This morning, Grand Avenue smelled exactly like Lake Okoboji in Northern Iowa. Haven't been there in 13 years (probably just about to the day), but I recognized the smell right away.


Ended up writing two songs yesterday, "Aunt Judith Smokes" "Never Go Exploring In the Toilet." Today I've done a rough draft for "We Built a Fort (And Seceded From the Union)." I might end up doing TWO albums at once - one of "appropriate songs" and one of "inappropriate songs." I think they're ALL pretty much appropriate (or, anyway, they have a solid moral center), but it might just be good business.

My little brother turns twenty-five today.

Eli, I have some very, very vague memories of going to the hospital when you were born. And some of tormenting you, of course, but I'd say that, as older brothers go, I went pretty easy on you.

I have much more specific memories of...

... playing one-on-one wiffle ball (I can even remember most of the fake line-ups for each of our "teams") in the backyard

... riding Big Wheels and tike bikes up and down the street, pretending we were escaping from the headless horseman

...eating popsicles at the "popsicle place" in the backyard

...spending long days at the pool in grandma's neighborhood trying to swim the entire length of the pool underwater without coming up for breath

...endless hours of kicking your butt at Atari

...night after night in the bleachers at Sec Taylor stadium watching minor league baseball and scheming ways to get a foul ball

...bike races around the block in opposite directions - I used to take the route that went downhill all down Hammontree, while you preferred starting and ending downhill on Parkview

...the day we finally beat Transylvania on the Apple IIe

...setting up massive marble races and keeping detailed records of which ones were the fastest (that red one usually won)

...the great "m.u.s.c.l.e. slingshot"

...playing Batman vs the Joker in the yard

...all those kool aid stands

..."cat savers"

...how long the walk home from Olmsted seemed when I was seven and you were five (surely no five year old is allowed to make that walk in this day and age!) and hearing you let loose an impressive string of swear words when we realized we were five minutes late the first time we were allowed to make the walk.

...memorizing practically every song Billy Joel ever sang

...recording "Billy the Daredevil," our ripoff of "The Ballad of Billy the kid" in the basement, with you on keyboard and me singing. Among the "bands" we formed were "Maniacs from Dimension X" and "Amethyst" (one hell of an 80s band name, if I do say so) "S.A.K.E." which stood for "singing adam keyboard eli." Other songs included "Severe Thunderstorm Warning" (of which Mom, thankfully, only remembers to chorus, or she'd still be singing the VERSES too), something about the last day of school (I can sing the opening couple of lines, but don't remember any chorus), "Time to Move On," and "Lookin' Good." Every now and then I'll remember a scrap of another one. We must have had a ton!

...rowing that inflatable boat around Lake Okoboji

...coming up with "routines" on the monkey bars in the back yard

...stealing the sugar out of the cabinet and eating spoonfuls of it straight

..."lavaland"

...playing pool in the basement. esp. when Brian was over and during the "flood of '93." Sorry about all those games of "Waste Eli's Fingers."

...and so much more, all the way up to your wedding last year, my trip to L.A. and your latest trip here. Happy birthday, and see you at thanksgiving!

My top dresser drawer has been my junk drawer for as long as I can remember, and some of the junk has been in there for a long, long time. Every time I open it, I wonder if I'll discover the cure for some disease (or possibly some bacteria that'll give me cholera). Anyway, here's some results from a recent dig:



A handful of ID cards - my 8th grade school ID, a metallica fan club card from 97, and an MST3K Info Club card from about 95.



M.U.S.C.L.E. men! They've been in that yellow thingy for YEARS - the first use I remember using the yellow thingie for was to carry around Garbage Pail Kids 1985, but I've had it since before that. I'd say the muscle men found their way in in the late 80s, though they've been in the drawer since 86 or so. Also included: some arrowheads my neighbor gave me (early 90s), a Steve Avery rookie card (89 topps), and a magnet that probably dates the the early 80s.



In eighth grade I had a hat that was covered in buttons (no, this was not hip at the time. I was a dork, then, too). Left to right: an anti-smoking one that I think I got at the Iowa State Fair in the early 90s, a handmade one (it was supposed to be an anarchy sign over a smily face with the words "crazy days are happy days." Uncool though my hat was, this button was well-admired), and a "why be normal" that came from a store at Merle Hay Mall called DV8. They sold buttons like this, incense, and a fine selection of junk made outta hemp. I thought they were the coolest store in Des Moines.



Four early 80s audio tapes. I think they found their way into the drawer when I digitized some of the stories I recorded on side 2 (which I did a lot of in the 80s) a few years back. The stories are wacky and full of references to "Muppet Babies." Hearing them a few years ago, my mother described them as "what A.D.D. sounds like."



My mom started working for Mattel in the late 80s; this is some Toy Fair schwag she picked up. A Ren and Stimpy cassingle signed in ballpoint by Billy West (who did the voices and ended up doing many Futurama voices). The button advertises a "The Last Action Hero," a total flop film that Mattel was all excited about in 1993 or so. I never saw it.



Finally, we have me in the costume I wore to school on Halloween one day in high school. Going to a school in Gwinnett County, Georgia dressed as Gene Simmons - even 15 years after most of the religious groups stopped talking about KISS - was an excellent way to attract interesting lectures. I'd put it on the Weird Chicago bus, but I'm pretty sure Simmons would try to sue me or something.


There was also something in there that's making me itch, but I'm a bit afraid to guess what it might have been.

I've been playing around with facebook and working on a middle grade book. Somewhere in the midst of all this, I started thinking about Mr. Cunyan, my music teacher.

He was an old, grumpy sort of guy. Most of us were a little afraid of him. Exactly what you had to do to get a good grade in his class was never clear (it shouldn't be that hard to score a 1 (our version of an A) in a 1st grade music class, but I never managed it).

In the long years since I was in one of his classes, I've occasionally heard bizarre stories - like that he told the class that he didn't believe in shampoo, and preferred to stick his head in a rain barrell. I DO remember him talking about rain barrels (while explaining the line "look down my rain barrel / slide down my cellar door / and we'll be jolly friends / forevermore"). I'm pretty sure that in the same class, he explained that sliding down a cellar door caused splinters, and if you pulled a chair out from under someone, they'd have back problems when they got old.

The weirdest thing of all is that this guy taught me how to rap. One of the songs we had to sing in the annual music program was a thing called The Music Fact Rap, of which I can still recite the following chunks:

Bach was born in Eisenach in 1685
but 1750 when his life was through
he had changed the world of music for me and you
even george, paul, ringo and john
the liverpool 4 did he turn on
remember the trumpet in penny lane?
it was straight from eisenach and JS bach
js bach from eisenach js bach from eisenach

ludwig! beethoven! born in Bahn
had the crazy middle name of Von
the first four notes in his fifth symphony
stand out like a monument in music history
did you know that NEAR THE END HE COULD NOT HEAR
but ol' ludwig, he had no fear
he kept writing music for us, you see
music makes the world a better place to be


Word.

Last night I talked awhile on the phone with Seth, one of my oldest friends, and we reminisced about what toy collecting was like in 1992 or 93.

It was a very different scene in those days - actually, it wasn't a scene at all. It was just the two of us, really. None of the comic book shops in town had large sections of Star Wars memorabilia. There wasn't a store in town that sold such things. There certainly wasn't an ebay. But it was age of bargains. I was into collecting Star Wars stuff (this did NOT make you cool in those days) and Seth was into Transformers (this did not make you cool then, either). Star Wars and Transformer geekiness was what it would later become in those days - the great transformer revival, in particular, was something we never would have predicted.

And in those days, man, the hard part was just finding the stuff in the first place - action figure dealers were harder to find than drug dealers. We spent countless saturdays biking to garage sales, wandering around the giant flea market at the fairgrounds. Now and then we'd have really big scores - shoeboxes full of figures for five bucks, boxes of vehicles for ten. Seth once got an ENORMOUS box of transformers - so big we had to take turns shlepping it - for about ten bucks. I got to where I could spot a booth with Star Wars stuff from any point in my peripheral vision.

We would scour the newspaper classified ads - there'd be someone selling Star Wars stuff about every six months or so. We had a whole catalog of vague leads; people who knew they had a whole case of stuff in their attic somewhere, thrift stores (that may or may not have existed) in some small town or another that were said to have a box of stuff sitting in the corner. I bought a whole bunch of stuff from some guy out in Colfax, and a Cantina Adventure Set from a guy named Doug who turned out to be a serious collector - he had two ROOMS full of stuff, and was my hero.

If we needed a specific piece of some sort, the process generally involved writing letters to comic book shops that advertised in the back of Action Figure News and Toy Review (which, itself, was not easy to come across). Or risk my parents' wrath by making a long distance call to one of them - a call that could cost me a dollar that could ahve been spent on a Marvel Tales Spider-man reprint or a slim jim and a jolt cola.

My main hunt then was for Imperial Dignitary, a wrinkly dude in purple who appears for about five seconds in Return of the Jedi. I never saw a loose one for sale, only carded ones (one of which I eventually bought when the opportunity came up). There are currently several loose ones on ebay, all for what would have been a dream price for me even at the time. And blank "card backs" with bubbles are easy to get - NO ONE had those then, or knew of anyone who did. Getting some of those was like a pipe dream for me.

If you'd told me about ebay then, it would have seemed like a dream come true. And it is, in many ways. Maybe the Good Old Days are now.

In other ways, though, it's ruined collecting. For all practical purposes, the vintage figures are still in stores - more expensive than they were in 1985, but just about as easy to get. I remember one spring, around this time of year, we made a pilgrimage to Mason City, Iowa, to visit a comic book shop that sold figures - the guy who ran it was kind of a jerk, but he usually had the best booth at the flea market. This is probably the only time that anyone, anywhere, EVER, got excited about a trip to Mason City, Iowa. It was a great day for me, one that I'll always remember fondly, even though the place didn't turn out to be a particularly great score. And there'd be absolutely no point in taking that trip nowadays.

And we didn't have emo, either. In my day we had alternative. And we didn't get to download it, we had to buy it, or copy it off a friend. And there were no CD-Rs; we had to use cassettes. And we liked it! We liked it fine!

I went to see a very funny play called "Leaving Iowa" the other day - it revolves around a family from Winterset taking a road trip to Hannible, MO.

Lots of fun, but I had a fantastic time just watching the Iowa slideshow that was played before the show. Iowa tourism is a little on the thin side - we had the mythical birthplace of Captain Kirk, a big railroad bridge, a handful of covered bridges, Adventureland, The Grotto of the Redemption, and the occasional roadside oddity. I've never been to the Little Brown Church in the Vale, but I think I'd hit the rest of them.

As the slideshow went on, I chatted with the people around me. "I've been there!" I said, when an attraction came up on the screen. Almost invariably, this was followed with a cheerful "boy, was that ever boring!" It got to be a running joke.

I missed the days when the highways were lined with billboards for tourist traps like "Spook Caverns" and things like that, but I can sure see how they would have succeeded. Well do I remember those four hour drives to Lake Okoboji - those four hours through farm after farm seemed like an eternity. My brother and I would spend our time scanning the horizon, looking for "civilization." The only thing to break up the trip was the annual stop at the Purple Cow, a delightfully named ice cream joint that seemed to come out of nowhere in the tiny town of Pochahontas.

One thing I've come to realize - and part of the reason I loved the play - is that being Iowan is something you can never really get out of your system. My ears still perk up when I hear the state mentioned someplace. When I went back to Des Moines last year - the first time I'd been there in five years, after moving away in 95 - I was amazed at how quickly I started to feel like I'd never been away at all.

I've spent my morning trying to find a single mention of the Purple Cow online, and I've come up blank.

At the cafe this morning, they were playing a radio station that I think should be called the Uncle Station ("Music From Your Uncle Lester's Closet"). Doobie Brothers, REO Speedwagon, etc. One song was "Dust in The Wind."

I remember that, for a brief period, I was in my eighth grade swing choir - and we spent most of the first semester working on "Dust in the Wind." I can still sing the cello solo.

If you don't know the song, the premise is that life is short and more or less pointless - all we are is dust in the wind, drops of water in an endless sea, and all we do crumbles to the ground - pretty grim business. There were plenty of popular songs about depressed, but this was a song about why you SHOULD be depressed if you aren't. If you do know the song, you will probably realize that it doesn't exactly swing. There are gregorian chants that swing a good deal more than "Dust in the Wind." Rather than swinging around, as swing choirs normally do, we just stood there and sang it.

Since this took a good chunk of the semester, for some weeks I spent my first hour of every day singing "Dust in the Wind" over and over again. I can say without too much hesitation that it was the most depressing semester of my life. Most people find middle school depressing to begin with, and starting your day with a heaping helping of gloom isn't exactly a pick-me-up.

When you spend an hour singing about how life is nasty, brutish and short, it's fairly hard to get into algebra the rest of the day. If all my money won't another minute buy, I would think, why in the hell should I be spending these transient moments trying to figure how to factor a trinomial? All we are is dust in the wind, anyway, and nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky. What's the point?

I suppose the fact that I never DID figure out how to factor a trinomial - or exactly what a trinomial is, for that matter - is probably my final revenge.


Eventually, we sang that one at a concert, and moved on to other happy songs, like "Turn Around," the most depressing song Malvina Reynolds ever wrote, "Tiger Rag," a bouncy number about animal abuse, and "Let's Step Out," a happy song -finally!- which was all about drinking illegally during prohibition. No wonder so many people from my middle school list alcohol first among their interests on myspace.

On the tour the other night, I invented a new game, which is entitled "Starbucks." You play by looking around for a Starbucks while driving - when you see one, you call out "Starbucks!" and buck the person next to you in the arm. I really must work this into the revisions of "Pirates of the Retail Wasteland." It was especially fun on a bus full of students last night.




Between tours today I picked up the new Bill Bryson book, which is memoir of growing up in Des Moines in the fiftied. I myself embarked on the adventure(?) of growing up in Des Moines, albeit some years later, so I've really been looking forward to this one. You can put me down for anything Bryson writes, really. In his first book, The Lost Continent, he mentioned the mall at which I used to hang out with the memorable phrase "Jack Kerouac, of all people, said the prettiest girls in the world are in Des Moines, but apparently he was never at Merle Hay Mall on a Saturday." My main hope for this would be some mention fo George the Chili King, a fine diner still in existenve, and he mentions it on page 21, this time with the memorable phrase "A George's chili burger was gone in minutes, but the farts went on forever."

No matter where I live for the rest of my life, I'll never be able to get away from being an Iowan. And that's okay.

It's been brought to my attention that only kids who grew up in Iowa grewing up knowing the joke about why they man put his car in oven. Weird. I immediately asked a few friends who didn't grow up in Des Moines if they knew the joke, and none did, though a few guessed. Can you?



Here's a new long version:

person 1: Why did the man put his car in the oven?
person 2: I don't know, why?
person 1: Because he wanted to see time fly.
person 2: that doesn't make any sense.
Person 1: yeah, he was pretty stupid. it didn't work at all.
Person 2: oh.



My real favorite of this sort of joke is:

Person 1: how did you get that gash in your forehead?
Person 2: I bit myself.
Person 1: how did you bite yourself in the forehead?
Person 2: stood on a chair.

Yesterday, I actually ran into a link to The Floppy Show, which was the Des Moines-area local children's show when I was a kid (and when my parents were kids). Besides the cartoons, the main part of the show was kids telling jokes of the "why did the man throw a clock out the window?" variety to the puppet, then by beeping his nose. We Iowa kids ate it up.

I had no idea it was a local show at the time, but now I feel as though I'm fairly lucky to have been born in time to remember local kids shows at all - there was a time not long ago at all when every town had their local kids' show host. I think the last hold-out was the Fox Kids Club hosts which lasted until the early 90's - one of my favorite things about travelling was seeing who the Fox Kids Club host was in whatever town I was in, though it never failed to be someone remarkably lame. Now, it seems like the only thing local on TV at all are the news anchors - though there are few local things around Chicago, such as Svenghoulie, who shows horror movies on the weekends at midnight.


Incidentally, my search for the rumored cafepress store that sells Floppy gear came up empty, but I did run into an article explaining why kids in Des Moines have tot tell a joke before saying "trick or treat" (another thing that few in the area realize is strictly a local phenomenon) - trick or treating in Des Moines. When I moved away from Des Moines, I was rather puzzled to find that kids weren't telling jokes before getting candy on Halloween. What were these kids - savages?

Yes. Of course they were.

(side note: then, you have the people who think everything they like is strictly local. I recall a woman in Georgia who saw my jack-o-lantern, which was carved to look like Charlie Brown. "Hey," she said. "I like that, cause, you, I grew up with Charlie Brown!" Well, no kiddin', lady. EVERYONE born after a certain point in the 40's grew up with Charlie Brown. She was apparently under the impression that Peanuts was "a southern thing," like football and Coke.)

With my Aunt Jen, Uncle Vinton, and cousins Tad and Heather, I hit a downtown bar called High Life. Last time I was in Des Moines, I wasn't old enough to go into bars.

High Life is an odd place - it's like being in a basement in the 70's. The wood paneled walls are covered in ads for Miller and Schlitz from the 70s, and the radio plays things like "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," "Copa Cabana" and "Folsom Prison Blues." The interesting thing is that the place works - it really does feel like you've gone back to the 70's. There's no corny display case of pet rocks and nothing relating to disco, platform shoes, bell bottoms or anything like that. It manages to be retro without seeming kitschy in the slightest, and there wasn't a hipster as far as the eye could see.

The menu is primarily basic fair - roast beef sandwiches, goulash, sloppy joe's, etc. But there are a few odd dishes, and quite a few deserts, drinks, and sides in which the main ingredient is Tang. For his dinner, Uncle Vinton had the fried Spam sandwich - he's a big fan of Spam; in fact, he's the only guy I know who wears a Spam baseball cap and doesn't think he's being ironic. One of the drinks at the bar (and I'm not making this up) was a shot of Jager and Tang. And it was tasty. Really.

The only modern touch was a video slot machine, on which I lost two dollars. After drinking Jager and Tang.

Headed from there to Java Joe's, at which the radio was also playing "Folsom Prison Blues," which is where, five years ago, on my last trip, I played probably the best show I'd ever played up to that time. It was good to be back in town.