ZOMBIES

My Favorite Toys From Back in the Day:

Rat Fink Hydroracer: You would fill the toxic waste tank with water then attach it to the Gokart with the giant Fat Man-esque bomb on the back. Pump it up and it would fly across the rug, soaking it thoroughly. Sorry Mom.

Winston Zeddemore: Would change colors I think. Colors were sooooo bad-ass.

Ninja Turtles Tank: Shot Pizza's at a clip of 5 every 10 seconds. Nailed grandma right in the butt with this one. Merry Christmas.

Crash Dummies: Tasteless fun. I had the mower, motorcycle, Piston Head and Bull. I remember someone told me they got all their crash dummies taken into the attic when their grandma went through the windshield of their car. Awkward Mattel...

Stolen Space Vampire

O.K. New York Public library, if you want my 1987 copy of Space Vampire, come and get it. Through careful, well thought out deduction, cunning wit and dashing good looks, my 8-year-old self weaved through a spaceship where invincible vampires ruled the roost. Admittedly, I glanced through the pages to see which was the wrong choice here and there, but for being a fresh face cadet with everything to prove, I think I chose my own adventure pretty adeptly. My family moved out of the city before I ever had a chance to return the book, an act that my young self half-feared and half-reveled in. Today, it sits on my book shelf as a testament to a few things:

* My passion for Choose Your Own Adventure Books
* My passion for space
* My passion for vampires
* My passion for space vampires
* How, despite myself, I really loved going to that huge library as a kid, passing those giant stone lions and picking out the cheesiest adventure novels I could get my hands on.

In all honesty, this series which started in the 1970's is pretty awesome. Any series which could have over 75 different titles such as "Rock and Roll Mystery," "Volcano!," and "The Antimatter Formula," AND make it so you could choose your own ending has to be good. Despite plot holes the size of death valley, nonsensical dead ends, and cliches so tired their practically in a coma, these books were exactly what got me into reading. That and the sweet cover art.

I can only imagine what the overdue fee on this book is, and how through the Patriot Act they might find this post and track me down. Well come and get it Bloomburg, I'm feeling lucky.

Love is a Bleached T-Shirt

The gray tee
with the dull peach splotch on the right shoulder
Where until four o'clock in the morning
we'd sit and watch Law and Order reruns
and you'd lay your Proactiv face on my shoulder
You'd grumble when I told you to take out your contacts before you went to sleep.
That t-shirt is love.

Clocked Out

On Dark Roasted Blend they have an article on astronomical clocks. One has a gear which would take 20,000 years to rotate once. Others are huge, color-laden monuments which are still awed upon despite the advent of wristwatches. You can also see the remnants of The Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek clock between 150 and 100 B.C. Mostly, these things just look incredible and make me feel like I'm in a sequel to Myst. Ironically, it's time-keeping devices like these which can make you feel a real connection to antiquity.

On Minds and Eyes

In the theater of war, sometimes it's Broadway and sometimes it's that smoking little black box theater near the docks. In this article, the Joint Chiefs are recommending an immediate shift from Iraq to Afghanistan. On March 19th, 2003 we went to war with Iraq, under the false notion of WMD's. Ok, recap finished. War's one of those funny things. Not "Alway's Sunny..." funny, either. It's so big and so horrible and has so many people and facets and suits and shiny things that it begins to have the attributes of a circus. Generals with whips, giant elephants tanks, trapeze bunker busters falling gracefully in the rafters. And it's impossible to watch it all. At a certain point you begin to take it all for granted. Then you see something like this. (WARNING, this is a pretty graphic image.) Images like this are graphic enough from your desk. Imagine being there, breathing in the taste of smoke and watching people run into houses and under things for cover. It's amazing to me how we are a species endowed with the desire to be near each other, yet mostly devoid of the ability to feel empathy for those outside of our immediate sight. I've been pretty pessimistic lately, despite gains in certain aspects of government policy and attitudes which have shifted (for now). Who knows if we ever really learn lessons. We see pain, yet it's easy to be so complacent that we forget how much agony war truly brings. How much of that is happening right now? As soon as we start separating each other, we begin to lose the ability to empathize with others. I think it's just important to be reminded of the actual physical carnage of war. No one really wants to see it, but usually after the immediate shock wanes, what's left is a sense of urgency, concern, and hopefully some sense of human morality. The out of sight out of mind credo just doesn't cut it anymore.

Where To Go?

Take a look at this.
- Small scale Hooverville's in California and New York.
- I remember visiting a homeless shelter last fall here in Newburgh, NY and talking to the director. He mentioned how even that summer the shelters were filling up to capacity like he had never seen before.
- The other day I was hanging out with some friends in the City of Newburgh and a guy named Cartier rolled up on a bike. He said someone had thrown it out and he fixed it up. Cartier had recently been released from upstate prison on attempted murder charges. He said he applied to 10 different jobs now that he was out but nobody wants to hire a felon. He was living under the Newburgh Beacon Bridge.
I don't really know how to connect these events, and I won't try to pass judgment. But it seems like there's something to all this, isn't there? Some silent thing which we can all see but which stays silent and moves gradually like a glacier; under the rug?