Cloned

In 1996 when members of the Roslin Institute in Scotland cloned the first mammal I was in the sixth grade. The cloned animal was a sheep and her name was Dolly. I can remember hearing this story on the radio the day it happened, as my parents were getting ready for work. Later that day at school, on the playground during recess myself and others who had heard about Dolly that day couldn’t help but to talk about it.

At the time what was interesting about Dolly wasn’t that she was the first cloned mammal; we kids had been talking about clones and cloning ourselves for years. Things like nuclear power and molecular transportation were old hat for us. Gene splicing and faster than light travel seemed tedious even. I myself had spent much of that year flying to school on the back of a resurrected pterodactyl, which wasn’t convenient but did serve as a reasonably interesting way of diluting an otherwise boring 7 a.m. car ride to school.

The reason why Dolly held our attention that day was that this was the first time we had heard adults talk about the science with as much interest as we had been doing all along. At last it seemed like the real world was beginning to catch up with our demands and expectations. Though we still had to brush our teeth the old fashioned way, and drive in cars to get from one place to the next, and eat our meals sitting down bite by bite, now, maybe, we are finally going to start getting genuine copies of ourselves, ready to do what we said when we said it.

“If I had a clone,” Brandon’s sister said, “I’d make it do everything for me I didn’t want to do.”
Brandon’s sister was older than me by a year or two, but I knew her brother and could usually count on her not sending me away or talking down to me when I stumbled into a conversation she was having. And she was always having conversations, and they were always her conversation so you had to be careful.

“You’d treat yourself like a servant?” I asked her.

As we had it worked out cloning was a way of duplicating another living thing. Maybe you would put the thing or person in one end of a machine and then a little while later, maybe minutes or maybe days, two of it came out the other side of the machine. We’d all been sent to the copy room before to make copies for our teachers and so we knew how a Xerox machine worked. Some of us had even made rudimentary attempts at the cloning process ourselves; pressing our hands and faces against the cold glass of the machine as the white heat of the light scanned and reflected against the contours of our aspects. We'd blindly stumble out of the copy room with the light of God the Creator still in our eyes and an elongated, gray skinned mutant of ourselves folded up and tucked away in the pocket of our corduroys.

“No,” she said, “I’d treat my CLONE like a servant. Or maybe a slave.”

I didn’t know what to say to this. For one, I was a white kid and she was black. Playground rules dictated that in the area of race relations and conversation discourse I was predetermined wrong and/or racist on any conversations concerning the names of skin colors and the usage of certain words, like ‘negro’ or ‘black.’ Also, Brandon’s sister was bigger than me, and kind of bully. I knew that if she was okay with bullying her clone than it’d mean much less to her to bully me. I had to be careful what I said to her.

“But if you don’t want to do something, what makes you think your clone of yourself is going to be any happier doing that same thing than you would be?” I asked Brandon’s sister.

“Listen, she’s my clone and she’ll do what I tell her.”

It was clear to me that Brandon’s sister had taken an entirely adult perspective on the situation. Or rather, that she had taken an entirely parental perspective on the situation. She was prepared to treat a clone of herself as she might treat a daughter: as her own property, endowed with thought and movement only because she had so willed it to be.
“And then, when I was done with it, when it got home from school for me or finished cleaning my room and taking out the trash,” she said, “I’d just kill it. And make another one the next day.”

“That seems wasteful,” I said. I could tell I was starting to reach that point where Brandon’s sister would no longer be able to tolerate my presence in her conversation, but I didn’t really mind, I was far more concerned with the fact that she was beginning to advocate not only the wasteful and lazy use and disposal of genetic materials (something I myself would not become comfortable with until much later in puberty) but that she was also beginning to fantasize about third-person, singularly neutral homicide. “What would you do with the bodies?”

“I’d dig a hole.” Brandon’s sister said. “Wait, no, I’d make it dig the hole and then I’d kill it.”
Years later I would remember Brandon’s sister saying that when I read Elie Wiesel. I have to consider myself lucky that what Brandon’s sister said resounded with me as an empty and hypothetical threat, entirely unlike Wiesel's own experience.
Our conversation was degrading from innocent daydreaming. As Brandon’s sister continued she stopped using the pronouns "she" and "her" to refer to her imagined clone and instead relied completely on the title “It,” which she had given her clone, her slave and her victim.

By this time other people had begun to interject there own ideas into our conversation. Max, who was a beast of a child and who's own clone I was positive would resemble a homunculus even more than he did, had his own ideas on the matter which rivaled Brandon’s sister’s in insensitivity if not entirely in cruelty.

"It would be wasteful to kill them everyday," Max said. "It would be a lot easier to just train one and pay very close attention to it. That way you could keep it for a long time and only have to kill it if you caught it stealing stuff, or touching your things or getting too smart."

"Or you could beat it like a dog," someone else suggested. "That's what we had to do with our dog. It kept yelping at my little brother so my dad threw his shoe at it. He told us if it ever did that to do the same thing."

A few older kids had more debauched notions of their clones. A boy from one of the advanced biology classes, I think his name was Eddie, suggested changing one of his clone's Y-chromosomes to an X in order to make it a girl. This had to be explained to the group. Smirks grimaces passed over everyone’s faces to think of Eddie like this.

I didn't understand it; some of the kids were okay with the idea of beating and killing clones but were repulsed by the insinuation of developing incestuous relationships with them. Eddie had only one eye; the other had been removed when he was just a baby. It seemed to me that a better use of an Eddie clone would be to supply a replacement eye for Eddie. I considered that even that type of harvesting and transplantation of a clone’s body was self-aggrandizing. This, coupled with the fact that I had already embarrassed myself and Eddie earlier that year when I’d asked him to take out his glass eye and show me the inside of his head was enough to make me keep my mouth shut.

Anyways, Eddie didn’t want a new eye. What he wanted was a girlfriend, or at least something like one. Too bad it would also be something like him. I tried not to think of Eddie in this way but I could not help to. I could not help but envision Eddie as I am sure everyone had. But, unlike everyone else, when I imagined Eddie copulating with his female self the two Eddie’s passed back and forth a pink and squishy eye while they humped themselves.

The conversation we were having was at its base a conversation of ethics. Or, and maybe more correctly, it was a conversation about a lack of ethics. Though the language we used concerned the bioethics of cloning we were each of us talking about not how we would treat our clones but how we would treat others. Many of us were so selfish and fool hearted as to misunderstand that we were talking about how we would treat ourselves. The self-destruction that our conversation extolled upon was amazing to me. Hadn’t we heard it a million times before, play nice, be kind, and treat others, as you want them to treat you? This conversation was cruel because it could be. It was unchallenged and in being so it had turned against us. This was not the curiosity of the playground that prompts you to bury trash in the sandbox and call it a time capsule or draw dirty pictures in the back of your notebooks. No, this was the idiocy that caused people to be pushed off of swing sets and left out of kickball games. This was calling each other “gay” and teasing the smelly kid.
"That is disgusting," Brandon’s sister said. She had a damning look on her face as she tried to reclaim the conversation. "You're all a bunch of perverts" she said. The bell rang and everyone sprinted away in different directions but ending up, eventually, in the same place.

I began to trudge back into the school building. I was left thinking about everything that had been said by our collection of playground philosophers. It appalled me, being the moralist of the group. Never mind how we might treat our clones, if and when we ever met them. How were we going to treat our children, our parents our friends if this was the way we would treat ourselves?

When Dolly was only six years old her body showed degenerative symptoms of aging. Her life expectancy at birth had been 12 years but gene have their own age and the mammary gland materials which were used to create Dolly were already six years old they themselves had been placed within an egg and began mitosis. Her body had some catching up to do and it did in 2003. Dolly was euthanised by the men and woman who had helped to create her. When she died she was suffering from crippling arthritis and lung disease. She was twice as old as she had lived, a concept I wish we could have known about that day on the playground.

When Dolly died when I was in high school and I had far more important things to think about then her. New sciences interested me, like the aerodynamics of a Dodge Neon, the volume of its back seat and the long overworked hypothesis I had constructed concerning the female orgasm. This is because when Dolly did die I was also a clone and had been for many years, as are each of us of our younger selves. Although in memories I still share all of the same genetic makeup as my former self, in reality I know that I am not he.

All of My Friends are Pokemon

Sometime in my youth, after Pogs but maybe still before Yo-Mega yo-yos, during the Bennie Baby fad, Pokemon rained supreme. As a consumer product Pokemon covered all its bases, growing from a cartoon into backpacks, shirts and shoes, kids meal toys and even a few movies and many video games. The Gameboy games were so engrossing that on its initial run Nintendo was able to successfully market two different games, Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue, much in the same way the Zelda series would do later. Arguably though the penultimate form of the Pokemon craze was the playing card game. Like Magic the Gathering before it and YuhGiOh after it the Pokemon franchise was able to do with playing cards what man had been doing with gold, metal and paper for thousands of years- they gave value (sometimes grossly exaggerated value) to something that was before valueless.

Call it childhood pragmatism but I never saw the point of the things. Probably the largest contributor to my lack of interest overall though can be contributed to the lack of interest any of my peers had to show in them. The card game required more than you to play it and that was one more person than I was able to find interested in it. As for the Gameboy games I knew a few neighborhood kids, mostly younger and better off than myself, who played them to the extent that made them brattier and more irritating than little rich kids normally are or ever need to be. Its most likely possible that I missed out on the Pokemon craze for one reason though: alternative education. That’s right, I was one of those weird kids that went to a weird alternative education school where you couldn’t wear shirts with graphics or bring candy on Halloween. And of course there was no room for something like Pokemon.

Though I didn’t participate in Pokemon at all in it heyday I do have a pretty good understanding about it now. (It’s about social Darwinism right?) Either way, what I do understand about Pokemon is the same thing I understand about friendship, and that is that as a child I had no idea what it was about, or how it was supposed to work. But I see now what’s been true all along- that all of my friends are Pokemon.

It sounds strange but when you consider the case its absolutely true. The Pokemon Trading Card Game, like elementary school, begins with a starter pack that offers a player way more cards than they know what to do with, often with doubles and pointless fillers. The more you play the better your deck gets and by trading or buying or by some other means drawing to their deck those cards that they most desired and found compatible with a playing strategy. The same with friendships- you sort through those cards that don’t know how to play with and you’re left with those that always come through and you know how to work well with.

I don’t know much about Pokemon. And I once knew just as much about friends. But know I now Matt, and he’s pretty much my Blastoise. And my friend Eli, well, Eli is Diglett. And along with a few other people (who can also easily be likened to Pokemon) these are the friends I’m going to have for the rest of my life. They are the core of my deck. But along with them is also a bunch of people who I know and appreciate knowing even if we aren’t especially good friends. I value these people because like the cards, sometimes we’re convinced to value things we probably shouldn’t just for the entertainment of a thing. Like the guy in my bio course I always talked about Lovecraft fiction with (Tangela,) or that girl who never shuts up from high school (Zubat) or the one I almost dated who was once cute and fun (like Shellder) but know is a little scary and sexy (like Cloyster,) or the blogger who sits around and writes about Michigan Football and the rise of socialism in America (Drowzee.) Trust me, I can do this for just about anyone- as long as they have a personality, though I know that that may be asking a lot from some people (Psyduck.)

All of my friends are Pokemon. And I value each of them- even if they are priceless.

Ooooh, you're my best friend

In a world we must defend

Pokemon!

Oh, and Paul, if you’re reading this I think you should know- you’ll always be my Slowpoke.

God's Country

It should firstly and plainly be said that I move in all those most respectable circles which all other atheist do as well.

I got up early this morning so that I could go out while the sun was still rising. It’s very often that I’m still awake when the birds begin to chirp but not so common that I’m actually awake and moving about outside with them as they do. I took a bike ride around the neighborhood and ended up down at the corner store. Everything looked fresh and clear in the morning-wet air. A crystalline blue sky filled full with misty cloud-whispers covering a heavy and damp dew humid air. It’s so clear out though. The sun is up but not out yet, not yet high enough to shine over the thicker clouds that coat the Midwest horizon in faux white cap mountain peaks.

Traffic is only a low rumble still and the loudest noise around me is the hydraulics of a truck cab and the hum of it’s refrigerated load. “Rolling Rock” it says in big beautiful letters above a panoramic blue-green rocky mountain scene I’ve never been to. I’d like to go out west, to the real west that lies past this old thought Midwest. I don’t especially like the idea of the West Coast, but I’d very much like to see the Pacific Ocean and those mountain ranges. The idea of the ocean doesn’t particularly impress me because of its size and grandeur, the great lakes ruined that for me at a young age. Never again will any body of water be anything more than a lake to me; I’ve peered out across lakes and seen nothing but more lake on the other side. And, I’ve done it from both Chicago and West Michigan looking back across at myself. I’d like to see the Pacific Ocean because of the name I imagine. I’d like to see a peaceful sea and imagine the orient on its other side. Worlds divided I guess. I’ve seen the Atlantic Ocean already and when I did I had all the salt that’s ever been a part of it stuffed right up my nose and down my throat. When I swam in it I was still so young that I had trouble opening my eyes underwater and it sure didn’t help me any. It was nice though, like going to a grandparent's house; someplace you know your family came from, seeing where your father slept and shared a closet for a room with his brother, seeing that vague place where your mother’s mother’s mother sailed over and on. In all the pictures I’ve seen of the west the mountain line in the background is what strikes me the most. Frontier land doesn’t stretch out forever in every direction; it’s cut up by ridges and pitfalls as far as I can see. Seeing pictures of those blue and white mountains is deceiving when you’re a child; there isn’t any way to tell where they end and because of that every town you see can give off the impression that it’s in a cradle of American bounty, set up and protected in a basin of God’s country’s very own best rocks. Where I grew up things looked to be in a basin themselves, surrounded on all sides by old industry. Steel mills, salt hills, burning blue-flamed oil towers; after a while it starts to look like the rest of the land, like it too was thrust up from the soil and rocks when the earth was still young and eons cooling. It’s hard to say if it’s any older than the rest of this place, especially when it was all already here by the time I showed up.

I rode my bike back home and left it in the garage on its kickstand. Looking at the red-lined clouds is like looking at the delicate red blood veins in a milky white eye. Everything just looks so clean and clear before that. The sky is infectious and all the air in my world is the same muted pale blue it’s been all morning and I start to wonder, “Is this God’s country?” Walking back inside I notice one last thing: those same road side gnats I picked off my shirt last night after running are stuck all up and down my arms now in the red blond downy hair. I pick them each out, one by one flicking them back in the direction of the road before I walk back inside and begin taking off my shoes in the front room of my parent's house. Oh happy new day.

caleb

Halloween, Part one

When I was young, very young, I dressed up as Superman for every Halloween. Understand though that when I saw “ young” I mean before Superman suits had fake muscle chest, but also before I had memories. When I was young and all of my thoughts were framed through my father's camera and slid projector I dressed as Superman for Halloween. I do have one genuinely honest memory from those Halloweens though, I remember my mother knelling down in front of me and pulling my curl down over my forehead, just like Superman’s.

We were in the hallway of our old house, at the bottom of the stairs, standing on the long rug that ran between the bathroom and the playroom. The bathroom shone a glorious white. White lighting, and yellow light bulbs and white, slick, smooth, cold porcelain tiles glared out of the bathroom and into the halls and out all the windows of the house. I doubt it was late enough at night for it to be dark out, even for a night in late October, but in my memories it was pitch black outside.

After years of being the man of steel my curl would evolve, transform me, straighten and lengthen itself, pressed down to my forehead with my brothers hair gel, a tight widows peak, an orange devilock draping down my little Halloween melon head. For many years I put on a new cape, black and red replacing gold and blue, that I tied tight around by throat, damp with sweat and rain all October. For a month I lived as a little Dracula child, hiding under beds and behind trees, falling end over end into piles of leaves, stealing away with lengths of rope to hang bodies from trees and build giant spider’s webs. Halloween would transform me too, evolve me, turn me into little beasts, raise me from the dead, turn my face whiter and my blood redder, and let me walk out at night, set lose, a full fledge vampire sucking down sugar and ready to eat the black out of the sky, to unhang the moon and drop it in my pillow case like some treat I’d claimed as mine that night.

For a long time I spent Halloween with my best friend, my brother, Jake. Jake was my best friend from one Halloween to the next, not because he was my brother, or because for years he was the only other person in life I knew besides my parents, but because he was exciting. Jake was what Halloween was supposed to be: trouble. Lots and lots of trouble. Once in a psychology class someone asked me where I learned what it meant to be a boy from and my first thought was that no one has ever taught me more about getting into trouble than my brother, the kid who taught me what it was to be a boy growing up, who through torture and demonstration showed me how to hurt people, hide things, steal junk, dig holes and run from anyone. My older brother Jake showed me not only how to be a monster on Halloween, but how to be a terror every other day of the year too.



...to be continued.

Caleb Michael, ghoul

License Plates

I overreact about a lot of things... I don't know why. I think maybe I hate change, I think I might just be that unstable. I probably should chose my battles better, I suppose I should let the little things go, but I can't...

The State of Michigan is issuing new license plates to everyone for some reason (no, I don't give a fuck what their reason is), and I just got mine in the mail. It's plain... blue characters on a white background. It says Michigan and something else, I don't know... I don't care. It's stupid. Why would they give us a license plate that looks just like Ontario's? Ontarians are the only people who even visit Michigan on a regular basis! As for the other option... with the green city/tree scape and the whatever else... it's just dumb.

Anyhow, the point of this all is that I'm going to miss my old blue plate with the white letters... and I'm going to miss seeing all those blue plates on the roads. To me they were Michigan, they were my childhood... and now they're both dead just like everything else in this god damned state.

What I Learned Today

I think it is wonderful that a children's television show has finally come along that can teach kids how to be creative, expressive, and active but also ill.

The show is called Yo Gabba Gabba! and if you have not seen it I recommend that you get around to it.  I was just switching around Nick Jr. in the middle of the day and found it.  You never know what kinds of useful things your liable to learn from a man like Biz Markie and children's television in the middle of the day

Also, as an added bonus (I mean besides the old school rap and ska theme of the show) one of the characters, Muno, looks like the end of a very friendly vibrator or of a very sick penis. But I'm not going to get into that.

"My name is Caleb, I like to dance!"

Revisited

Today I found a porno-magazine in the middle of the road. It was all alone on the asphalt. The pages were turning one over another, back and forth, exposing young girls and their breasts and asses and more. When my bike tire rolled over the magazine I thought I heard the crunching of dry leaves but as I looked down I saw her. I saw her two legs, pinned down by me now, spread eagled underneath the rubber of my tire. Held there, her legs disjointed, her smile gazing up at me, wet and pink, spread wide across her youthful face. She is clean and pristine and nice but undeniably dirty and corrupted on the page. She looked happy to me. She looks happy to me still. She looked ready to make someone else happy too. “This girl is a giver,” I thought. “Someone who really understands the meaning of altruism. A real tart of empathy.”

Suddenly, I’m passed it and before anything can register I’m hearing the leaves rustling again, pages turning quickly, full of nature and instincts and carnal matters. Did I just see that?

I did. Yes. Yes! And there it is again, and there again! It’s as if some little boys (maybe two or three, let lose from somewhere inside of me) are gathered greedily around it, the magazine, and are flipping glossy pages, silk slick first and then clammy with sweat against their blood-flushed fingers. The pages seem so dry though, so worn there in the road that one more turn by those invisible spit licked fingers might tear the pages, mutilating some poor girl’s body or face and bending staples out of this book’s binding.

I double back and there she is again, and again (or is it now her sister, or her lover?) They’re young and fresh and all different shades of the same well known (or well learned) pinkish hue. But I’m more struck by their faces- each is happy. Everyone is smiling up at me with perfect pearl teeth, high polished on the pages. “What’re you so happy about?” Even their looks of longing and hard-pressed, long waiting glimpses of anticipation seem more playful than anything else. There is nothing these girls are missing. Except, maybe, their clothing. But, I don’t think they even miss those all that much.

The pages keep turning at a heartbeat’s rate and I’m standing over them. My bike is in the grass and I’m in the middle of the road staring down at my feet and her face, and ass, and more, intently and not so unlike Mosses I’m on a mountaintop with God. After all, I’m staring down with my eyes averted from all the people walking past me, from all their disgust, from the drab sky and cold wind that was before in my eyes. But is this so much better or so much worse? I was content today, void of thoughts and feelings until these girls fell underfoot and under tire and flaunted their happy, content, fresh faces in my way. How can I feel sixteen and sexy and stupid all over again? And lost like John the Baptist awaiting god in wilderness untouched, uncontrolled, and all alone before all majesty, at once? How can I feel so old and stupid and decrepit too? These girls are running past me like all girls do, but flipping one by one past me, turning back flips and bending over, wide and low and long, across beds and barn doors and stable walls. They are taunting me and are unkind, and dance past my old, cold weathered stiff bones.

By the grace of God I’ll walk by all this and won’t take off my jacket and fold it over my lap today. Not today. I’m not all that young and uncontrollable and untouched. This isn’t freshman year again, not like every other day has been. I’ll walk by all of this today. Or, maybe I’ll roll it all up tight as her and stuff them in a black back pack. Maybe I’ll save it away not for pleasure, but as a tool, a reminder, a talisman of fall and sex and being young again, or never again, or always still.

Who knows really?


Caleb, 19

Cookies

If only everything could be so simple... I need this after today.

Father and Son

It’s a dreadful day when you finally realize that your father is human, that the pillar of strength and discipline, that paragon of everything safe and good in the world is just as scared as you are, when you realize that he is just as flawed as us all.

It’s a terrible moment when you finally beat him at one-on-one and you know by the look in his eyes and the sweat dripping from his brow as you sink that last jump shot that this time he didn’t let you win. It suddenly hits you that you are too fast, too strong, too skilled, too young (and maybe not young enough). And maybe there is a triumph in that moment, a gloating, but that grin soon falls from your face. You know that the days of throwing a Nerf football in the front yard are gone, the days when a tackle meant being picked up in a giant bear hug. You can see it all in his eyes and the heaving of his chest, that strange mixture of pride and defeat that must come when your progeny eclipse you.

It’s a horrible feeling when you realize that your father can no longer help you with your math homework, that you’re a better speller than he, that you have a better grasp of astronomy and history and philosophy and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, that you can beat him at Jeopardy without trying. And maybe some of it is just forgetfulness, and maybe some of it is technological and scientific advances, but you don’t think of that at the time. It just hits you like a dull thud.

The transformation in your relationship is not a sudden thing, it’s gradual, just as growing up is, but when you finally make that realization that he is human, it is the beginning of the end of the world as it once was. You begin to see his flaws in you instead of all the good and maybe you don’t want to be just like him anymore, maybe you want to strive to be better, strive to overcome those flaws. Maybe that’s natural and necessary, and maybe it doesn’t matter so much whether you succeed or not. It’s the mother bird pushing her babies from the nest and hoping that they fly. It is a jolt when the big picture appears to you, though, that you are your own person now, that nothing is tying you down anymore. You stand with him on a little cliff overlooking Lake Huron and stare out into the water, stealing yourself. You tell him he’s being an idiot, that he’s not thinking and the reason he’s arguing with your mother and that he made a scene is not because he’s upset with her, or you, but he’s stressed from work. It’s quite possibly the hardest thing you have ever done in your life, to confront him damned the consequences, but you succeed, you embrace and your world is turned upside down, is opened up. Maybe we all need that eye-opening jolt of realism to know who we truly are, but that knowledge never comes at the time. You just feel alone, and defeated in the moment of your greatest triumph. You feel lost and confused

And slowly you realize that he is no longer your boss, the King of the castle, but a cog in the unit that is your family. You realize that the two of you are equals, compatriots. He stops telling you what is right and you begin discussing things… there aren’t anymore time outs, or yelling, even when you do something boneheaded like flip his van over three times and almost kill yourself. He knows that you’re a smart kid (or maybe adult?), that you’re not going to make the save idiotic mistake again, he trusts you…

It’s a nice feeling, but one with immense consequences, because you no longer have that safety net. Sure, your parents are there for you, but you know that it is time for you to set out on your own, to make your own decisions, to make your own mistakes, to have your own victories. It is that old universal truth that freedom and safety are polar opposites. You are free from the nest, but not longer secure, and it is terrifying and terrifyingly exciting at the same time.

The Gauntlet

Remember when video games were hard? Yeah me too.

People complain about video games now, but there is nothing bad that can be said about any game that you didn’t have to pound on just to get it to play. The hardware error that companies like Nintendo, Sega, and Atari built into there cartridge platforms bread a whole generation of wife beating children who, even before you could kill whores and steal cars in Liberty City, were reverting to violence to solve their problems. I pounded on Donkey Kong harder than Mario did to Princess Peach, or King Kong did to Fay Wray.

Looking back it occurs to me now that besides being harder to start these games were also harder to play than anything on the market today. The controls for some of the classic and super Nintendo games are alright, but that’s easy when all you do is run and jump. But in the original Donkey Kong even athletic great Mario jumped like a ballet dancer on acid. Once you get to Jurassic Park on the Genesis, the one place you really need to run and jump, those abilities kind of fall apart in your hands as you wake up in a shady, monster filled, government occupied Pitfall.

If you see what I’m driving at here, you’re better off than I am. These games were hard, even if you didn’t utilize the one option they designed the menu for: the difficulty setting. But difficulty? Difficulty? Is that even an option in these early games?! I understand easy, normal, and hard, but what about “playable” as an option, or how about, “application of the natural laws of physics” on/off switch? How about some “difficulty” settings that would actually allow the game to slide back and forth on the spectrum of skill level, and not luck. I don’t know how many Italians, scientists, monkeys, and marines I’ve killed hoping that they could make it across a two foot jump and not trip standing up or face plant themselves into an invisible ledge. These games had one real setting- suckyhardtryagaingoodluckbastard. But the games were fun and challenging in a way TV hadn’t experienced since the introduction of the presidential debates and then much later and more predominantly with American Idol. It wasn’t just that we were young, with undeveloped hand eye coordination, or that these games were really, really, badly programmed (which they were), that made this games so hard. They were designed intentionally to be hard, and because of that worth playing again and again.

Looking past the insane logic of the story lines, the poor programming and resulting complex paradoxical game play that introduced games like “Schrödinger's Cat’s Bowl-a-Tron”, and sadistic game developers dreams of blind, nubby fingered children, the video games of our youth were pretty damn amazing.

Now, I’m not going to lie, I once I had to have someone remind me that Sonic wasn’t Mario, and that rings weren’t coins. And, for a long time when I’d play Mario in my uncle’s basement with all the cousins crowding around I had no idea what was going on. I mean there were dinosaurs, and manila colored nipple men, and a guy that could spit fire, and an arrangement of different mushrooms. And, sometimes my brother would give me the second player remote and tell me I was playing when I wasn’t, and for a long time I couldn’t tell. But eventually I got a “big” just like Mario did, and I grew up and understood a few things about video games.

The things that video games have taught me almost seem like universal truths to me now, things I was born knowing, natural rights intuit in every child. So, here they are-

What video games have taught me:
-That no matter what modern concepts of physics tell us, there is such a thing as a double jump. That is right, one jump on top of another, a mid air miracle, pushing little men a little higher.
-If something or someone changes color, they’re probably a zombie. If they bounce up really high and then off the screen, they’re probably just dead.
-Even little mustached plumbers can find the love of a beautiful princess, even if they can’t find her.
-Health is everywhere.
-And so is lava.

Seriously though, isn’t art supposed to relate to real life? At least a little. And I’m pretty sure that a huge part of life isn’t about getting eaten by raptors and falling off cliffs. But then again, I could always be wrong about that too.



-Caleb, true ninja

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes: A short piece on fear

Some of the scariest things in life aren’t phobias but necessities. When people grow up they put better names to things, but when we’re young we don’t have sociophobia, agoraphobia, and necrophobia, you’re just scared, of things like strangers, being alone, and bogeymen.

I do not know about you, but most of my greatest fears in life are those same things I was afraid of when I was just a little kid. But I’m not talking about losing a toy or a person or yourself, I’m talking about that feeling you got every Halloween that’d cause you to bring your legs up close to your body in bed just in case a madman tried to chop off your legs. Before I even knew what a madman was, what was really mad, what Friday the thirteenth meant or why white vans were terrifying I knew I was scared of all of them, with no little help from my older brother. For years I slept in the center of my bed, clutching a heavy flashlight (and in later years a police baton), my arms folded over my chest like some ancient honored pharos, just out of reach from any hands from any place under my bed. Before I knew what anxiety was I had seen hell’s fires, Bram’s asylum, crazed dogs and lost children, greater fear’s than fevered dreams, things far worse than Goosebumps, X-files, and Are you Afraid of the Dark?, horrors unheard of but ever imagined since the first sons of man were old enough to torment the second sons, because what else are older brothers good for. Shit! It’s a wonder any of us ever left our rooms on some of those darker nights. But through it all there has only ever been one fear that has always stayed with me, that one fear (besides seaweed) introduced to me by 1941’s The Wolf Man: Gypsies!



I’m not too worried about strangers or being alone any longer, but bogeymen and gypsies still scare the daylights out of me. I don’t know what did it, if it was the ragged clothes, the eeriness of the fortuneteller’s eyes, all black and white, a Dracula in different clothes Bela Lugosi nearly plays himself, a wild European madman staring out of cursed eyes. Or, maybe it was just the fact that they traveled in wagons, lived in them, from village to village, like some sort of communist trailer park carnival people, which is quite possibly the most evil amalgam of Euro/Anglo/Americana trash known to man. The Wolf Man’s story draws it’s plot and circumstance from folk lore, making use of myth and storytelling to build the Wolf Man as an ancient evil. And that’s what gypsies are- ancient evil folk people. So you know they’ve got nothing to lose, and that is scary.

Most fears are irrational, and the scariest stories, murders, monsters and ghouls are spun of spider webs already in our heads. But even so, this one fear of mine, this one real fear I have left over from childhood I think I’d rather like to hold on to for as long as I can, no matter how irrational it is. There are far worse things in life to be afraid of than gypsies, and once we get past all our irrational fears all that’s left are the rational ones, and all those are truly terrifying.



Oh, look out you rock 'n rollers
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
Turn and face the strange
Ch-ch-Changes
Pretty soon now you're gonna get older
Time may change me
But I can't trace time

-Caleb, un-truly terrifying

Michigan and Trumbull

I have no idea when the first time I saw Tiger Stadium was, or what transpired at any games that I attended there, but what I do remember I feel is far more important. I’m not sure if I would have turned out any differently had I never visited the stadium, but I cannot imagine a childhood without lazy summer days spent in a ballpark. I remember those long low tunnels and the great expanses of green everywhere. I remember the sea gulls and the hot dog vendors and watching batting practice. I can still remember sitting in those plastic chairs eating peanuts with my dad and even if I wasn’t paying complete attention to the game, I was learning to love it, I was soaking in the atmosphere.

I’m not even sure what more I can express about baseball or childhood or the Detroit Tigers that I have yet to in this space. It meant everything to a kid from Dearborn, to a Detroiter at heart whose blood was full of motor oil, to sit in that stadium and be part of something that stretched back to times that were written in the black and white of newsprint. Wins or losses never mattered back then, but I still remember those seats along the third base line with the sun glaring down at me.

There has been a ballpark on the corner of Michigan and Trumbull since 1912, but it seems that that might soon be ending. The Detroit City Council approved plans to demolition the stadium, but then voted against transferring ownership to the demolition company… I don’t know what they’re doing, whether it is just politics or a genuine interest in preserving at least some of the old stadium. I just feel numb to it all now.

I know I’m not an impartial observer in this by any means. A history major that happens to love baseball is against tearing down Tiger Stadium? I’m sure that’s a shock to everyone, but I can’t help but feel with my heart on this issue. I understand the arguments for demolition, but I don’t want to hear them anymore. To me, that building is the heart and soul of the city, and now it is deteriorating like everything else. The Free Press ran an article the other day about how people living near Tiger Stadium are sick of it sitting there, and how it has become an “eye sore”. The entire article pained me to the core. One resident claimed that no one wants to live near a baseball stadium. Maybe you should have thought of that before you moved across the street from one that has been standing for almost a century! And honestly... what kind of person wouldn't want to live near a ballpark? There were some good quotes in the article, too, but far too many of them were horrible. Tiger Stadium deserves better than that. It is a landmark and a place that has meant so much to so many, and these people are just willing to toss it aside?

At lest there are some who are working to keep the stadium, but it seems like it is too little. Ernie Harwell said it perfectly in the Free Press.

“Tiger Stadium has meant a lot to generations,” Harwell said. “If we can’t (save part of it), we’ll have to keep Tiger Stadium in our memory, our mind and our heart, and cherish it that way.”

Somehow Detroit just won’t feel right without that old ballpark sitting at Michigan and Trumbull. I just hope they find some way to honor it there.

And as I am Peering down Springs Blouse...

Why will I continue to search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe? Why must I reject those beautiful bouts of chaos? They hit me like pleasant strokes, bubbles in the brain-at the park last summer they floated through that cramped air and sun streaked sky.

Sitting in the tub I am four and my mother’s blowing bubbles over my head and they stick to the white tile walls and the water is getting cold and the bath is full of mountains of white that keep popping and a hair floats by and I get scared. When the water is too chilly for me to take and the heater in the basement is already dead from exhaustion mother fills a pot on the stove. Pouring it over my toes I know she loves me.

But then it was summer again and for some odd reason music sounded better then it ever had before. Something in the air had changed and what more than that, Spring had crept out from 45 degrees of rain into a stuffy car and suddenly its 63˚ at the city airport. And that damn it all to hell April 6, 2006 or was it 2005 or 1994-0r-2 had pumped me full of thoughts of perfect folds of red summer blouses and divine bosoms with perfect playful cleavage as a girl asks me to turn in her paper for her because she can’t be bothered by the niceness of the day to leave her seat and I’m peering past her name in the upper corner and seeing her smile and the shrug of her shoulders on the same depth of field while her breasts pull daisy stalks into that V you see when two leaves or petals or legs or parts of summer met.

And then I am back at the park and that damn it all to hell April has set girls on every thought and emotion and sense I have. And there’s something in the air where I breath that causes something inside of me to feed and I can’t tear any bit of my over worked mind away from the breasts I see floating across the sky and over my bath and then I realize that they're bubbles I am remembering and I was four in that tub again.

And sometimes, we just have to be happy that summer and winter are so set in their ways. Spring and Fall, no matter what month, have a way of going either way, running a bit cold or feeling un-restfully warm as the wind blows. But, there is something about the middle of summer, something which is absolute, solidified by the heat of a July day which only summer has. Summer time is strong and sure, letting itself be known in every drop of sunlight into sweat, shouting out it’s presence like a boy with his ball in every long hour of the longest days. Summer burns a memory into your mind so surely that your brain peels. So definite that every blade of grass ever plucked up and rolled between your fingers, pulled at from the ground till it burst out singing dirt into the air as it gave to you is locked away in your mind. Summertime brings on emotions so dormant that even the bugs shoot off electric joy as they dance through the night, little thunderstorms so soft they could mock the lull a baby’s sleep. And, what’s more there is the memory of the first smear of that galvanizing green against the pavement where it is smeared into the heart and the soul of you the first time you see a fire fly die. Summer brings all the calmness of a nap, all the comfort of grass hugged feet, all the joy of nights so dark the sky is filled with lights that out shine cities and so warm that the day might not ever end and summer will just last forever.

And then I realize that it is April again and I’ve set out to get myself and there are a million pretty girls I’d love to kiss before I’ve lost my sense of Spring-supple breasts and supple heat that reaches inside of me and turns my chest up to the nth˚.

Starship Captain

Sometimes I think I should’ve been born in a different era.

People always say that, people always crave change. For some reason, they want something new, something different. The grass is always greener on the other side, and probably dozens of other old sayings that don’t come to mind right at the moment. Sometimes, though, it does seem that it really is greener over there, or maybe it is just greener in fiction. Yeah…

Maybe I would’ve been better off being born in a different reality, something that wasn’t so concrete, something more superfluous, somewhere more magical.

I started re-reading Dune about a week ago. I’m not sure quite what gave me the urge to do it, but I picked it up and started reading it. I think it was some sort of yearning to read an epic space opera... I can't really believe I just used that phrase, but I'm just going to go with it. I would read for a while and then start to feel guilty about doing it and begin to talk myself into reading something that I hadn’t read already. I have a huge stack of books that I want to read this summer, and I was “wasting” time rereading something I had read years ago. I always do this, make reading into some sort of chore and try to “accomplish” something by finishing a book that I don’t really want to. I should just read what the hell I want and stop reading what I don’t enjoy. But, anyhow… I stopped and considered reading something else several more times, but I never did pick anything else up, Dune was just too good.

And then I reached a point that made it all worthwhile, that made me realize just why I was still reading it and why I always listed it among my favorite books. As I was riding north along I-69 in Indiana, I reached some sort of nirvana.

I don’t think it was the words on the page, or even the place in the book that did it for me, but everything just came together in an instant. I realized just how great a book I was reading. It’s so good that I cannot even begin to explain it. I just felt like Paul, knowing that he was moving inexorably to a future he did not want, but being helpless to stop it. It was pure contentment, pure joy and a feeling of intense comfort and satisfaction, as if I was doing the perfect thing, at the perfect time, in the perfect place. I know there are countless people who wouldn’t enjoy reading Dune, many who probably would hate it, even… I know this, it’s not for everyone. I guess it’s plodding at times (but I never find it so), maybe a bit confusing, it’s long and dense, but I guess that’s part of what I love about it. Herbert created a world so rich and huge that it took my breath away even though nothing was new to me. At that one moment, the book was perfect, and the world was so right that I ached to be there myself. I wanted to be on that awful desert world. I wanted to be caught up in all the intrigue and violence of the Imperium. It is the reason I’ve sacrificed hundreds of hours to playing Imperialism, Civilization and Crusader Kings, just trying to reach that place where I feel that I am actually there, that I am actually the commander of armies, the diplomat plotting, the captain of that mammoth starship.

And, I guess it’s the same reason that I love Star Wars so much, the reason that I feel every insane, nostalgic feeling that I do. It’s all about that feeling that I can’t even explain correctly. Those things are more than movies to me, more than books, more than ideas, more than anything that I could ever put my hands on, or watch with my eyes. It is a world, a galaxy that is so ripe and wonderful that I cannot help but yearn to be there. It feels more like my home than this Earth ever will.

But, that’s when I know something is truly great. It simply transcends appreciation. I appreciate good books and movies, and I enjoy many of them, but a certain number of them strike a different chord. Some things I love, and they make me love them. It isn’t a passive experience, but they reach out, grab me by the collar and beat the living shit out of me until I realize their greatness. I feel every pang of sadness, every joyous moment and experience every wonderful adventure as if they were my own. The real world simply has never provided me with anything that real or that grand.

Gah, there I go talking about fiction again, but I just want to be a starship captain when I grow up, dammit.

Me, a Swimmer, and The Creature From the Black Lagoon: An Unnatural Love Affair

What’s wrong with the Creature From the Black Lagoon is everything that is wrong with science and religion. Love.


I can still remember when I first saw this movie. It was a long time ago. Throughout six and seventh grade I spent many Friday nights with my best friends Joshua and Nathaniel. We’d stay up “late” at Josh’s, sitting on his floor watching old movies his father had rented for us. We’d watch the classics: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, Abbott and Costello Battle Racism and Oppression in White Hollywood. And we’d watch the creature features, like The Creature From the Black Lagoon.

Remember when you were little, and you were never sure whether something was going to be really scary, or just exciting and funny instead? Watching The Creature From the Black Lagoon is very much like that. When you’re young so many things that shouldn’t be scary are scary, like dead bodies, and missing links, and girls. But when we get older the really terrifying stuff in the night comes out, like loneliness, and lose, and woman. And if we’re lucky those things can still be funny too. But what was nice was that back then they always were funny and scary. Back when we were little everything scary had the possibility of being funny, and that’s the way it should be. We should be able to laugh at ourselves over the stupid stuff we get torn up and freaked out over. I remember hiding in Josh’s closet, wound up in a curtain, waiting for Nathaniel to come out of the bathroom so I could jump out at him. And remember that feeling you used to get, that feeling when you’re trying to scare someone, and you’re so tied into it, so excited and young and funny that you’re scared too? Scared of your own tricks, of your own jokes, of how young and stupid and sublime you are. I had that felling. And it was wonderful, wonderful to be scared.

That’s what The Creature From the Black Lagoon is like. You don’t know if you should be scared or laughing. And usually it changes every time you watch it. Just like when you’re trying to scare someone else, if you want it to be scary, if you’re willing to let yourself go, let yourself be a part of it, it can be as scary and exciting as anything in life can be.

The last time I watched The Creature From the Black Lagoon I decided to get a professional opinion on the movie. So I went to Wynston Rose McCreary- The Swimmer. And right away she hit it right on the head:

“I don’t get it…is it supposed to be funny?”

Wynston is completely right, sometimes you can’t tell! The Creature From the Black Lagoon doesn’t always make sense. The character himself…its self, really is a contradiction between science and religion. And no, not like the way Nightcrawler is a Catholic, or John McCain is a Republican, but the way Jesus is the son of God, or Orion is the son of Darksied, or Luke is the son of Vader.

You have to understand; the level of weirdness in this film is of that like you’ve never seen before. It isn’t a horror film, or a slasher, or a thriller; it’s a creature feature. The villain isn’t evil, or demented, or a Dracula, they’re just weird. They’re blobs and flies and gillmen. The Opening scene of Creature is the creation of the heavens and the earth…and then all of a sudden WHAM! they cut to the primordial sands of evolution and start talking about how all life evolved out of the sea, pulling itself up from the dregs and the muck and pretending to be man. They even say the world is over 15 million years old. See? They’re coming at us from all angles!

The Main character, The Creature, Gillman, is no less confusing when you think about him. He’s a sort of missing link, part man, part fish. Have you ever watched a fish in a tank? They’re fucking crazy! And so is Gillman. Fish are like retarded hairless dogs that can breath underwater. They go all over the place, eat all sorts of stuff, chase and roll and scrap with one another, and what do they do at the end of the day? Die on you. And Gillman is the same way.

In the film a group of scientist travel to the Amazon searching for The Creature. And, of course, they have to bring along a young, pretty, she-scientist. And of course, Gillman falls in love and tries to kidnap her. Which makes no sense! I’m not sure what he wants with her, he has no penis. So why is he kidnapping her if he can’t rape her? What, is he going to wait for her to drop her eggs and swim up stream so he can then fertilize them? Or, of course, maybe he’s just a little curious and wants to dry hump her a bit.

Honestly though, I find it pretty upsetting that the science crew and I totally expect Gillman to rape the girl. Why can’t he just kidnap her? Why can’t he just want someone to talk to, some company? Why is that so unbelievable? Oh yeah, because he’s a fish man. And that is exactly what makes Gillman so tragic: He’s a fish that is in love with a woman… not even Shakespeare could have written a story that compelling. Gillman, the eunuch child of creationism and evolution, is in love with a white woman in 1954. And, in the end it isn’t tragic, or cute, or anything lasting, it’s just unnatural, unreal, unbelievable. But, like any good love affair, totally frightening and worth dying for.

Sitting there in my room watching the movie for the first time in years with The Swimmer I had to consider our own unnatural love affair and how deep and weird and wet it was. I had to think about how long I’d known Wynston, how I’d met her, and how we’d gotten where we were, sitting there across my bed. When I first met Wynston I was all over her, just like Gillman. But unlike Gillman, her and I are really good friends now, and I didn’t get shot and lit on fire and drugged and killed for loving her.

I really do love her; she’s my best friend. And it really is weird and wet and deep, but it’s also real, and like any good friendship totally frightening sometimes and absolutly unnatural.

I think in the end what is most upsetting about The Creature’s story is that the very people that came looking for him kill him. They chased him down, they cornered him, they made him fall in love. And isn’t that the way it always is? We ask for it, we want it, we know the score and the price, but we still fall in love, we still go looking for it. That’s the point though. We fall in love and risk the weirdness of it all, the possible pains and growths and fears, but we still do it. And like we’re being transported through the Amazon or back to childhood we’re struck with the sudden fear and excitement and thrill of being scared. And it’s that thrill, that horror, that funny feeling that makes us laugh out loud when we know we love someone and are scared as hell that we do. And it’s that laugh that makes the search and the pain and the black waters all worth the while.



“Why is a movie about a black lagoon so reflective to me?”
“I wonder what color their clothes are.”

-Caleb, The Eunuch Child of Creationism and Evolution + Wynston Rose, The Swimmer

Vader's Head

"Banded together from remote galaxies are thirteen of the most sinister villains of all time: The Legion of Doom. Dedicated to a single objective, the conquest of the universe. Only one group dares to challenge this intergalactic threat: The Super Friends!"

I never read comics much when I was a kid. Sure, I flipped through some of my Uncle’s old ones from the sixties, but I was never really into them. I have no clue why, but I always preferred reading books to comic books. So, it was through a different medium that I learned about super heroes and their villainous counterparts; it was through television, the way every child of the nineties learned about anything.

I loved watching X-Men, Spider-man and The Super Friends on Saturday mornings, but it wasn’t until I decided to watch The Super Friends again about a year ago that I realized something…

The Legion of Doom lives in a giant Darth Vader head.



The archenemies of The Super Friends live in a giant Vader mask! I guess Black Manta must’ve been cruising around the swamps of Dagobah one day in that crazy ass submarine of his, found the Vader head that Luke cut off and decided it would make a good base. If it wasn’t all ridiculous enough, the show came out a year after the original Star Wars released, so they must’ve known what they were doing. But, why? So they decide to hide their base in a fucking swamp with alligators all around them, because I guess they thought the Super Friends wouldn’t want to get their capes dirty. I now know why we’re destroying the Everglades so quickly… it’s to catch Lex Luthor.

The first thing that strikes me about the show now is just how colorful everything is. The colors are badly washed out, but man, are there a lot of them. The second thing is that everyone on the show is a fucking moron. The Super Friends are just retarded, and even Superman and Batman who are a huge step up in intelligence from the rest of their numbskull compatriots, couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag. Luckily for the world, the Legion of Doom is even dumber. I guess you can’t expect much from a group who lives in a swamp, but still… I’m pretty sure my five year old self could have thought up a better plan for taking over the world than they do every episode.

These plans usually consist of one of the members of the Legion complaining that the last plan was awful and that they had a way better one. They would then begin to explain their needlessly complicated and downright stupid plan to send the Super Friends into the sun on a rocket or to cause the Earth’s temperature to rise slightly higher so “Fearians” from Venus would want to colonize it. They were always interrupted by some other member who continued to explain the plan, who was again interrupted. I’m not sure if they had planned it together, or they just all figured the more complicated the plan, the better. I’d guess the latter. Needless to say, the plans always failed. And what villains go around talking about how evil and bad they are all the time? Even Emperor Palpatine thought he was doing the right thing. Lex Luthor even states their enemies are “the forces of good”. Evil people don’t go around say, “Oh, I love being evil, badness is so cool, I’m going to go kill some babies now.” It’s insane!

I really don’t know how a group with two supposed geniuses and a robot could be so dumb, but they were beyond brainless. To make it worse, they didn’t even pretend to be smart. They were like a bunch of monkeys flinging feces at each other and destroying shit because it was fun. They creators expect me to believe that a group of super villains is just going to demolish their base because they feel like it? I guess it’s because half of the damn Legion consists of Superman’s retarded cousin, a giant cave woman, a Cajun zombie, an autistic guy in a wetsuit, and a fucking gorilla. A gorilla! Obviously hanging around these idiots has affected Lex and Brainiac’s intelligence something fierce.

I could go on and on about how the show doesn’t make any damn sense, but you can just watch it yourself. You won’t be disappointed, it’s hilarious.

Baseball

Why do you have to love baseball? Because you just can’t help it! Because you love summer. Because it’s not a sport but it’s life, it’s a pulse, and it’s time. Because baseball can be everything. Baseball is real, and it’s real as you or me.


What is in baseball is what’s in all of use. Something that binds us, connects us, grounds us. Baseball is strong smells and textures and deep deep truths. The feel of the ball; the ridge of each stitch, the raw weave of the pants, and the childishness of the caps. Baseball isn’t a sport, it’s a game. Those aren’t athletes on the grass, they’re real people, the way it used to be. Baseball’s a game made to be played by drunks and overweight old men, and young kids. As easy as the dust gets caught in your nostrils, or the way the setting sun just stops when those painfully red rays hit the mound and you can see the smoky spirit of the game moving in the energy about everyone’s feet, baseball gets caught in your veins. It’s not sport, it’s a game, and it’s life.


What happened to the good old days, when porn was smut and liquor was good for you? Back when baseball was American pie and the mitts were big and bulky and always broken in? What happened to the afternoons of fathers and brothers? What happened to the days when kids looked up too drunks for all the right reasons? What happened to the days of Terrance Mann? You know? You know.

Baseball used to be played by gods, not titans. Real men, who were true Adonis’, with fat solid figures that’d dank deep of life. Today, you look across the polished diamonds, through jumbo eyes, and see Frankensteins. And, it’s not these monsters, these inhuman muscles and drug fueled creatures that are baseball. No, it’s the real guys, the guys like you and me. That’s what made baseball great, that’s what made it an American game, because those men that were out on the field weren’t much different from the two of us. So take back your Hercules’ and Goliaths, and give me those ghosts of Christmas present and young John the Baptists. Baseball was played by someone like your father, or your uncle, or your neighbor; someone who’d been in the same towns and parks and mini-marts and watched the same games as you. And, that’s what made them great; that’s what made them gods, and the game a game of legends. When those men stepped out onto the field, when they crossed the wild green grasses and kicked at the dry dirts there was an energy in the air like that from the dawn of time, and, pulled up from sleep baseball lived. Those men, those boys, those true articles would hit and run and throw and in there legs and arms and honest frames a game greater than good and evil was played by people more honest to life then any angel or demon. They played a real game: baseball.


I’m not a sports-man, but I am a man, and I can’t help but love baseball. Sometimes I’ll watch the games on tv, and if someone’s offering I’ll go to stadium with a fun group of people for a nice afternoon, but I can’t tear myself away from what used to be. Baseball is meant to be an honest game, that’s why we play it in summer, and why it has to be done outside, and even why the batting cages always hurt so damn much in the palm of my hands. I can’t honestly watch baseball without thinking about who should really be playing it; without thinking about all the old men who somebody should be looking up to, and about all the young guys who should be on the road, and all the dead guys that made so many opportunities possible for those creatures that get paid to play a sport and not a game.

Sometimes, in summer, when the sun is setting very late and night, and everyone winding down, I wish I could hear someone shouting in the orange light from the sun, and the kicked up dust. Before the streetlights turn on and everyone knows its night time and the fireflies come out, I like to listen for that honest sound of kids shouting and leather and wood and red string, because I swear to god I can hear everyone of those. And it makes me sad to think about it even now, because I know baseball is an honest game to be played at honest times by some honest people.


Like I said, I’m not a sports-man, and I’m not a Christian, but if you’ll look past both those you’ll see I can be honest too. And, if you remember, I mentioned young John the Baptist, which is another thing I can’t help but think about when I think of those kids playing baseball. I don’t know, something about a young kid, stuck in the wild, trying to prepare the word for what God’s told him will change everything, and being scared as hell of it just reminds me of childhood. And, I’ll tell you, though I’m not a sports-man, and I can’t see god, I’ll keep my eye on the ball, because I truly believe an honest game just might be able to save all of us.

-Caleb, right fielder. Deep, deep, right fielder.

Box Score

“I’m reading the box score, Scully. You’d like it; it’s like the Pythagorean Theorem for jocks. It distills all the chaos and action of any game in the history of all baseball games into one tiny, perfect rectangular sequence of numbers. I can look at this box, and I can recreate exactly what happened on some sunny, summer day back in 1947. It’s like the numbers talk to me, they comfort me, they tell me even though lots of things can change some things do remain the same.” –Fox Mulder

One day, Mulder reminded me of something my dad once told me, something about how I should love baseball because of how much I enjoyed statistics. My seven year old self never really understood that, because things like wins and losses, points and touchdowns, goals and assists were so much easier to understand than ERAs, batting averages, WHIPs, or slugging percentages. But, not understanding all of that stuff never stopped me from loving the game, and it never stopped me from playing second base, or debating All-Star team rosters with my grandpa on lazy weekday afternoons. And when I grew, and my knowledge of math increased (though I will never admit again that math has ever helped me better understand sports), I began to get what my dad had been trying to tell me all those years before.

Baseball is the game of statistics, the game of numbers. I learned what all those funny acronyms and abbreviations stood for, and what they meant. I learned all the little intricacies of the game, and I fell in love with it all over again. It wasn’t just whacking a ball with a stick and running bases or catching and throwing, it was strategy and numbers that stretched back into the foggy reaches of time, numbers that meant something, that could restore something. I might never be able to recreate a summer day in Boston in 1920, but I can damn well know what happened at Fenway that day. So, I think back and wonder what it was like to watch Hank Aaron, Ted Williams, Babe Ruth or Mordecai “Three Fingers” Brown, and I dig up all those charts filled with numbers and abbreviations and marvel at the order and simplicity of it all.

Once at a game at Comerica Park a blonde in the row in front of mine caught my eye. She had her hair back in a pony tale and a baseball cap on her head, and to my amazement she was filling out a score card as she watched the game from the bleachers. She was recording for posterity that day in time. It was quite possibly the most attractive thing I had ever seen in my life. Just watching her slender fingers marking outs with a pencil and seeing her rapt attention at every movement of the game was intoxicating. I understand if that makes me seem crazy to most of you, but I’m sure that someone out there understands. I know Mulder would, at least.

Ballparks themselves are intoxicating… the rumble of the crowd, the call of the vendors, the warm smell of hotdogs and the freshness of the air, the warm sun shining and the inviting sky spreading out in every direction. There is just something about them that is different from all those places called Arenas, Bowls, Domes and Coliseums. They are parks, they are fields… they are expansive and open. I feel sorry for those cities that don’t have a true ballpark, but are forced to share a facility with some other sport. It just isn’t the same. I’m lucky enough to have two of them, though one is a haunted shadow of its former self.

It has been a long time since I was last in Tiger Stadium, but I’ve went past it many times since then and I know it’s still sitting there at Michigan and Trumbell, just waiting. No matter how long it has been, though, I know I’ll remember those long, claustrophobically low tunnels that must still be there, and the field where so many of my heroes and my father’s heroes roamed for summers stretching back decades. I still know those steep bleachers that made you feel as if you were right on top of the field and I can hear the seagulls crying out in my mind. I can still remember sitting along the third baseline, cracking shells and popping peanuts into my mouth, the mitt on my left hand just itching for a foul ball, and my dad next to me keeping track of the game on a scorecard.

Comerica Park is newer, more open, and perhaps the grass is greener now, but I know it will never replace Tiger Stadium. No park can ever replace that old warrior in my heart. But, CoPa is a good park, and the skyline from it makes me think about how much I love the city, despite everything. It’s funny how those surroundings gave me so much courage, how thousands of people around me brought me comfort. It’s odd that friends chattering away and the thrill of a potential comeback victory made me do something that I probably would never have done otherwise. So, I talked to the blonde girl with the scorecard and the Tiger’s hat. I told her that she was beautiful, and she smiled at me. I talked to her, and my heart thumped at her smile and the look in her blue eyes. I felt alive… and it didn’t matter what she said, how she responded, that was never the point. It was only the movement of her lips as she formed the words, not what she spoke, that mattered, the gentle curve of her jaw line and the happiness that I knew my words brought her. So, we talked about the game and ourselves, and it was unbelievable. We talked about filling out scorecards, four seam fastballs and our lives. And it didn’t matter that she had a boyfriend, that I never got her phone number, or that she lived in Cincinnati, because I was happy. Nothing but that one brief moment mattered in the end. Of course, as with all good love stories, the night ended with fireworks, brilliant streaks of neon color lighting up the cool Michigan night. I haven’t seen her since, and know that I never will again, but all that is important is that I was there, watching baseball in a park, speaking to an angel with a scorecard, and that the Tigers won it in the bottom of the tenth. It was exhilaration, it was pure joy, and it was a moment that will live forever through the pencil marks upon a piece of paper. Sometimes, things just seem to come full circle, I guess.

“Shut up, Mulder, I’m playing baseball.” –Dana Scully

Mr. Zamboni

It doesn’t take a poet or a hockey fan to appreciate the innate love people get from a Zamboni gliding across the ice.

Who doesn’t love the Zamboni? Foreigners? I don’t know. I don’t think so. Hating the Zamboni wouldn’t be un-American, and it wouldn’t be un-Canadian either, but it would be something damn close to it- It would be un-Human. And unheard of.

Even if you aren’t a hockey fan, or a winter sports fan, or a warm blooded human being, the Zamboni will make you a fan of something more important, a fan of the ice. Everyone can love the ice, the way skates feel, the tight strain around your feet and ankles, painful and protective, so much love that it hurts like a Christmas hug from a fat aunt, or a thanksgiving dinner that aches and fills more than it tastes, or a handshake from your father when you both know you’ve just done something utterly amazing. Ice is perfect- it’s cold, but it isn’t sterile, and the molecule aren’t bound tightly closed but are instead held together with open arms, embracing each other lovingly.

The Zamboni can make you a fan of ice, of the cold, of the winter and Canada. Zambonis are so damn gorgeous. They are everybody’s friends. They’re a source of comfort. People watch Zambonis go around and around ice rinks, mesmerized, enthralled, watching a childhood mobile that’s larger than life. In those large rinks time and space are transformed and people are lifted away from this world, and enter into someplace where the national anthem isn’t about a war but is still patriotic, where having an American flag and a Canadian flag hang side by side just seems right, where white scaffolding isn’t a sign of industry, and clean air isn’t just a Canadian selling point. Hockey rinks, excuse me, Ice rinks, aren’t magic, they’re just nice, and they make other things nice too. In an ice rink, the ice isn’t hard, but dependable, the air isn’t cold, but crisp and still, and the energy isn’t lost, it’s just stored away, like the sun is inside Superman, in people, waiting to be let out, to burst out, to shoot out blades and dance on the ice, gliding over everything, to sing out of mouths like god singing the universe into existence, hanging in the emptiness of space a beautiful cloud, fleeting and energetic, singing the body electric.

Raw ice is great-ice in the wild, untamed, the kind that’s always rough but has kind snow banks to catch you- but ice in a rink is a whole different world. The ice rink is its own nation, its diplomat the Zamboni, a king and a commoner with duel citizenship. And even in writing this I can’t tell if in my soul I’m a Canadian or an American. I guess I’m neither and I’m both. I’m a Michigander; and I’m a kid, and I like to skate, and I’ll always love to watch the Zamboni work its magic and do its thing.

Does every ice rink have two flags in it? Or is that a Michigan thing?

The Zamboni should be our state Mascot. Or at least Canada’s. They’re like Teddy bears or best friends, and they do what Roosevelt did for this country and what best friends do for us: They pick us up, brush us off, wiping away the tears and the blood, scaring over our cuts and softening our bruises, they set us back on your feet looking like we’re something new, something still amazing, even when we’ve been through hell, even when we aren’t much. The Zamboni comes in when everything is cut and torn and wrecked to hell and cleans it up, smoothes over all the bad parts and leaves the ice fresh again. The Zamboni gives everyone a little more faith. At a concert you cheer for an encore and hope to get one, at a hockey game you cheer for the Zamboni and know you’ll get it.

It’s always there, The Zamboni, that last glorious player, taking his victory lap for all of us, all of the skaters that have been there before, and all those skaters that’ll be there again.

What’s so great about the Zamboni? I consider myself a poet and a hockey fan and a Michigander, and I still can’t answer that question properly. It’s great because an Italian guy from Utah built it. It’s great because it has two seats for a one man job. It’s great because it’s one occupation everyone can respect, the way janitors and schoolteachers and prophets should be respected but aren’t. It’s great because it’s a part of hockey. It’s great because it’s as hard to understand and as easy to love as Curling. And it’s great because everyone always waits for it, and watches it out there all alone; doing a good clean well needed job for all of us.

Thank you Mr. Zamboni.
Long live Lord Stanley.
And go Wings.

-Caleb, Michigander.

Moriarty

When I was young, I had a Moriarty against whom my Holmes was pitted, as surely as I had found my Watson at that young age. I was matched against this fiend as early as I can remember. We were rivals of unimaginable import, no less so than Achilles and Hector or Batman and The Joker. Our battlefields were countless; the football field, the jungle gym, the backyard, the basement… We fought over the Super Nintendo controller, and we fought because we could. It was rivalry, it was sport, and it was a battle for the fate of everything that had ever mattered to me. And when one day he began to tear apart the snow fort that I poured my blood, sweat and tears into, it was a defense of honor and justice on a scale that would have made Superman proud. And we fought, beat and pummeled each other into the snow, fists flying, bodies tangled and snow rubbed into faces, a scene right out of Calvin and Hobbes, but what then felt more like The Battle of Hastings. I came out of it all victorious, and I stood there in my front yard, clad in all the regalia of winter, my cheeks flushed, my eyes bright and my heart thumping a triumphant opus. As the sun shone in that blue sky and the snow gleamed around me, I knew I had preserved my little kingdom in suburbia, I had held the city through the night.

It wasn’t just two boys solving their disagreement with fists, but something far greater than that, at least to me. Our conflicts always were more important than simple fights, because I never lived in the real world, not then, and not now. That lump of snow was my castle, and the pile of dirt in the backyard was the Hall of Justice. Roman Legions marched through my bedroom, and spaceships zoomed past as I stared up at those glowing neon stars on my ceiling. I always understood Richard the Lionheart better than Bill Clinton, and I probably still do. I never chose this rival, this nemesis, we were thrown together just like Arthur and Mordred. Since I can remember, I knew him, and we fought tooth and nail, and I gloried in the warfare. It was the stuff of legends and fairy tales to me. I despised him with every fiber of my being for my entire childhood, and then one day, all of a sudden, things changed… I was a freshman, and he was no longer there. I grew up, and moved on, but there was always that place in me that longed for that conflict, as assuredly as I needed comrades in arms.

It is important to have adversaries, to have someone to strive against, someone to push you and make you better. In conflict you strive to win, to fight your hardest against all odds because of that competitive fire burning inside of you. You do things that you never thought you could because of that need to be better, that need to win. In battle you become stronger, mind, body and spirit, even if it’s truly only mock combat. An enemy makes you learn and fight to succeed not with a helping hand, but with a kick in the teeth. Sometimes it’s the pain and hardships that turn you into a success, that make you strong. Sometimes it’s those bruises and black eyes that spur you on to be the best. Kennedy once said of the space program, “But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

Besides, when you’re a kid, weaving tales in your mind about defeating your rival is just fun. So now I’ve found a faux-archenemy, a new foe to clash with upon the battlefields of my imagination. If in doing so, I’m crossing the Rubicon from reality to the realm of fantasy, so what? Is it all that different anyhow? And it is in this vein that I struggle to keep the imagination flowing, the world from sinking into some sort of drab, cynical Hades. Because, what would be the point then? With no struggles, no adversity, where is the thrill of living? Who cares to live without that excitement, without that conflict, without that fun?

And so I write, because its better that way, half in the world of fiction, and half in this condition called reality. Like Alice, half through the looking glass, and half at home. Sometimes I wonder if fiction and reality are so different after all. I always find that people believe the myths more than they believe the truth, anyhow. I’m told the quack of a duck doesn’t echo. I really don’t know if it does, perhaps I should just go find a duck and a cave. Or I could just sit here and write about epic battles and great conflicts and then maybe go watch some Looney Toons and see a fight over whether it’s really Duck Season or Wabbit Season…

At dinner recently, I brought up the subject of archenemies, and how I wanted one. It got some good laughs, some hilarious stories and some jokes. For, who in their right mind wants an enemy, anyhow? While I cannot vouch for the state of my own sanity, because… well, that’s just a Catch-22, I can say that it is the idea of an enemy more than the reality of one. I miss the thought of having someone to pit my strength against, and in doing so, make myself better. I need something to fight, something to strive for, and some hardship to overcome. How else would I know that I have accomplished anything?

I realize the real world is filled with enough hardships, conflicts and roadblocks for me to struggle with, overcome and in doing so strengthen myself. But in the end, the problems of adulthood simply do not hold the same romance as those childish fights. So for now I’ll just look back at all those struggles of childhood, remember the glory and the happiness that they brought, and know that I will always have them. And in the end, isn’t that enough?