Follow The Leaderhosen

I logged into this durn thing late one night in some sort of stupor--I clearly wasn't at my best and should really not have been writing about life, love, those who live it and those who get screwed. Etc.

I'm not sure what I did but realize that now I am accidentally following my own blog under some randomly generated nonsense name that I believe has PB&J in the title.

Happy day: I'm a jelly bread!
Who knew?

Ghost Stories for Young Boys - Part One:

I don't remember how it started but when my brother Ivan was very young, like three or four years old, he was terrified of Abraham Lincoln. Not just any old Abraham Lincoln, mind you, but that special, personal version of our--was it fourteenth president?--the one that lived quietly in Ivan's closet and could only be seen late at night when the door was accidentally left slightly open.

Sometimes when it was way past dark and Ivan was trying to get to sleep, all tucked into his wee tiny bed and the light from the hallway would filter into his bedroom. It would be just enough light for him to catch sight of Abraham Lincoln where he was silently standing--tall and proud--wearing his standard issue stove-pipe top-hat, with the classic bow tie around his neck. Honest Abe never moved so much as quietly loomed, beady little eyes glistening. Needless to say, this scared my brother shitty and he would scream for our mom to come and shut the closet door for fuck's sake already.

My mom would come running to shut the closet door and be smiling slightly in that knowing and motherly way so that it was almost as if she and Abraham Lincoln had been in bed together in the next room and had planned the whole event--you know--for a lark.

Ivan was not amused. Ivan was never amused by the antics of Abraham Lincoln--not the one in his closet and certainly not the mechanical version at Disney World. I can't remember if this was before or after he began the late night house calls to Ivan's bedroom, but we also had a run in with Old Abe in The Hall of the Presidents at Epcot Center. As you are wheeled into the room on the roller-coaster like seats, being horrifically seat-belted in so there is no escape, you see Abraham Lincoln seated on his giant chair, much like his statue in DC. When you are front and center an easy target for the man, Abraham Lincoln, the robot, jankily stands up, cogs popping and wheels turning not-too-smoothly--the man needs some oiling--and his mouth begins to move, slightly off with the words, like the mechanical bears at Chuck E Cheese pizza. But the effect is twice as eerie because it's a dead president, giving an undead speach, his mouth gaping open and shut
like a fish on dry land gasping for water:

"Four score and seven years ago..." That was as far as he got before I heard Ivan screaming from the car next to mine, where he sat with my sister. He tried to unbuckle himself and climb out of his seat, to no avail, and then he began to cry. Eyes shut, mouth wide open to almost the full size of his head, which was thrown back in the most abjectly miserable wail. Now I've never been to the wailing wall, but I'd bet that it had nothing on this...and the band played on: "Our father's fathers..." droned mechanical Abe. And all the rest of it.

I'm certain that there is nothing more miserable than childhood. Unless, of course, it's being haunted by Abraham Lincoln...which you should really hope like hell you never are.

Ghost Stories for Young Boys - Part Two:

So, maybe when Ivan turned five or six, my brother became terrified of Anne Frank.

I'm not sure how it started but I do know that my sister, Andrea, and I thought this was terrifically funny so she and I sat down with a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank and armed with pencils, pens and erasers set out to do our worst.

On the cover of the book was the popular photograph of Anne Frank--a young girl with screwy teeth, dark circles under her eyes and carefully attended hair. We wanted to "enhance" this portrait, the way children often do, by penciling a moustache, blacking out the teeth or drawing on a giant mono-brow, as if a bat had just flown into the poor girl's face and died--You know the mischief. We started by taking our mean little pencil-top erasers and scrubbing away the image, we whited out the pupils in the eyes, but we weren't careful so we removed some of the face around them to leave the spooky effect of Anne Frank having wide glowing white orbs where her eyes should be. It was a terrifying effect so we stopped right there.

Then the real haunting of The Diary of Anne Frank began. We would take the book from the shelf and put it beneath the pillow on Ivan's bed. Or maybe we would put it in his sock drawer, in his coat pocket or his lunch box--wherever we could think of.

We didn't often see when or how Ivan would discover the book each time, but when he did he would return it to the book shelf, usually shoved behind some books or buried beneath a stack of others. It was fairly easy to find as he would face the spine inward so you could see only the pages of the book--And it was the only book that was turned around on the shelf, facing inwards.

Once I remember putting the book inside the pajama shirt my mom had put on Ivan's bed for after he came out of the bathtub one night. Andrea and I watched as he discovered the book and, rather than scream or show any alarm at all, he quietly put the book to his lips, kissed the portrait on the cover and said "please don't hurt me, Anne." Then he carried the book down the hall and threw it as hard as he could so it landed on top of the bookshelf. We never would have found it again, I'm certain, had we not seen this ourselves.

You'd think we'd leave well enough alone after witnessing such a solemn moment and for the most part I think we did, but we were mean older sisters and had nothing better to do.

We discovered that the heating vents on certain floors of our house were connected to other ones, so, for instance you could speak into the floor vents upstairs and hear it crystal clear from the rooms below.

This prompted a whole series of mischievous plots, one of which was waiting until Ivan was in bed at night and almost asleep and then we would whisper into the heating vents above his room in low, droning, ghost-like voices: "Annnne Fraaaannnnk...Annnnne Fraaaannnk..."

We would do this until Ivan would jump out of bed and run to find our mom--This barely gave us enough time to make it back to our rooms and pretend to be asleep.

I doubt that anyone fell for this and I'm sure we got into a lot of trouble--It's hard to believe one little dead girl could cause so many spankings.

The End.

Duck and Cover

The most insane noise rattled the house today.
Windows, walls, floorboards--you name it; it was shaking.

I thought a World War II pilot must have somehow escaped the tragedy of his own century and the gas crisis of this one and was about to dive-bomb us all--Flying noisily and dangerously low, moving through space, time, inventing equations that bend both--equations I'm not old enough to understand and wouldn't explain to you if I did.

But no.

It was not one, but two ghetto birds in flight; low-flying and traveling in a pack of two. (That's helicopters to you peeps in Alaska!)

"Safety in numbers, good buddy," one says to the other over the radio and nods meaningfully as they pass each-other in mid-flight--Meanwhile, some dweebish co-pilot in dark shades and a shit-eating grin leans over and gives a thumbs-up.

Fuck it. They were flying close enough for this story to be true--they were flying close enough to have babies. Fuck em.

Two, Four, Six, Eight--Who Does Paul Appreciate?

I like to think this song was written by Paul for Ringo and that he was so drunk he forgot there were four Beatles and thought he was just seeing double.

Which math doesn't really work, but you'll kindly suspend your disbelief when you listen to the song and picture a drunk P. McCartney trying to keep his little R. Starr to himself--all of this magic with two other dumbfounded scuttle-bugs following in hot pursuit, trying to prove that they too exist and are not, in fact, chopped liver.

Beatle pate. How tasty; how rare.

Almost; So Close: a fan, a friend, a guy named Ali

Once upon a time I saw that a man in India I had never met was following this blog--One out of like three people who had bothered to put a little picture of his face up and say, Yes, Yes I will read this thing.

Clearly he'd made more of an effort to follow it than I did to write it.

I was all, "Hello Mister Muslim from Around the World."

I was all, "However you found me and are proudly reading whatever I toss off, whatever random noise at whatever random moment inspires this weird white girl in America, well that Sir--Mister I'm Sorry Are You Hindu, Sir?--that and all the rest of whatever you're up to, not that I have any earthly idea...but ALL of it--it's alright with me."

And then a Led Zeplin song played.

Everything was GROOVY.
ALL CAPS, I mean it with the CAPS.
And my happiness, like these words,
Was,
All spaced out like this;
Like a Poem,
Like a Song,
And a songbird to sing it,
Right in your ear.

And then he unsubscribed from this blog.

He must've thought I would teach him how to plant beets and farm the land. How to purify water and save the people. How to look a cow in the eye and smile from the soul, I don't know.

It never happened.

Led Balloon

the thing about Led Zepplin that makes them my nemesis band is this: Everything about their music and the people who listen to it says, "Oh yeah."

It says, "Oh yeah, here we are, right where we want to be."

Is it? Can't we do better?