Once upon a time, in a lifetime faraway, my grandfather owned a diner. From the days of my earliest memories, Pop ran the diner. He rose at 4:30 every morning, without an alarm clock. He started the grills, warmed up the dishwasher, and welcomed the first customers at 6 AM. This was who he was. He made up for it with a daily nap in his downstairs office most afternoons.
For this week’s Throwback Thursday, let’s go eight years back to an old blog post… which will then take us even farther back.
Ever feel like biting someone’s head off? Have a few people on your scene who deserve to have their heads chewed off and spit out like a piece of rancid beef? Would you do it if you knew you could get away with it?
Well… Until you come up with your plan for the perfect head chomping crime, I’ve got a little diversion for you. VOODOO PEEPS! These little peckers are oh so willing to vicariously give their lives in place of the big peckers in your life who really deserve to have there heads gnawed off. And it keeps you out of trouble!
First, start with a fresh box of marshmallow Peeps at Easter time. Remove the wrapping and put the box away somewhere. Forget about it until July, when the Peeps are perfectly stale. (They’re best that way!)
Let those peeps get stale for a few months.
Then, when some fowl excuse for a human being gets your tail feathers all in a knot, remove one of your little Peep friends from the box. (Note: Though you are peeved and all in a huff like a hen who just laid the mother of all eggs, be gentle in removing the Peep so as not to tear the guts out of his fellow beside him. You will need him at a later date for sure. Jerks of a feather flock together. If you have one jerk in your life, more are bound to follow.) Carefully position the Peep within your finger tips, using your pinky as a perch for your sugar-feathered friend.
The perfect Peep
Step three, the most satisfying part of the process: With gusto and delight, with soaring abandon, yet with precision, bite the hell out of his little soft body and rip his head right off his mallow shoulders! Do it as a starved buzzard who hasn’t seen a rotting carcass in weeks! Birds do not have teeth, but you do! Do your carnivorous worst! Bare those canines! Chomp down! Fill his jugular with all of your venemous anger!
Off with his head!
But! Before you swallow, savor the moment! Toss his little egg-head around within your cheeks! Allow his sticky little cranium to migrate from one side of your mouth to the other! Suck his little brains out and feel your frustrations flock away as so many startled sparrows!
Is that a Peep in your mouth or are you just happy to see me?
Ingest and smile!
Nice beard.
Feel better? I knew you would! (A little birdy told me!)
May the purple Peep of happiness send droppings of peace upon you always! (Send pieces of droppings on you always?? Nah!!)
We were in the KISS Army and we meant business. (Click the image to read the story.)
In keeping with the current “Throwback Thursday” theme that is all the rage with the kids these days, here is my contribution: a (true) story I wrote in 2001, thirteen years ago! (Did I really just say 13 years?)
Even though it was written after the internet was well on its way to being a ubiquitous staple of everyday modern life, this story is showing some signs of age, a little rust here and there. For instance, iPods were not invented and CDs were still all the rage. (A little Googling revealed that the first iPods hit the market in October of 2001.) Also, this gem of a story hit the internet 2 1/2 years before MySpace opened its doors and 3 years before Facebook began its intended world domination. (What’s MySpace?) This story was published during the era of “online journals.” We didn’t have “blogs.” Blogs didn’t catch on until after some of us toyed around with “weblogs” first. Same difference, “blog” just sounds cuter. There was Diaryland back then, a site were you could sign up for a free online diary. It was pretty basic and you had to “host” your images elsewhere. But there are some of us still around who went hardcore and built our own websites. We told our stories, recounted our days. We made image galleries, resizing photos and making thumbnails and html pages and we “ftp’ed” all of it to our servers (for which we either paid a monthly fee or we got free hosting, for which we had to tolerate ads on the headers and footers of all our pages). Facebook has combined all that and, unfortunately, has conditioned (reduced) us into primarily writing brief statuses and witty comments. Who writes stories online anymore? Who has the attention span to read them?
But, you know what? All that great stuff aside. Growing up, what the hell was an internet? Who thought about the “World Wide Web” in 1975, except the Army? Who cared about computers? We had bikes, and footballs, and BB guns, and the outdoors, and imaginations. And, as a rite of passage into our teenage years, we all discovered the true opiate of the masses: Rock-n-roll.
I want to go back! I will willingly turn in my iPhone, walk away from the entire internet without even glancing over my shoulder, hand write all my letters for now on, if… if you will let me go back to those years when I first discovered rock music. I don’t want to go all the way back to the days of GI Joes and playing hide and seek. Not that far back. Just back to the days when I first grew my hair long (when it was still an act of rebellion), when girls lost their cooties and became the most intriguing of God’s creatures, and Led Zepellin had just released “Stairway to Heaven,” and the sound of electric guitars and drums brought me to life. I want to go THERE.
This story from January 30, 2001 is about the beginning of those days for my cousin, Patrick, and me. I miss those days. I miss my cousin. (And some of the trouble we got into.) This story is a reminiscence of those days.
Six years ago… on a distant blog, at a now distant location… I wrote this.
I will be right upfront and tell you there is an “unseemly” misspelling in that old article. All words are not what they “seem.” I could go back and edit that article, fix it all up, make it pretty. But… I’m too tired.
The article has redeeming qualities though: Dr. Seuss, Beatrix Potter, Monty Python, and snakes… snake plants actually. Make sure you click those links in the article. (The links are in white text. Dumb, I know. But, hey, the links match the “monster” in the video I linked to.)
If you can’t sleep, I recommend “I Can’t Sleep”. If that doesn’t help, try the chamomile tea, you naughty, fat, little rabbit.
(Originally posted on the website Continuum…) I wanted to write the conclusion to “The Drummer’s Story” tonight. But after doing some Christmas shopping at the…
