strangepulse.com

Being a teenager pretty much sucks. But my recent Soundgarden post had me looking at old photos I have of Daniel from when we were teens. He was friends with my older brother, Willy, and totally ignored me.

Of course I had a big crush on him.

(Sorry if this is stuff I’ve posted before, I’m sure most of it is…but my old blog posts aren’t online anyway.)

When I first knew him, he had a girlfriend named Suzie. She was beautiful. Popular. A total preppy. It was like something right out of a John Hughes movie—popular preppy girl dates reject punk boy. Her jock friends used to try to beat him up. One time they were in the hallway at school and some jock started a fight. Daniel said Suzie jumped on the guy’s back and was hitting him with her purse.

They came over to our house once. I remember them looking at our record collection. And Daniel saying something about how when they get married they were going to have a certain kind of house, etc…I wished longingly for a boyfriend like that!

Here he is, over visiting with my brother:

I think Suzie must’ve been a senior and graduated before him. He ended up having a lot of girlfriends. They were all gorgeous, and I swear they all came to our wedding. One even played the piano for our ceremony.

Daniel reached legend status at our school when he took a 22 year old to his senior prom.

Daniel was a big rebel and always in trouble. He was well known at school for his wild escapades. If anything happened, rumor was always that Daniel did it. The year after he graduated, when he was living in Hawaii, someone tore down our high school sign and dumped it on the principal’s lawn. I remember hearing someone saying it had to have been Dan who did it. Kinda funny.

Our school had three different lunch times and one semester I didn’t have any of my usual friends in my lunch hour. So I sat with Daniel and his friends. I actually had a crush on another boy who also sat with Daniel. Here’s a picture of Daniel at lunch:

Here’s a picture of our friend Dave (the same one he goes surfing/dirt biking/skating/etc with now):

My friend Colin is next to Dave. The black hair you see peeking in on the side is the guy I had a crush on, eventually he became my very first boyfriend. Mostly what I remember from those lunches were the boys all being gross with their food. At one point, food started getting tossed around a bit, and they all got detention.

I didn’t, though. One nice benefit of having sexist teachers, I guess. Girls got a free pass for food fights.

Here’s a picture I think Dave took and developed in the school darkroom:

Because I sure never put an anarchy sign on any pictures like that. Note the Cure tshirt. I’m pretty sure Daniel and I met for the first time on the way to a Cure concert. He was riding the bus with me and Willy to the show. He had a broken rib from skateboarding, and he was jumping off curbs and stuff in the arena’s parking lot. Very typical of Daniel.

Once I brought a tape recorder to school. I had a penpal in San Francisco I used to write to all the time and we’d trade mix tapes. Well once or twice I tried taping her a “letter” instead of writing it. I told the guys at lunch about it and Daniel promptly grabbed the tape recorder and started saying a bunch of stuff.

I really wish I still had that tape.

Daniel and I had one class together in all of high school: Ms. Verner’s psychology class. Here he is sitting in the seat in front of my friend Jen:

I remember him coming into class and cracking jokes to us like, “Wipe your chin off.” Or, “What are you eating under there?”

One of our assignments in that class was to make a timeline of our lives, including what we thought would happen to us in the future. I remember mine said I’d go to college, get married, have kids, become a grandma. Then my husband would die and I’d be free to travel around the country on a motorcycle and I’d join a punk rock band.

Punk rock girl.

I came across this REM music video the other day that I’ve never seen, for the song “Imitation of Life.” Have you seen it? It’s really pretty amazing.

It’s just a scene of a backyard bbq/party, people gathered around a pool dancing, but the camera will zoom in on particular people at different times—and the time line will reverse. So it’s like the camera is zooming in on different people at the same time. It was all shot in 20 seconds, and the video is all the same footage being rewound and played forward again while zooming in on different parts of the film.

And rumor is the guy in the green shirt w/the hat near the waterfall (at the beginning he dives out of the pool backwards) is Thom Yorke of Radiohead. (It zooms in on him at 3:42.)

My favorite camera broke awhile ago. I’ve missed it sorely. It was a cheapo plastic focus-free panoramic that I flipped the lens on. Flipping the lens made the sides go all blurry. Like this.

Apparently when I flipped the lens, I didn’t glue it back on very well, because it fell off, and the camera is no more.

My parents recently sent me a whole ton of cameras that are somewhat similar, so I’ve been testing them out after flipping their lenses. The first one didn’t really work out—the pictures came out totally blurred everywhere, rather than just at the edges. The second one, though—it’s showing more promise. I tried it out when we went to the Disney Concert Hall. I think it’s going to serve me well. Here’s what I got out of the first test roll.

I like this one, rather abstract:

Nathaniel acting a bit like a scared schoolgirl:

Downtown streets:

The one armed man:

I keep thinking he’s like an assassin in a spy movie or something.

It looks like the edges are blurred, and the center while soft is still somewhat in focus. Not completely obliterated, anyway. Yay!

I don’t really have any. MCQ, someone I know from blogging at KB, is in town this weekend, so I might try to meet up with him. Other than that I just want to go bike riding and photo-taking.

Yesterday I took Nathaniel and his friend Dillon into downtown L.A. We went to the Disney Concert Hall to take pictures. I don’t have any developed yet. It’s one of those crazy buildings designed by Frank Gehry, it looks like a piece of crumpled up garbage from the air. (We just saw Get Smart and there are scenes filmed there, which is what made me want to go take pictures there.) Here’s a picture Dillon took of it. It’s cool because you can actually walk up inside the structure, and you’re outside, but you’re hidden from view. This shows you what I mean.

After that we walked over to MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art. There is a big sculpture there all made from industrial metal parts, like pipes and pieces of airplane wings and stuff. Basically a bunch of trash all wired together.

Then we went to Olvera Street, which is the oldest street in LA and seems like a little piece of Mexico right in the middle of the city. It’s pretty cool. There are these little shacks full of vendors selling shoes and Luche Libre masks and hand puppets. We got tacos and took pictures, hoping the light hadn’t faded too much for my film to turn out. The sun was going down.

So that was yesterday. Here’s a bike ride from the day before on the Santa Ana River Trail (again). About the ending: Well, I’ll just say Nathaniel doesn’t take direction very well. His understudy came to the rescue, though.

Soundtrack: Ladyhawk - “S.T.H.D.”

I just googled that song title to see if I could figure out what that abbreviation stands for. Some possible meanings:

Stored Heading
Sheikh Trust for Human Development
Southern Tier Harley-Davidson
Student Technology Help Desk
Strap Tie Holdown

Any other ideas? Shut The Hell Down?

And happy birthday to Dillon. (The only one of my kids who actually reads my blog.)

It was October 18, 1986. I was 16 years old. My older brother Willy and I went to see a band called Love and Rockets at the Moore Theater in Seattle.

The Moore is a smallish theater and the seating was general admission. We got there early to get in line and try to get good seats. We weren’t first in line, though.

Back in the 80s all the cool kids, the ones who dressed all punk or new wave or goth and went to teen dance clubs a lot, smoked clove cigarettes. I don’t really know what exactly clove cigarettes are, but I know they smell different than regular tobacco cigarettes.

A girl next to me in line was chain smoking them. By the time we finally got into the venue I was feeling sick from it. Really, really nauseous. For years after that I couldn’t smell cigarette smoke without getting nauseous.

We got to our seats and had pretty good ones. Not spectacular. We were in the center section off to the left, maybe 20th row. I was feeling pretty sick.

Until Soundgarden came on.

I’d never heard Soundgarden before. I’d heard of them—a friend of mine at school had heard a song called “Incessant Mace” on KCMU, the UW’s radio station. He recorded it off the radio and said it was really fantastic. But he never lent me the tape. So I’d been curious to see what they were like.

They blew me away.

I was totally held spellbound by their performance. Chris Cornell was wearing raggedy jeans, cut off at the knee, and no shirt. They had only red lights on the stage. Their dark, slow, heavy sound, combined with his amazing vocals—it was incredible. I forgot about everything except how terrific they were.

When they were done, Willy spotted his friend Dan across the theater. When Dan saw us, he jumped up on the backs of people’s seats and walked across the entire row to get over to where we were. We hadn’t saved him a seat but he sat with us anyway. Three people, two seats. When Love and Rockets came on, everyone stood up on their seats. Dan stood on mine, but I remained sitting—was feeling too sick.

I remembered my grandma telling me if she ever felt like she was going to throw up, she’d stick her finger down her throat and get it over with, so she could feel better. I decided to try that. I mean, here I was, not only missing Love and Rockets, but missing my chance to share a seat with Dan Malmrose!

Yes, the guy standing on my seat is the guy I married.

So I went downstairs to the bathrooms. I wasn’t sure where exactly they were, and I saw a man and a woman standing in the hallway and asked if they knew. Turns out the women’s room was right next to where they were standing.

I was wearing a Tones on Tail tshirt, and the guy pointed at it and said, “They’re a pretty good band.”

A couple reasons this was funny:

• A couple of the guys in Tones on Tail were also in Love and Rockets, who were playing on stage above us at the time.
• The guy who told me they were a pretty good band was Kim Thayil of Soundgarden, and he’d just finished opening for Love and Rockets.

I went into the bathroom and tried to make myself puke, but just couldn’t do it. It’s harder than you’d think. Finger down my throat, gagging, etc—but no puking.

So I went back out into the hall and asked Kim Thayil if Soundgarden would do an interview for my friend’s ‘zine. He asked the woman he was with to give me Chris Cornell’s phone number. The woman I later figured out was Chris’s wife and the band’s manager.

I gave his phone number to my friend Colin so he could do the interview. I’m not good at that kind of thing. But Colin never did call him.

After that, Soundgarden were always my favorite local band. I don’t have any pictures of them from the Love and Rockets show, but I do have a picture of Love and Rockets:

That’s Daniel Ash playing sax.

Have you ever been to a man made lake?

Ever notice how they never feel quite right?

They’re pleasant and lovely and everything, but they always seem a little off somehow.

Take Greenlake in Seattle for example. It’s a lovely spot. A small lake in a flat area of Seattle, with a nice lawn surrounding it and a paved bike path. But did you know it was man made? I always thought that lake was kinda weird. And when I found out it was man made, I understood why. It shouldn’t be there.

Calexico has a song called “Man Made Lake.” When I saw them live, the singer, Joey, said it was about some city, forget which one, but that it could just as easily be about Phoenix, or Vegas, or Los Angeles. I think it’s supposed to be a post-apocalyptic song, like it’s about after the world has ended and everything is left desolate.

I think a lot about how I live in a desert. With millions of other people. Millions of people should not be living in a desert. We’ve made these giant cities in places they shouldn’t be. That’s what the song makes me think of.

I love the line about the cell phone trees. I don’t know about the rest of the country, but down here in the southwest they disguise cell phone towers to look like trees. Some are palm trees, some are pine trees. They look ridiculous. A lot of people don’t even notice them. It’s always fun to point one out to someone who has lived here their entire life and never caught on that the weird looking palm tree is actually a cell phone tower. Here are some pictures of some (I didn’t take any of these, just got them off Flickr):

I have this little tiny spy camera I carry around with me everywhere. It’s uses 110 film. Remember that? Tiny little film. (My scanner doesn’t do so hot scanning the film, but oh well.) Here’s a picture of the camera:

I often forget I have the camera with me (it’s so small), so I rarely use it. I finally finished off a roll and it’s got some old stuff on it!

This is a picture of my friend’s neighbor’s house when they were on Trading Spaces:

The house was right across the street from Eijah’s middle school. He’s in high school now. That’s how old this picture is.

Here’s Nathaniel outside the Nickel Nickel arcade:

The boys in line for a Megadeth concert:

IKEA!

I kind of like this shot of not-Nathaniel:

The rest are from when Daniel and I went on a walk through the neighborhood next door to our complex. He took a bunch of me.

Aren’t we cute.

In case any are reading this blog.

Never allow yourself to turn into this:

Please.

This might be acceptable:

But only if you’re parodying yourself or someone else. Is parodying a word?

Turning into this is never acceptable:

And neither is this:

So, to recap. This is cool:

This is not:

(Gene Simmons after his plastic surgery.)

Friday night Daniel, his friend Dave and Elijah went on a church camp out to Calico. It’s a desert area out past Barstow. Pretty far drive, like maybe 2 and a half hours. Someone always brings a lot of fireworks (I mean like an insane amount) and the kids go crazy (I mean like totally insane) with them. Daniel and Dave brought dirt bikes.

Nathaniel and I drove out Saturday morning. There’s a ghost town in Calico, it’s a tourist trap, but I knew I could get some cool pictures there. And there’s some small abandoned houses nearby I wanted to get pics of, too. You know, falling apart, covered in graffiti.

The boys of course complained about how boring it was and just wanted to go home.

So on the way home Elijah said something funny, I can’t remember what. I asked him if he ever thought about becoming a writer. He said yeah, and asked why I asked. I told him he was really creative.

He said, “Yeah, I’ve got creativity coming out the wazoo.”

Which made us laugh.

Then he said, “I excrete creativity. There, I just excreted some…And it smells really bad.”

Which made us laugh some more. Until Nathaniel noticed something that actually did smell bad. “ELIJAH!”

I must’ve been really tired because I get into this state sometimes where if I start laughing too hard, I just start bawling. Like seriously crying really hard and I can’t stop. I was on the edge of that at this point. And Elijah just kept going…

“That will be the opening joke of my comedy routine. It’s only my second best. You always open with your second best and save your first best for last.”

Nathaniel: “You’re going to fart for your opening joke? And that’s your second best? What is your first best?”

Elijah: “I don’t have one.”

(This is where I lost it. Seriously. Crying.)

Nathaniel: “Then how do you know it’s only your second best?”

Elijah: “I just do. It smells second best.”

I was dying. Nathaniel became concerned, since he was sitting in the front seat and could see I wasn’t really able to drive and laugh and cry hysterically at the same time.

Me, in between gasps and sobs: “Stop!”

Nathaniel: “Elijah! Stop!”

Elijah: **more random hilarious stuff**

Nathaniel: “Elijah, stop! You’re going to get us killed!”

Killed by a fart joke. Just think about the potential gravestone epitaphs. Like a goldmine.

I forbade anyone to speak until I was sure I was not going to start crying again as soon as they opened their mouths.

Here’s a few pics.

Dave on a dirtbike:

Daniel on our new minibike:

Best buds:

Elijah and Nathaniel by the truck and tent. I’m glad I didn’t have to sleep in there, air mattress or no.

An example of the fun the kids had in the desert:

Only a mother’s nightmare.

The secret? Ruin their habitat.

The concrete rivers all over southern California really trip me out. Everyone’s seen the LA River in movies, right? The Terminator most quickly springs to mind. I’ve always felt weird even calling it a river. It’s like, a giant ditch.

There’s a river closer to us called the Santa Ana River that is also made of concrete. I looked up what it’s called when they pave a riverbed: channelization. (Or river engineering.) I thought this was mostly unique to California, but apparently it’s been done heavily in other parts of the US, too.

The Santa Ana has a biking trail along it. Like, the whole way. You can ride from the beach to the mountains and back again. I took Nathaniel and Dillon over to it yesterday for a quick bike ride. I’m sure everyone’s getting sick of my videos by now but I’m still enjoying them, so you’re stuck with it.

Song: Pride Tiger - “The Lucky Ones”

Man, I love that song. If you pay attention, you can see Dillon taking pictures as he’s riding. When Nathaniel disappears for awhile, he’s actually down in the riverbed.

We ended up at a railroad bridge that is no longer in use. (Well, it’s in use by a homeless person—there was a mattress and some things down underneath it. That’s gotta be some prime real estate.) So we took some pictures and then headed back to the car.

Nathaniel’s smiling at me, Dillon’s taking a picture. Dillon was taking his in black and white so I thought I’d try converting some of mine.

That’s Dillon above, Nathaniel was already up around the bend. I kept stopping to take pictures and they’d get way ahead of me. Plus I couldn’t always make it back up the inclines and would have to walk my bike! The trail is slightly uphill on the way back, and that combined with the headwind did me in.

Nathaniel and Dillon waiting for me to catch up. I told them they didn’t have to wait for me, they just had to come back and find my dead body if I didn’t show up after awhile. Nathaniel said if they didn’t wait for me they’d already be back at the car waiting there.

There were some hawks down in the river bed, which is what they’re looking at. The birds looked weird to me. Had huge bunches of tail feathers—almost more like a vulture or something. But I didn’t stop to check them out.

Dillon brought along his new camera and got some excellent shots, which I’d link to if he’d set up a flickr account, but he hasn’t.