The importance of proper letter spacing

Back in eighth grade, I had a literature teacher who kept me after class one day to ask me a question about something I'd written in my poetry journal. Back in the day, my schtick was to make drawings in the margins of my journals, illustrating whatever it was that I had written about.

On this particular day, I had illustrated myself thumping a bitten-off fingernail. Beside the sketch of my fingers moving swiftly to propel the hangnail across the page was the word "flick," written in uppercase, comic book-style.

Mrs. Yeiser was concerned that I'd written something else there. Something that — even though it made no sense in the context of the drawing — would have gotten me in big trouble had she sussed it out.

I assured her that, no, I really did mean "FLICK," even though, yes, I could see how from a certain angle, it might certainly seem as though I'd written something much more controversial.

Ever since that day I've been particularly keen on the importance of proper kerning.

So when I saw this sign in Saltillo over the weekend, I made my sister stop the car and turn around so I could get a photo.



The Church of Christ needs to work on its sign's kerning.

I'm the one who makes the hot dogs

Ah, I miss Opryland.

I remember going there once clad in my finest white spandex shorts.

Hang in there, Patrick Swayze

Supposedly Patrick Swayze is on the verge of dying of pancreatic cancer. :(

When most people think of Patrick Swayze, they think of him possessing Whoopi Goldberg, or maybe doing pelvic thrusts alongside Chris Farley. Not me.

I think of the man who ensured my heterosexuality.

There was one summer in the late '80s when Dirty Dancing had just gone from being in the theater to being on HBO, and my sister managed to record it onto a VHS tape. We, along with Josh and Mandy, the two neighbor kids my sister babysat that summer, watched that movie at least once a day, every day. Dirty Dancing was listed on our daily schedule, just like lunch and chores.

And every time we'd watch the movie, we'd go absolutely batshit over the part where Johnny Castle gets out of the bed and you can see his butt for, like, two seconds. We'd pause the tape and giggle like maniacs.

How Josh grew up to be straight after that summer, I'll never know.

What a difference a decade and a half can make

I'm at my parents' house. All evening we've been watching old home videos that I coaxed my brother to get out of the safe. So far we've covered 1992 and 1993. I have been rolling in the floor laughing until I couldn't breathe and tears streamed down my face. There is a Fourth of July clip in which all you can see is some fireworks going off in the yard and our stupid fire-eating dog Bo trying his best to knock them over, while all you can hear is everyone in the family taking turns screaming "Bo! BO! BO BO BO BO BO!!!" at the top of their lungs. I lose my shit when my brother, who was five at the time, screams at that dog repeatedly in his little five-year-old way. He was such a ridiculously cute and precocious kid. Funny that when I was eleven, he didn't seem nearly as cute. In fact, I spend much of my time on film screaming at him and acting like a general ass. Especially when we're flying kites and I can't get mine to take off. I sit on the ground and pout, claiming that my kite and only my kite is a dud. Boo frickin' hoo, chump. Jesus!

You know, I always wondered why boys never liked me in elementary and middle school. Now that I have some distance and perspective, I understand with complete and absolute clarity and don't blame any of my childhood crushes for thinking I had cooties. Oh lord, the high waistlines, the poofy bangs, the headbands, the white Keds, the wedgies, the goofy teeth, the flat butt, the spandex, the sweater vests, the puffy paint and glitter, the drawl, the bark laugh, the stupid jokes. Yikes.

Why my parents weren't constantly smacking me around for being an ass, I'll never know.

Update, 12:46 a.m.



You have not lived until you have seen my mother and me cover "I Saw The Light" -- that wholesome ditty about adultery by Wynonna Judd -- in our matching white T-shirts crowned with hot pink bandannas, bejeweling, and fringe. And matching white Keds.

Have. Not. Lived.

Memory Monday

I swear, I make it through my digital clutter at an even slower pace than my physical clutter.

Here's a (silent) video I found of Felix and Gonzo playing back in the spring of 2005. Gonzo's been gone nearly a year now, believe it or not.



Man, oh man, I miss him a lot.

Havenwood

I'm clicking through digital pictures taken back in '03/'04 or so, preparing to burn them to discs and get them off my hard drive. There are lots of pics of ferrets, lots of funny gas-station shots Phil took at Daily's, and lots of pics of The Kids working and boozin' it up. I rocked the gold eye shadow back then pretty much every day.

Those were good times.

Blasts from the past

Some radio station I stumbled upon today was rocking out the '90s music. What caught my attention was that Silverchair song that was so popular back in '95. I sat and listened to it and remembered singing along with it back in high school, and how'd I'd sketch the word "Silverchair" in the Frogstomp typeface on all my folders in school, along with the logos of the countless other bands I listened to at the time (The Toadies, Bush, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Drill*, The Cranberries, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, Hole, Collective Soul, the list goes on and on). Man, I loved Silverchair. And just the other day I saw their new video on VH1 or whichever cable music channel occasionally plays videos. And at first I thought it was The Killers, because the lead singer had short hair and was wearing a vest with no shirt. It was a very confusing moment when I found out who the song was by. My, how much we've all changed.

I also got to hear some 311 while driving on my lunch break. Man, that was a band I pretended to like big time, but, boy do they ever suck. Their logo was fun to draw, but their music was an aural abomination (my apologies to the three remaining 311 fans out there).

The radio also tossed some old-school Green Day (remember when they're weren't so damned ubiquitous?), Nirvana, Tool, Soundgarden, Marilyn Manson, and Primus my way. It was like being in a time machine. It was awesome and cringe-inducing. (Full disclosure: I still listen to Tool and Nirvana on occasion.)

In another ten years, I'm sure I'll feel the same way about the music I listen to now. The cycle continues, the Earth still turns, the tides still roll, all is well with the world if we can take a mulligan every ten years re: the music we listened to in the previous decade.

I had a revelation while driving home from work tonight, after I changed the station and caught some station in the middle of a Led Zeppelin song: I don't listen to nearly enough Zeppelin. Lucky for me, iTunes is finally offering their albums, so I can sit here and remedy that right quicklike.

* Does anyone else remember this band? I first got into them because they had a song that was in "Empire Records." And I want to say they were also on an X-Games soundtrack, back when those were all the rage. They don't seem to offer their music on iTunes, although there is a video for "Go to Hell" for sale. Oh, man, it is the most generic scream-grunge crap ever, and I LOVED IT. This is why I maintain that I have questionable taste in damn near everything. Check out the video here, and try not to laugh. I dare you.

Prep

I'm about to go wash up a bunch of berries and peel a couple of pomegranates in preparation for tomorrow. I don't have any big serving trays, though; it's probably best to just cart everything — washed and cut — to the parents' and then commandeer some of their many stray serving platters.

I was thinking today about a memory I have of a Thanksgiving Day back when I was, gosh, I had to be 11 or 12 — right at that age when you're still into pretending but you're starting to grow out of it bit by bit and there's a growing resentment at having to sit at the kids' table. I remember the weather was not quite bitterly cold yet, but it was overcast and windy and quite chilly. I was wearing a sweater striped horizontally with yellow, blue, orange, and green, with matching red stretchpants and a red headband. And, more than likely, white Keds. (At least, that's what I'm wearing in this memory; there's no telling if that's true. But the rest of the memory definitely is.)

My cousin, brother and I spent the afternoon outside on my parents' deck, pretending that it was a giant ship. I was the captain. The waters were choppy and I kept having to keep orders to my crew to keep us afloat.

Inside, the women cooked and cleaned and the men sat in the den, flipping through channels and watching football.

That's one of the few Thanksgivings I can really remember, a memory so bright and clear that it's hard to believe it's as old as it is. I'm not really sure why it has stuck with me the way it did.

Whiff

Just now I was cleaning off my incredibly filthy balcony — scraping up the moldy, dripping remains of the pumpkins, repotting the mum I bought, cleaning up dirt I flung everywhere while repotting, scraping the dead roots out of all the other pots, etc. — and I got a whiff of a smell that nearly knocked me down.

It was of my Nana's trailer, her last one — the blue one — that, even when it was new, smelled of ancient nicotine pressure cooked into every absorbent surface, cheaply made plastic trailer doorknobs and ceiling tiles, dusty mauve carpet so thin paths were worn from room to room, and yellowing linoleum pock-marked with cigarette burns...

Raisins

I have this memory of seeing my great-grandmother — or someone — put a whole bunch of raisins in a big bowl of water, and of watching as the dried fruit plumped up, and then seeing all these tiny little worms detach from the dimples and crevices in the raisins and rise to the surface — a skin of tiny little worms on top of the water in the bowl. Worms you couldn't see just by looking.

I have no idea if that is a real memory or a dream or a daydream or what. But I've had it for as long as I can remember, and it put me off raisins for a long, long time. And to this day, every time I open up one of those little red boxes and pour myself a handful, I think about those worms.

Day 39 — Granny's stuff

My great-grandmother, for as long as I knew her, was a small woman: frail, with a humpback, who we always assumed went to great pains to keep her hair dyed a velvety almond brown. She would go every week at the same time — Saturday morning, if I recall — and sit beneath one of those mammoth dryers at the beauty shop on Main Street in Saltillo, for as long as it took to get her hair perfectly round and airy. It wasn't until she became too ill to live alone and take care of herself that we realized, after no one had done much more than comb and style her hair for weeks, that the woman barely had a grey hair on her head.

And that was the way with my great-grandmother; there was always more about her that I didn't know than I did. From the way my family talks about her, it seems like she was a completely different person before I was born than she was after. My father speaks of the awful things she would do and say — and truly some of them are downright evil — and I just can't imagine my Granny — my small, frail, shaky, cackling Granny — acting like that.

My sister loves to tell the story of the time Granny got so mad at Krissie's pet rooster that she chased it around the yard and whacked its head off. Then she chopped off one of its feet and put it in a small white box on top of a layer of cotton and brought it back to prove to Krissie what she'd done. My sister kept that foot for a long time. I remember looking at it in that same white box and wondering what a rooster could do to make someone so mad.

During my lifetime, Granny's meanness was, as far as I can tell, tempered somewhat by the steady breakdown of her body. I look at pictures of her in her younger days, when her only son was meeting my grandmother and preparing to marry, and it's amazing how solid she was: tall and thick, and muscular like a farm wife has to be when she's carrying slop to the hogs and spending hours with her arms in the air, pinning wet sheets to cables strung up in the back yard. But as she topped 70, 80, and 90, she shrank in stature and I watched as her skin began to droop and sag and nearly drip off her bones. It became soft and easy to bruise, like the skin of a finicky banana. It showed the marks of a hundred accidental bumps and nicks.

And no matter how crooked and gnarled her hands became, she always kept her fingernails — which were long and impeccably filed — painted mauve.

On my way to my parents' the other day, I passed by her old house, which has sat vacant pretty much since her death, and noticed my dad's car in the driveway. I turned around and went back to see what he was up to there.

He was inside, changing out some light bulbs. I looked around at what was left of the place — an old Zenith floor unit TV, a stack of gilded-frame mirrors and landscape prints, boxes of fabric patterns and clothes, some dishes and glassware, and some random papers — and noticed that, since the last time I'd been in there, they'd managed to condense everything that was left into the living room. We're getting ready to put the house on the market. Part of me wants to just move in and clean it up and keep it in the family. I've got lots of memories in that house: Toasting grilled cheeses in the toaster oven, trimming the hedges for piddly amounts of money, peeking into the cedar chest and taking big whiffs of the woody scent, pilfering through the secret compartment of Granny's jewelry box and trying on her clip-on earrings, watching Wheel of Fortune, greeting trick-or-treaters at her front door.

On the floor was a dark-brown fedora. My great-grandfather's. He used to wear those and carry a cane, and I have these memories of my brother, when he was a baby, wearing the hat and carting the cane around, to the great amusement of Grandaddy. He died not long after those memories were imprinted.

Granny never got over him. I would sit with her on trips home from college and she would talk about how much she missed him.

What heartache is left in that house.

So I decided to take some with me. Not heartache, per se, but little pieces to remind me of that house and the people who lived in it, who I never really even got the chance to meet.

Project 365