For your Halloween listening pleasure, enjoy this parody of piety.
(Link)
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Friday, October 30, 2009
On Trick-Or-Treating
October 31 has never been much more than just another day for me. My formative years found me more likely to overdose on "meat and three" rather than staying up until the witching hour to unwrap all of my neighbors' cast-off candies. Besides that, my grandad owned a country store where I was more than welcome to take all of the Butterfingers that I could handle, so I became numb to the lure of chocolate bars.
Growing up in rural NC, the trick-or-treatees were few and far between. The concept of a subdivision hadn't caught on, so the only neighbors I could beg candy from were my grandmother and great-grandparents next door, my great-aunt next door to them, and Mr. Langston. Mr. Langston lived in a white house across the field behind my great-grandparents' house. He died when I was fairly young, so I only have a few (four) vague memories of Mr. Langston: 1) he always smoked a pipe 2) on a wall in his old photography studio was some sort of certificate from a rotary organization or civic club that had a topless mermaid on it 3) he gave me my first pet, a turtle I named Herman and 4) he had a reputation for poisoning dogs that crossed his property line, so to this day my dad suspects that Mr. Langston gave one of our dogs an anti-freeze cocktail.
I don't remember actually committing to the act of trick-or-treating more than a handful of times. In the early 80's, my sister and I must've had zero imagination because we chose, for two years running, to go trick-or-treating as ghosts. And don't think that we were dressed up in some sort of creative ghostly garb, because we weren't. We wore sheets. Two straight years, we each wore a sheet with crudely-cut eyeholes.
After running the ghost gig into the ground, I broke out and became a hobo the following year. Hobo attire included overalls, a hat, and of course the hobo's obligatory bindle stick. Everyone knows that all of a hobo's worldly possessions will tie up neatly on a bindle stick. If it weren't for said stick, I would have merely been wearing overalls and a hat - not a costume.
And finally, on October 31, 1987, I saw my last foray into trick-or-treating. My friend Chris and I went in tandem as the Road Warriors. If you're not cultured enough to be familiar with the Road Warriors, they were the hottest tag team in the National Wrestling Alliance in the late 80's. Chris was Hawk, and I was Animal. In real life, the Warriors were easily discernible in that Animal was the one that didn't inject himself with monkey hormones.
This was the one Halloween where I wanted to play the part spot on. I studied the face paint on Animal to get it just right, and got into an argument with my mom over how I should wear my hair. Animal had a mohawk, but my mom was a haircut nazi, and a mohawk wasn't gonna happen. I wanted to spike it to give it a quasi-mohawk effect. She wanted to comb it straight back since Animal's hair was cut short. I am still passionate in my argument that I was right, and the mohawk would've been the better choice. Also memorable about this Halloween is the fact that it was also going to be the year that I broke out of my three-house Halloween rut. Chris's dad, Don, was going to drive us down Main Street in Mocksville, then through Mock Place, an apartment complex for low-income seniors.
I remember a few stops in Mock Place in particular. There was an elderly woman who invited us inside, and we saw that she was watching G.L.O.W., the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. We thought she was an angel. Then, we went to the next apartment, and some unfortunate, unsuspecting tenant decided not to answer the door. Bad move. After we spit all over the doorstep, we ran back to the car, where Don assured us that we had made exactly the right decision, "That's what you're supposed to do! If they don't treat you, trick 'em." Later, we stopped at a brick house on Main Street where we rang the doorbell over...and over...and over. An old lady finally made her way to the door and said, "Stop ringing the doorbell! It gives my dog seizures!" So after making off with her candy, you know what I had to do, right? Yes, it comes full circle. Mr. Langston poisoned dogs, and I doorbelled them to death.
Growing up in rural NC, the trick-or-treatees were few and far between. The concept of a subdivision hadn't caught on, so the only neighbors I could beg candy from were my grandmother and great-grandparents next door, my great-aunt next door to them, and Mr. Langston. Mr. Langston lived in a white house across the field behind my great-grandparents' house. He died when I was fairly young, so I only have a few (four) vague memories of Mr. Langston: 1) he always smoked a pipe 2) on a wall in his old photography studio was some sort of certificate from a rotary organization or civic club that had a topless mermaid on it 3) he gave me my first pet, a turtle I named Herman and 4) he had a reputation for poisoning dogs that crossed his property line, so to this day my dad suspects that Mr. Langston gave one of our dogs an anti-freeze cocktail.
I don't remember actually committing to the act of trick-or-treating more than a handful of times. In the early 80's, my sister and I must've had zero imagination because we chose, for two years running, to go trick-or-treating as ghosts. And don't think that we were dressed up in some sort of creative ghostly garb, because we weren't. We wore sheets. Two straight years, we each wore a sheet with crudely-cut eyeholes.
After running the ghost gig into the ground, I broke out and became a hobo the following year. Hobo attire included overalls, a hat, and of course the hobo's obligatory bindle stick. Everyone knows that all of a hobo's worldly possessions will tie up neatly on a bindle stick. If it weren't for said stick, I would have merely been wearing overalls and a hat - not a costume.
And finally, on October 31, 1987, I saw my last foray into trick-or-treating. My friend Chris and I went in tandem as the Road Warriors. If you're not cultured enough to be familiar with the Road Warriors, they were the hottest tag team in the National Wrestling Alliance in the late 80's. Chris was Hawk, and I was Animal. In real life, the Warriors were easily discernible in that Animal was the one that didn't inject himself with monkey hormones.
This was the one Halloween where I wanted to play the part spot on. I studied the face paint on Animal to get it just right, and got into an argument with my mom over how I should wear my hair. Animal had a mohawk, but my mom was a haircut nazi, and a mohawk wasn't gonna happen. I wanted to spike it to give it a quasi-mohawk effect. She wanted to comb it straight back since Animal's hair was cut short. I am still passionate in my argument that I was right, and the mohawk would've been the better choice. Also memorable about this Halloween is the fact that it was also going to be the year that I broke out of my three-house Halloween rut. Chris's dad, Don, was going to drive us down Main Street in Mocksville, then through Mock Place, an apartment complex for low-income seniors.
I remember a few stops in Mock Place in particular. There was an elderly woman who invited us inside, and we saw that she was watching G.L.O.W., the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. We thought she was an angel. Then, we went to the next apartment, and some unfortunate, unsuspecting tenant decided not to answer the door. Bad move. After we spit all over the doorstep, we ran back to the car, where Don assured us that we had made exactly the right decision, "That's what you're supposed to do! If they don't treat you, trick 'em." Later, we stopped at a brick house on Main Street where we rang the doorbell over...and over...and over. An old lady finally made her way to the door and said, "Stop ringing the doorbell! It gives my dog seizures!" So after making off with her candy, you know what I had to do, right? Yes, it comes full circle. Mr. Langston poisoned dogs, and I doorbelled them to death.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Friday, October 9, 2009
The Great Pumpkin Debate
Me and pumpkins go way back. I mastered gluttony early on in life and dabbled in songwriting for a while when I was 7 years old. My mom still has one of my lyrical gems tucked away in a drawer somewhere--go ahead, ask her... she'll show you. Though it's a song about my dad, one of the masterful lyrics I had written was "why, oh why, do I eat pumpkin pie?" (That's clearly the kind of socially relevant song writing that solidified the legacy of the likes of Bob Dylan several decades prior.)
As I grew older and became a corporate cog in the produce wheel of Lowes Foods, I also spent a great deal of time stealing pumpkin pies from the deli (seasonally, of course) and polishing them off behind the swinging doors of the employees-only produce storage room. Why all the pumpkin history? To let you know that I haven't merely jumped on the pumpkin bandwagon in my later years. No, Friends, I started young on this journey, and now I'm simply a grown man in search of my next pumpkin high.
Coincidentally, the obligatory seasonal adult beverage these days seems to be the pumpkin ale. There are no fewer than ten available to me locally, and they're pushing the "Oktoberfest" brews further back on the shelf each fall. First, let's understand that anything infused with pumpkin probably shouldn't be appealing. It is technically a squash, after all, and I doubt that anyone is waiting for the leaves to turn so they can make a bee line to the store for a microbrew with a light gourd finish. I'll spare the technicalities here and assume that we can all agree that the appeal of a pumpkin beer lies primarily in the spice.
As I grew older and became a corporate cog in the produce wheel of Lowes Foods, I also spent a great deal of time stealing pumpkin pies from the deli (seasonally, of course) and polishing them off behind the swinging doors of the employees-only produce storage room. Why all the pumpkin history? To let you know that I haven't merely jumped on the pumpkin bandwagon in my later years. No, Friends, I started young on this journey, and now I'm simply a grown man in search of my next pumpkin high.
Coincidentally, the obligatory seasonal adult beverage these days seems to be the pumpkin ale. There are no fewer than ten available to me locally, and they're pushing the "Oktoberfest" brews further back on the shelf each fall. First, let's understand that anything infused with pumpkin probably shouldn't be appealing. It is technically a squash, after all, and I doubt that anyone is waiting for the leaves to turn so they can make a bee line to the store for a microbrew with a light gourd finish. I'll spare the technicalities here and assume that we can all agree that the appeal of a pumpkin beer lies primarily in the spice.
My mission for several years has been to find the perfect pumpkin beer. This year's offering is vast enough that I feel like it warrants some due diligence. Which one will most please a fat man who was once a fat kid who wrote shitty poems about pumpkin pie? The nominees are:
For sobriety's sake, I tested no more than a double shot of each beer (although all were finished off later). In an effort to maintain impartiality, I asked my wife to serve as an alternate juror / blinded taster.
Surprisingly, we rated the beers almost exactly alike, so the letter grades below represent our mutual assessment. And the winner is...
So there you have it, Folks. I feel like I've done my fellow man a great service. If only one regular Joe can be persuaded to bypass the Smuttynose for a Buffalo Bill's pumpkin ale, then my work here is done. Enjoy.
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