi-colored scarf waving in the wind, all I could think about was that this was it. “She’s not even trying to hide it anymore,” I thought. I wondered if I should break into a run, or keep going and hope she would just get tired and give up. That didn’t happen.

Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch, scrunch behind me, but much faster. She was running to catch up.

I was truly frightened here – more frightened than at any time in my life. I really did not know what was going to happen next. My senses heightened, waiting for an attack that might surface: tentacles of black ochre wrapping around my very soul, non-Cyclopean geometry mingling with pervasive chills, a sack full of batteries. She had caught up by now.

“David!”
I stopped. I figured if she was going to stab me or something, then, fine. It’ll at least be over. I honestly felt helpless. Tired. I gave up.
“What? What do you want from me?” I half-yelled, half-whined. I shrugged and felt my body deflate. This had exhausted me completely, and I just wanted something to happen. The constant getting up, looking out the window, staring out the door-hole-thingie, the constant listening for the

putt, putt, putt. putt, putt, putt.

of her farm truck had finally killed me.

“What is it?” I turned, snow still falling, faster now. I looked at her face. There was no expression on it except misunderstanding. She had no idea. No idea at all.

“I just wanted to talk to you, that’s all.”
“Please,” I pleaded, sanity starting to slip. “What do you want?” I said these words slowly.
What
Do
You
Want?

Something happened. She seemed to straighten a bit. We both stood there in the falling snow, which was starting to get heavy, and began blurring the perfectly ordinary geometric buildings around us.

She stirred suddenly and did something I did not expect. She shook her head side-to-side slightly and looked at me.

“Relax, David. Sheesh.”

And then she walked off into the snow, her image blurring and disappearing from view. I stood there for a few seconds and then simply turned and walked to my car, got in, rested my head on the steering wheel, and started the car. I had a long drive home, and it would be longer because of the snow.

I never saw her again after that. Maybe something clicked in her. Maybe she had gotten tired of it, too. Maybe the helplessness and resignation on my face as I stared at her there in the snow finally told her that this wasn’t working, whatever she was trying. Maybe she saw my face and decided, “Sheesh. What a puss,” and decided I wasn’t worthy. Regardless, she was gone. It took a few days for me to realize this. I still looked around corners, still looked out the window, still looked out the peephole. After those few days, I realized it was over.

However, it wasn’t. It still isn’t, in some ways. Those “safety checks” I had developed were now habits. I kept looking out the window, the peephole, around the corners. Even when I moved to Norman, I found myself still doing them. I still do now. The whole time altered me. I changed into someone who lost the ability to get close to others, to avoid the possibility of this happening again. I became distant, and it took a long time for someone to break through. "Stalker’s" gone, I guess, probably living somewhere in the Orient, maybe meditating on her vegetable militancy and hopefully not thinking about me at all.

And the habits are all still there, 12 years later. I still wander in front of windows and look out like a sad, caged animal hoping someone will release it. I find myself walking up and looking out the peephole in the door for something that probably isn’t going to materialize, but which, deep down, I still think can. At night, I still hear the sounds of cars driving by, and listen for the horrid noise of her farm truck, its sounds confined to the repetition of a single, mad onomatopoeia of all too obvious source:

putt, putt, putt. putt, putt, putt.

ADDENDUM

As an addendum to this rambling shoggoth of a tale, I’d like to add one thing. What I really lost after all this, and which has never honestly returned, is Trust. Until this year, I don’t think I’d ever realized how the two events –bigoted, controlling girlfriend and Stalker, not to mention my own failures in past relationships with people, friends or otherwise – had destroyed my ability to do that.

One of the most important parts of any true relationship is Object Permanence, otherwise known as Trust, specifically, your ability to trust that when someone isn’t around, or isn’t reachable, that they’re still there for you. That is something that’s always been difficult for me, and these events have made it well-nigh impossible. It affects every relationship I have with people, and every move I make as a person.  And, of course, that lack of Trust is also a part of how I see myself. If you can’t trust anyone, that includes you. I hesitate before every sentence, every time I put something out there for people to see or read, I am concerned about communication and fear that what I write or say will never be what it is I mean it to be -- which in a post-modern world  makes it even more difficult, since all meaning can be and should be questioned. 

To lose such trust in yourself and everything in general makes life a horrible thing to live. You cry out for those moment of real sincerity – real, unbreakable and unmistakable, true moments when you can relax and allow yourself the beautiful opportunity to really let go of your self and accept someone else’s.

I wrote this as a Lovecraft parody because I wanted to try and find a metaphor (this was all symbolic? Really, Dave? REALLY??!) for the way you can be altered by events in ways that never leave you. Lovecraft’s protagonists may win a small victory, but they never can leave the experience behind. They are changed for the worse. And while the immediate danger may be over, the universe is full of other things that will snatch you up into its darkness and spit out the contents, chewed and desiccated. Even in the Role Playing game based on his works, you have a Sanity level, which, if you lose too much of it, means you lose your mind.

I am altered. I know this. I cannot help it. I have tried and I have failed and yet I try again. One thing I despise is the bullshit definition of insanity as “to repeat an action over and over, expecting a different result every time.” No. That is Life. Following that idea, then Life itself is Insanity, and it may be. Lovecraft’s “gods” are nothing more than infinitely powerful, mindless beings who do what they do because they simply do it. Those of us in the wake are buffeted around and try to ride out the tempest.  And *you* try surviving a hurricane and see if you don’t come out different through the other side.

And, something else that’s real and horrible. One thing that is not in the story, and which I left out as a politeness, is that I did have a girl friend at that time, at best we were FWB’s, but she was still someone I was close to. We’d both been hurt recently, and just needed some shelter for a while, and we did that for each other, even as this was happening, which she was aware of, and which she helped with just by being someone who demanded nothing and expected nothing but friendship and some fun.

She’s not allowed to talk to me anymore. Or her long time friends. (I say “allow” when I really mean “she’s made the decision to go along with someone else’s demands on her and her life”.) True, lasting relationships survive on Trust. When that trust is destroyed, nothing works again as it should. It is only the truly strong who can overcome such horror and begin again, and I know I am not a strong person anymore. I am tired. I am tired of being sad, of being alone when people are all around me, and I am tired of trying. Perhaps the meaning of all of the experiences related in the story is that the horror ultimately has won. No truck sound is needed to trigger my fears. All I need is the sound of my own voice.  Sometimes it can convince me otherwise, but I don’t trust that guy enough anymore to let it be.

Putt.Putt.Putt.