The Weekly Essay

Source: Wikipedia

I was out on my lunch break and saw a scary looking swarm of dark bugs buzzing around a patch of grass, so of course I headed right for it. I’d seen swarms like this before, starting when I was a kid and staying at my grandparents’ house one summer day, and there was a dark cloud of buzzing bugs around the bushes of one of their neighbor’s houses. My grandmother was terrified and told me to stay away from them because there was no way we could tell what they were, so of course when she wasn’t looking I went over for a closer look. My grandmother saw lurking death in everything: grass that was too tall could hide spiders and snakes, grass that was too short could make the ground dangerously hard, being outside too long on a summer day I could get pneumonia, being inside too long I could get rickets from vitamin D deficiency, and she carefully went through every piece of watermelon out of a fear that the seeds might sprout in my stomach and grow out of my nose. And the bugs in that scary looking swarm turned out to be June bugs which I still love because they’re completely harmless and just big goofy bumblers. As a kid who studied bugs of all types I knew most beetles to be, in spite of their heavily armored backs, kind of timid. Most preferred to hide under logs and rocks or in basements; they’d retract their antennae and back away from any movement, any light. Not June bugs. You find June bugs right out in the open, happily buzzing or bumbling around with their antennae up and spread wide like radar dishes, broadcasting to the world HEY, WHAT’S UP? I’M GONNA CLIMB UP YOUR LEG AND FALL OVER AND THEN FLY INTO A BRICK WALL FOR NO REASON. They’re big and really attractive beetles, with mottled green and yellow backs and their undersides are metallic green or gold. I caught some and took them to my grandfather who showed me how you can tie a string to a June bug’s leg and it will buzz around like a tiny weird balloon or maybe yank really hard and leave you with a string with a prickly beetle leg tied to it.
The next summer I was old enough to stay at home by myself and there was a time when my friends in the neighborhood had either moved away or were away so I had a lot of time to myself. I found a swarm of June bugs and it was fun at first just watching them, catching one and examining its shiny underside before letting it go, but then I started to perform what I called experiments but which even then I knew were really sadistic tortures.
Anyone who knows me know this story has a happy ending, for me, anyway, although not for some of the June bugs. I didn’t grow up to be a serial killer or for that matter a criminal of any kind. I’m not a vegan but I probably would be if I couldn’t get meat so neatly sliced and packaged it no longer looks like any animal and while I will hurt a fly I only do it if the fly is in the house and I feel guilty about it and I occasionally cause my wife some consternation when I catch a spider so I can release it outside even though I try to explain to her that it’s a member of the Lycosa genus and therefore completely harmless. So this story is not as dark as it could be, or rather it’s not a prequel to something much grimmer, but it still makes me uncomfortable that I put June bugs in glass jars with cotton balls soaked in alcohol and then pinned them to a piece of styrofoam, and then I started to put them in plastic bags and put them in the freezer then revive them in the hot air that blew from the air conditioner in the back of the house. The stove in the kitchen had those black spiral burners and I’d turn one on, crank it up until it glowed orange, and press a June bug’s back against the metal. At worst I was risking a burned finger but for the June bug this was always fatal.
As I consider this heavily loaded words like “normal” and “healthy” come to mind. I wonder how many others have done the same sorts of things, but most who did, understandably, don’t want to talk about it. Even then I felt guilty about what I was doing, wondered why I was doing it to such inoffensive creatures that don’t bite or sting or even get served up neatly sliced and packaged. And I’d already stopped when I went out one morning and walked around feeling like my head was wrapped in invisible cotton, and aching in my arms and legs. I went back inside and went to bed and woke up with a fever of a hundred degrees, and the only thing more miserable than missing precious summer days because of illness is having a body temperature that matches what’s outside. And I was too weak to cross the room and get rid of the styrofoam board of neatly mounted June bugs.
I’m resisting the temptation to try and draw some bigger conclusions from this, or to turn the June bugs into a metaphor. Some people might say, hey, they’re just bugs, and maybe this is a common, or at least not rare, phase kids go through, but I also don’t want to offer up any excuses. What I really want when I walk through a swarm of June bugs, when they crawl up my leg and fall off or fly away and bumble into things is to be like them, oblivious to any threats, or maybe they’re really the smart ones who know there is no lurking death.

Read Part 1 here.

When we got to Dale’s house my parents let me out while they went to park the car. As I was trying to cross the driveway unnoticed a tall blonde girl spotted me and said, “What is HE doing here?” There were only a few kids outside and they ignored her and me. I went into the house to try and find a secluded perch.
Dale was somewhere in the party, moving around with an entourage. I didn’t try to talk to him, just tried to stay out of everyone’s way. There was no place to sit, no place I could disappear to. It seemed like the only kids from school who weren’t at Dale’s house were ones I’d want to talk to. I hadn’t eaten because of nerves and the belief that there’d be food at the party, and there was food in the kitchen, but the entire football, basketball, baseball, soccer, and golf teams were between me and it. That was a grand total of just nine guys—small school–but the kitchen was crowded and they were hungry and there was still no way I could grab a sandwich without losing a hand. Eventually they moved on to the den to graze on cheerleaders. I sat down next to a basket of tortilla chips and a fondue pot of cheese dip. A guy with a mullet and a wispy moustache sat down and slapped me on the back. “You like nachos?” he yelled, then pointed at me. “Hey, dude’s all right! Dude likes nachos!” And I thought, hey, if this is all it takes to fit in I could have done it years ago.
I couldn’t eat nachos forever–well, I could, but the athletic department was working its way back–so I drifted off to a spot on the stairs where I stayed until Dale’s stepmother, who was nice and always seemed to zero in on me with some idea for getting me “involved”, asked if I’d go upstairs and choose some music. In Dale’s room there was a setup with a turntable and speakers that leaned out the window toward the patio below. I played some of Rush’s 2112, “Burning Down The House”, then switched to “Mr. Roboto”, really digging being a DJ. During the long version of “The Safety Dance” I dug through Dale’s milk crate full of vinyl and found an old recording of “The Hokey Pokey”. I thought that would be fun in an ironic way and danced happily by myself until a guy with a mullet and a wispy moustache, not Nacho Man but a different one, told me to get out.
For a long time I sat at a picnic table in the backyard sipping Kool-Aid. While the evening darkened and the multi-colored party lights strung around the patio grew brighter I watched couples who’d been blocked from the bedrooms disappear behind the toolshed at the back of the yard.
A pretty girl who ignored me at school sat down and said hi to me.
“Have you seen Stevie Wonder’s new car?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Neither has he.”
She laughed and put out her hand then slapped the table between us.
“You’re a smart guy. Maybe you can help me. I took my mom’s boyfriend’s car out the other night, you know? Anyway I dented the the right front fender and my mom’s boyfriend is gonna kick my ass when he finds out. What should I do?”
I didn’t even know where to begin since “Why were you driving your mother’s boyfriend’s car when you haven’t even even got a learner’s permit?” seemed like a bad way to start. Besides, I thought, we all make mistakes, we all do things we wish we could take back. It wasn’t advice, but that didn’t matter. Horns were honking in the driveway and parents were coming out to point and snap their fingers. The party was ending.
That summer there was a growing schism in the church with my parents on one side, Dale’s father on the other, and most of their mutual friends uninterested in taking sides.  The big gatherings where our parents got together and that had been, for most of our lives, the times when Dale and I would get together, stopped happening. And even when our parents did get together we were both getting too old to tag along.
Most Sundays Dale brought some new friends he’d made in his new neighborhood, or occasionally Keith, to church with him. I was never invited to join these groups. Neither of us played soccer anymore, he’d dropped out of the Scouts, and I’d lost interest in the church youth group. When we passed we rarely said more than “Hey” to each other. In the fall, even though we went to the same high school, it was a much bigger school, and we rarely saw each other, and moved in different circles, although his circles were so much bigger. I was still so awkward, an outsider, alone most of the time, although I’d gotten good at blending in, wearing jeans and an Oxford cloth shirt. Sometimes Dale would walk by me in the hall and not even see me. One night a month into our freshman year my parents went to Dale’s house and I went along. Dale was alone in his room and for several awkward minutes I was alone with him. Then for some reason I started to spill about my latest obsession, interstellar travel, and how much I wanted to get off this planet. I rambled about wormholes and warping space, and I thought I sounded like the biggest dork in the universe, but I couldn’t shut up which made it even worse. Dale didn’t say anything until I finished and flopped into the beanbag chair.
“If you find a way,” he said, “take me with you.” It was a simple, quiet request, and I thought, what problems does Dale have that he wants to escape? And I thought, how could we possibly have this in common? Neither of us said anything after that. It wasn’t awkward, just the airless silence of two people who have nothing to say.
Dale and I would never be alone again after that. My parents left the church and a lot of their friends. Dale and I, I thought, who had so little in common, were only friends because circumstances forced us together. When those dissolved so did the friendship, but after years of feeling I was being pushed away there was that moment when Dale admitted he didn’t want to let go. At school I found friends, friends who were more like me, friends I chose. And yet I realized that you never really replace friends you’ve lost; new ones will never quite fill the void the old ones left.

This story doesn’t have a clear ending. If I could go back, if I could do it over, would I give it one? Would I do something differently, would I do everything differently? Maybe this is the ending it needs, to fray in different directions that will trace out their own paths, like people leaving a party.

“You’re coming to my party, Chris.”

It wasn’t a request. For Dale it was simply a statement of fact, made while we were sitting in his bedroom. Actually he was half lying on his bed and I was sunk into the beanbag chair next to the stereo. He was throwing a party to mark the end of our eighth grade year, the end of junior high, the end of our time at MacMurray school, and he’d decided I was coming. I wasn’t so sure. The one thing I was sure of that Dale and I had been growing apart for years even though Dale had been one of my oldest friends. Our parents went to the same church, our mothers were close friends, and our birthdays were only a few months apart, so of course we bonded. We grew up together. At Dale’s tenth birthday party, the same one where I broke my front tooth but that’s another story, I tried nachos for the first time, although back then our idea of “nachos” was a corn chip with a slice of pasteurized processed cheese and a little bit of onion. Dale and I went to summer camp together. When we weren’t at camp we spent a lot of days walking to the video game arcade. That was when Dale lived near enough that we could walk to each others’ houses, which only lasted a couple of years. His family moved at least three times, but when he lived farther away we still saw each other at least three times a week. Our parents got together most Friday or Saturday nights. There was also church and its youth group, and we joined the Scouts together. We played on the same soccer team for three years. He was team captain and lead goal scorer and I was, well, there. Even though Dale loved horror films and I hated them—they’ve since grown on me—so we watched horror films. And Dale convinced me to sneak out late at night, which wasn’t hard because I wasn’t going to get a lot of sleep after watching The Beast Within, and we ran around the neighborhood filling mailboxes with shaving cream. And I’ve never forgotten the day we were home alone and decided to kill time making prank calls, asking people if their refrigerators were running. Then Dale dialed a random number and asked to speak to Jim. “This is Jim,” the guy on the other end of the line replied. Dale started laughing and looked at me and mouthed Oh shit. “Hang up!” I hissed. Dale said, “Hey Jim, it’s Dale, how’s it going?”

“Dale who?”

“Aw, come on, you know, it’s me. How’ve you been?”

Jim paused and then carefully said, “Well, all right, I guess, how about you?”

And the conversation went on for about fifteen minutes with Dale reminiscing about how they went fishing and their trip to Chattanooga and Jim trying to remember whether he’d ever been to Chattanooga.

During the summer between fifth and sixth grade Dale’s mother had to go into the hospital. Cancer, which she’d been dealing with for years, had come back and was much worse. Dale came and stayed with us. At first I was excited about this; to me it was like an extended sleepover. I didn’t think about what Dale was going through, and it frustrated me that he wanted to spend hours on the phone with Keith, another friend of his who lived next door to him. Keith was an athlete and a football fan, like Dale. It didn’t occur to me that, given the emotional stress of his mother’s illness, Dale would rather be at home.

When she got worse he did go home. When she died he and I didn’t talk about it, not until his next birthday when I was one of a half dozen guys he invited for a sleepover. We had pizza and watched movies and played games, then, late, things got quiet and one of the other kids asked Dale if he missed his mother. He talked quietly about how hard it had been, how the last time he talked to her she was unconscious, that the last thing he’d said was “I love you.”

I didn’t say anything but just listened, deeply aware that Dale, a few months younger than me, was years older.

As we went into sixth, seventh, and eighth grade we saw less of each other. Dale dropped out of the Scouts and his father moved the family to another part of town. There was also a growing schism in the church and his father was on one side while my parents were on the other. There were still occasional get-togethers but it had all changed. Dale and I went to the same school but we were in separate classes and moved in different circles. Most days he wore the usual cool kids’ uniform of a pale blue or white Oxford shirt and jeans. Most days I wore plaid shirts and corduroy slacks, the usual uniform of a kid who wants his ass kicked. When Dale and I were together we had less to talk about. Mostly he tried to convince me I should get my hair feathered and listen to Journey, and I was more interested in reruns of Star Trek.

When he invited me to his farewell to junior high party—not that it had a name or a theme because it was too cool to be anything but a party—I assumed it was out of pity, or maybe just habit for him. None of my other friends from school were invited but a lot of kids I didn’t like were. So I came up with a brilliant plan for getting out of it: I wouldn’t tell my parents about the party, which might have worked if Dale’s stepmother hadn’t asked my parents to help chaperone, and my parents of course thought, hey, what fourteen year-old shy geek wouldn’t want to go to a party full of jocks and cool kids with his parents?

When I say Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is one of the best films of the ‘80’s and even deserves a place among the best films of all time I’m not kidding. Sure, it got blasted by critics when it first came out, but so did Led Zeppelin’s debut album which is now considered a classic, and, sure, it’s got its weak spots, but so does Led Zeppelin’s debut album and for that matter so do a lot of great works of art. It may not be Citizen Kane but it would be ridiculous if it were because Citizen Kane had already been made almost half a century earlier. And Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure has lasted, meeting one of the main criteria for a film to be considered classic. Mark Twain also described a classic as “a book which people praise but don’t read,” and the film is so dependent on sight gags and actors’ performances that if it were made into a book that book would be terrible and no one should read it.

Granted this is just my opinion and while most opinions should be taken with at least a grain of salt it’s up to you to decide just how big that grain should be, and I’ll sprinkle in some additional thoughts. At least three times a day I ask myself, what makes you think that? And the first time I saw Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure I said, wow, I know we’re going to see a lot more of Alex Winters, and maybe that other guy too. Keep in mind, though, that this was before Keanu Reeves was famous and was even before I was asked to play Keanu Reeves in a school talent show, back when I had more hair and less waist, but that’s another story. What I’m saying is that with opinions you should always season to taste, and a voice is telling me I’ve already hammered this point so hard it’s embedded in the wood and I should move on.

The critics who hated Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure were also, in my opinion, a bunch of old ugly dudes who missed that Bill and Ted aren’t as stupid as they seem–and maybe even smarter than they realize, like when Bill lets it slip he has “a slight Oedipal complex”, and while it’s lasted, I think it’s greatest impact was for people of a certain age at a certain time, which is ironic for a movie about time travel, but then films about the future have a lousy track record of actually predicting the future with the possible exception of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. And what made it great was not that the way it spoke to a rising generation but its message to the older generation: trust the kids and they will turn out all right. With the right guidance, in fact, they can be extraordinary, and can even make a better world where miniature golf scores are way down and bowling scores are way up. In retrospect it seems almost too perfect that Bill and Ted’s mentor from the future, Rufus, is played by George Carlin who, two decades earlier, embraced the youth culture that was being rejected even by some of his own generation.

Source: Gfycat

While that other well-known ’80’s time travel film, Back To The Future, also contained the warning that the future and even the present aren’t fixed, it looked to the past. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure looked to the future, keeping it largely unknowable, but placing the greatest burden not on the past but the present. Bill & Ted also fully embraced something Back To The Future only touched on: when you’ve got a time machine you’ve literally got all the time in the world, as the disappearance of Ted’s father’s keys in the first reel has a most excellent payoff in the final one.

Source: Bill & Ted

As much as I loved the first film I had low expectations a few years later when I went to the theater to see Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. It felt like the first film was so complete in itself that, in spite of the success, there couldn’t be a sequel. In the theater, though, I did get a brief reminder of what the first film meant to me. There was a group of kids in the front row and somehow before the movie started I got to talking with them found out it was the tenth birthday of one of them. I gave him a pair of sunglasses with glow in the dark frames. “Thanks!” he said. “That was really excellent of you,” his mother told me. I just said, “Party on, dudes,” and took a seat in the back row where the Bogus Journey, in spite of the Ingmar Bergman references and great use of the Vasquez Rocks, was most heinous and non-triumphant.

And now there’s a third film in the works, and I wonder what this future holds. I don’t ask why because it’s Hollywood, Jake, and sequels and franchises have been part of the game at least as far back as the 1930’s with setups like The Aldrich Family which spanned a total of eleven films.

What I’m wondering now is, have they gotten better? Have we? And by “we” I mean those of us who are like Bill and Ted: guys who’ve already started out pretty high up on the ladder and get an extra boost. The future, so far anyway, hasn’t turned out to be so excellent for many people. Those of us who saw ourselves in Bill and Ted had a chance to make the world better and we largely failed. And one of the biggest flaws of the first two is that women, whose historic roles have largely been sidelined or even ignored, get the same treatment from Bill and Ted–even the historic babes. Sure, Joan Of Arc takes over a Jazzercize class, but even the woman who manages their band turns out to be Rufus in disguise. Bill and Ted have been to the past and future and to Heaven and Hell and even defeated Death, and now is their chance to see history as much more complicated than the contributions of as many dudes, mostly white dudes, as can be stuffed into a phone booth. George Carlin is sadly gone but that means we are now Rufus, and we have a responsibility to extend the help we offer far beyond the Circle K parking lot. And some of us old ugly dudes need to be reminded that while we can still party on the first and most important thing we can do in both the present and future is to be excellent to each other.

Your Allergy Horoscope For The Week

Pollen: While everyone else is complaining about the sudden cold snap you’ll be glad for the relief. For at least a few days you’ll be able to breathe again without being medicated to the gills. Oh, wait, it’s a dogwood winter and those blooms are wide open. Never mind.

Shellfish: Be prepared to explain at least three more times that it also means shrimp and lobster, and that, yes, you do know what you’re missing but you’d rather be breathing. And once again you’ll have to tell someone to knock it off with the escargot. That wasn’t funny the first time.

Pet Dander: Aggressive people will try to take the lead. Step back and let them. What you’ve been dreading will come to pass. Or it won’t. Take a little “me” time this week. An old romantic interest will flare up, or it might just be your sinuses.

Mold: You’re a fun guy, even if you’re a gal. Haven’t heard that one a million times, have you? This week just say no to those mushrooms your friend brought back from a backpacking trip in Northern Europe or you’ll be having an emergency room freakout.

Peanuts: At least you’re not allergic to almonds because those things are everywhere these days. Or cashews because those are delicious. Here, stick your hand in this can of mixed nuts and see if you can pull out some almonds and cashews. Don’t worry, it’s less than fifty percent peanuts so you’ve got a good chance.

Beryllium: Do you know if you’re allergic to beryllium? Better go ahead and cancel that trip to the X-ray tube factory just in case.

Dust Mites: Imagine millions of tiny little bugs with pointy legs and sharp pincers crawling all over your body all night long. As they march along they eat up pieces of your dead skin that flake off and collect in tiny troughs and canyons of your sheets. Anyway, sleep well!

Eggs: All time is relative at the celestial level. The heavenly bodies move in their never-ending dance to the music of the spheres and all are part of an infinitely circling cosmos. Renewal is constant. So, really, when you think about it, a bacon cheeseburger really is the best breakfast. Especially with that hangover.

Milk: Put down the knife, step away from the Camembert, and no one gets hurt.

Sagittarius: The only people not allergic to Sagittarians are other Sagittarians. Avoid hyperactive, optimistic, outdoorsy types, especially if they’re into archery.

Latex: When stressed ask those around you to treat you with kid gloves. When insulted remind them you are rubber, they are glue. Hypoallergenic rubber in your case.

Bee Stings: Just think of raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens, brown paper packages tied up with strings, while you’re waiting for the ambulance to arrive.

IF YOUR BIRTHDAY IS TODAY: You’re too young to read this, but don’t worry. There’s an allergy out there for everyone.