Autobiographical Sketch Part I

I was born in Newport Beach, California, on July 15th 1977. The details are hazy as are the next two or three years. However, I seem to remember, a couple of years later, running down Moore street, in Santa Ana. I made a break for it I guess. I was caught by the neighborhood New Wave kid. He looked like a member of Duran Duran or something – not that I knew that at the time – it’s just a detail.

I spent most of my formative years on this same street. 2506 Moore Street. This was Santa Ana but not like the real Santa Ana. This wasn’t the gritty, carneceria, give-me-your-wallet-ese, Santa Ana. No, this Santa Ana was just on the border of Costa Mesa. We lived in a relatively quiet, suburban neighborhood. The house wasn’t too bad either. I mean you don’t expect much on a carpenter’s salary anyway but I think my parents did a pretty good job with what they had. My mother taught pre-school for some years until the requirements and regulations became too exacting and my father was a ten hour a day carpenter for a good fifteen or twenty years until he became a full time estimator for his brother’s framing company – Darrow the Framing Corporation. After the pre-school gig my mom began work at a private Christian school – Maranatha Christian Academy – which helped pay for me and my brother’s tuition. I guess I forgot to mention that before – I have a brother. He was born some four years before I was. He must’ve been at school already when I was found by the New Wave kid.

So my brother and I attended this school from kindergarten through high school with our mom working there in the cafeteria. This school was part of a church that was founded in the seventies by pastor Chuck Smith. In an effort to reach the counter-culture youth of that era, the church was conceived as a real hippy-dippy, Jesus Freak haven. The sad conclusion of this free-from-conventions, we-don’t-need-any-of-your-old rituals-let’s-just-love-God-and-each-other was that I was raised in an overly conservative, fear and guilt inducing environment in which empty platitudes and soft spoken catch phrases dripping with judgmental undertones, were heard more often than the words of Christ.

But I digress. I had a pretty happy childhood for the most part. It wasn’t until I reached fourth and fifth grade when I became aware that I didn’t look the same in a tank top as other kids that things got at all sour. Not that I was tormented or anything but any fat kid will tell you the same stories. P.E. was a dreadful experience. And it was made all the more dreadful for having been raised in sunny, Southern California, where, as it stood, a sizable portion of the population couldn’t be bothered to wear what little fabric made up their faded Quicksilver t-shirt anyway, leading to the option of “shirts” versus “skins” when needing to distinguish between two newly formed teams. Often I would employ the pathetic tactic of taking just my arms out of the sleeves of the shirt but leaving the rest of the garment dangling around my fat neck, hoping that there was enough fabric to cover my nubile boy tits. This never worked. Eventually some skinny, piece-of-shit, friend would make a comment and I would be bummed out for the rest of the period. Thank god for the TV-formatted attention span I had in those days so that by the next class period I’d be on to worrying about how to do the least amount of work to get me through the class and leave time for my artistic endeavors which included the drawing of Looney Tunes characters and sports cars.

Early on I developed a serious love affair with the arts. I was obsessed with the Warner Brothers cartoons and would sketch them incessantly for hours on end. And, like most boys of the eighties, I was endlessly entertained by the film comedies of Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray. I watched hours of ALF, Growing Pains, Cheers and Moonlighting. I read Mad Magazine and the Farside. By the end of the eighties I would stay up late to catch a few minutes of David Letterman or Saturday Night Live. These are the things that would shape me in so many ways. I wasn’t into sports and I certainly wasn’t studious. I was lost in a world of film and television. I would run around with my other smart-ass friends and try to make a joke out of everything. I’d say eighty-five or ninety percent of my jokes were stolen from something I saw on TV. I imagine the same goes for those smart-ass friends.

Everybody has a few ill-dressed skeletons in their closet, I gather. The thing is mine are wearing Cross Colors and Malcolm X jackets. In the sixth grade I discovered hip-hop. In Junior High I discovered reggae. The combination made my little sensibilities become way too afro-centric. I was a fat suburban white kid with a relatively privileged life. I pretended to be a skinny black kid from Queens, New York. Now I stayed up to watch Yo! MTV Raps. This lasted well into my sophomore year in High School until such time as my friends and I discovered pot.

In my grandparents days there were like three different things you could be as a teen: a jock, a preppy or a greaser and they all wore tight clothing. In my parents days one more thing was added: a hippie. Now somewhere in between my parents’ days and mine were added a couple more: a nerd and a punk. My generation saw a minor explosion of new “things you could be.” You could still be a jock but that was forming new branch called “bro” that in turn would form more branches of “bro” sub-species. You could be a punk and that too would splinter into new categories like “straight edge” or “neo-Nazi” to name two. You could still be a “preppy” but you had to do coke now. I think there are still greasers but they’re all weirdly nostalgic and pretend they’re in the fifties and they have to go to great pains to find a place to live that has an “olde towne.” Nerd went from social outcast to chic to social outcast again and hippies went from long, dirty hair and thrift shop clothes to long, dirty hair and thrift shop clothes.

So here I am, in the early nineties, I’m into hip-hop and reggae and I dress like it. Now I’m confronted with marijuana and the hippie life-style. How do I choose between the two? I don’t. I start to mix styles for a bit and begin to make a more embarrassing mess of sartorial selections than a fat kid with low self-esteem should be allowed to make. To make matters worse one of the latest “things you can be” to appear during my formative years revolved around electronic music and a ghastly little function known as a “rave.” Turns out these “raves” and “ravers” are exactly a mix of the hip-hop, reggae and hippie cultures and for a (thankfully) very short time I fit right in there.

...to be continued

Not For Discerning Readers

Recently I was talking of sexual aids - that is to say, products designed to enhance or otherwise make easier the sex act betwixt two consenting adults, not that horrible disease that Larry Clark gave everybody - I was talking of their convoluted nature and the amount of, in my opinion, unwarranted effort that goes into the purchase and application of these products. Well, in an effort to relay a related anecdote, the other conversationalist with whom I was in discourse says to me "So I went to a sex shop recently with a friend of mine. He used to date the girl who works there. She makes custom dildos. You know, like if you want to get your girlfriend a dildo that's a replica of your d*#k. Isn't that weird? Anyway, blah blah blah..." It is not often that one is faced with such a loaded non-sequitur. "Wait a minute," I said, interrupting the rest of her story which apparently was not about the custom dildos, "Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't that mean this loving boyfriend would have to go to said sex shop, presumably walk into a back room somewhere, proceed to make himself erect in the presence of this woman who would then have to apply some kind of mold to this erection? That's not a gift. That's called cheating."

But for realies though - what kind of world is this?

News

Weird news lately. Boner died. Shamu killed a trainer. A huge earthquake in Chile caused tsunami warnings everywhere and earlier in the year a huge earthquake in Haiti caused Wycleff Jean warnings everywhere. The future is much weirder than Cormac McCarthy could have imagined. And none of us has a dad that looks as good naked as Viggo Mortenson to guide us through these rough seas. Oh what a world.

...but

At least we got ten Best Picture nominees to root for! And two of them are cartoons!