View From The Muddle

I've been searching my mind for some adventures to post; maybe about the night of the Thumposaurus people throwing chicken bones on the hood of a Pontiac Sunfire, or the time some punk in a Volkswagen Beetle tried to punch out DD's lights. How about the night where Ralston showed some dudes in Nashvegas that you shouldn't threaten him with a lead pipe. Maybe I could write about those days when Bruno and I used to sneak whiskey into the movies and be staggering by the time the credits rolled. I once got kicked out of E.T. for smoking and just generalized mischief like hollering at the people who told us to put out the cigarettes. I was all of 14 and now I can't even stand to be in the same room where a cigarette is being smoked. I stll jones for it, but the stank is too much. This then free associates into , "Hey didn't that E.T. Atari game really bite."

More adventures snippets: climbing the fire tower on Tiger Hill outside of Murfreesboro and watching the sunrise from its perch which would sway with a good wind, descending into Snail Shell Cave with one flashlight and a six pack of fruit coolers for provisions, journeying to Chapel Hill at midnight to try and catch a glimpse of the light - the only lights we ever saw were atop the county cops coming to run us off, and there was the time my cousin Freddy and I hitched a ride with the freak, as opposed to frat, who had caught his hand in a meat grinder when he was a kid; I had been terrified of the guy ever since I saw him sucker punch C.L. one afternoon on the Smyrna football field. C.L. was a football player who was fighting this freak named Pickel, over what I don't know. A huge crowd gathered to watch and C.L. was winning. He had Pickel on the ground when meat grinder hand leaped into the fray. The the high school teachers ran us off, but meat grinder and his cronies caught up with C.L. down the street and broke his ribs by repeatedly hitting him with a 2 x 4.

Luckily I've never been in a 2 x 4 fight. I did grab a bat and chase my cousins around the yard once. I had bumped my head on a swinset and they had laughed at me. I was disappointed when my parents took the bat away from me. These were the same cousins that liked to call me names, threaten to throw me out of the boat when we fished on a pond, and pummel with their fists everytime the adults weren't looking. I suspect now that they liked watching me go kamikaze on them, They'd push me to the edge where I would promptly drop off screaming and punching everything which made me look like the bully when the parents decided to investigate the yelling.

Now I'm yelling at myself that I've moved beyond adventure remembrance and landed straight into the psychological minefield that used to be my youth. I don't know if I want to delve back too far these days. I've entered a rationalistic era of thinking with the present on overwrite. Symbols and all the potent imagery I once considered the truth are falling away. For example: I was flipping through the few channels of television I watch when I caught some The History Of Rock And Roll last night. It was the "guitar hero" episode and while I dug the music as always I found myself gagging on the "guitar represents freedom" spiel of Steely Dan and session player "Skunk" Baxter. No, I thought, a guitar represents a guitar. Nothing more; it's just something that some people like James Burton play exceptionally well and others like me play very poorly. I'm sure I believed this "freedom" rhetoric when this documentary first aired around ten years ago. I also once thought the line "hold on to 16 as long as you can" was brilliant and look at what a goon Mellencamp has become. Which is the most scary thing. That I'm turning into some boring old goon who wouldn't think of having an adventure now. So, bare with my angst. It's just the view from the middle for me is all muddled.