This post was inspired by a conversation on the RRC forums about scary movies.

As a boy growing up in Dayton, Ohio, I spent many a Saturday evening (or afternoon) watching a show called “Shock Theater” which featured schlocky horror movies and was hosted by Dayton’s own “Dr. Creep“.

I remember one of the films distinctly, not because it was particularly good or scary–it wasn’t–but because my father scared the shit out of me during the movie. The film was called The Manster. The premise was too convoluted for a young boy to understand. In the movie, the protagonist, also known as “The Guy,” starts to grow a second head for some reason (Read the Wiki link if you want to know the actual reason. I certainly didn’t remember it.) The second head begins as an irritation on the guy’s shoulder. In one of the key scenes, the guy scratches the spot on his shoulder that is driving him nuts only to reveal an EYE sprouting there! So, that part did scare me.

My father was watching the movie with me and noticed my being visibly startled by the eye on the guy’s shoulder. This must have been during the afternoon because dad was wearing his blue, terry-cloth robe (he worked third shift, so he wouldn’t wake up until early afternoon on the weekends) and mom was in the bathroom putting on make-up. Engrossed in the movie, I didn’t notice dad slip into the bathroom with my mom and close the door. I didn’t notice him come back out a few minutes later, either.

I did notice when he started to groan a bit, as if he were in pain. I turned my attention back to the movie. Dad groaned a little more. Apparently, the pain was getting worse. I looked at him and watched as he rubbed his shoulder. I didn’t think much of it and turned back to the movie once more. Dad got off the couch and stood next to the television, grimacing in agony. He cried out in terrible pain. I began to get concerned. Both my sister and I watched as he grabbed the collar of his robe, let out a horrific wail, then ripped the collar off his shoulder to reveal–AN EYE!

“AAAAAHHHHHGHH!” my dad bellowed.

“AAAAAHHHHHGHH!” my sister and I screamed as we levitated off the floor.

“AAAAAHHHHHGHH!” my dad screamed again.

“AAAAAHHHHHGHH!” my sister and I screamed as we ran out of the room.

Dad chased us–all of us screaming–until he cornered us in our bedroom. He stopped screaming and started laughing. He then revealed to us that the “eye” on his shoulder was drawn on by my mother using eyebrow pencil.

I’d say this was the last time my dad scared the shit out of us, but I’d be lying.

I was taught from a very young age that nudity is not something to be ashamed of. I was taught that nudity is something hilarious. As toddlers, once my mother dried us off after our baths, we would run out into the living room, stark naked, just to hear my dad say, in an exaggerated voice, “Ooh La La!” We didn’t know what “Ooh La La!” meant, but it was always funny. We’d shriek and chortle, streak out to the living room, get dad’s attention, then run shrieking back to the warmth of our laughing mother’s towel.

When we were young, my dad bowled in a league for work. On league nights, he’d get showered and shaved and begin his pre-bowling regimen, which included donning what looked to us to be the strangest pair of underwear we’d ever seen. The underwear had a front, but only thin strips of cloth on the back, so we could see our dad’s butt. We asked him what type of underwear they were and he told us, they were “Bowling Alley Underwear.” Since the only thing more funny than our dad’s butt was his singing and dancing, he bestowed upon us a Pickard Family legend: On league nights, after his shower, he’d emerge from the bedroom, clad only in his Bowling Alley Underwear and start to sing “Buh-buh-buh-buh! Bowling! Alley Underwear! Bowling! Alley Underwear! Bowling! Alley Underwear!” Then, he’d turn around and wiggle his ass faster than a rap video chick while he sang. Without fail, we would be in absolute hysterics. It was the greatest, most funny show on Earth at the time. Then, just as soon as he’d sprung out into the living room for his big number, he’d disappear back into the bedroom to finish getting ready. There were no encores. It was a weekly treat.

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Not to be confused with Instant Karma, I got a double dose of Regular Karma in the span a few hours.

First, upon my return home from work, I found a letter from my drum-playing downstairs neighbor. In it, he apologizes profusely for “Saturday night”–or Sunday morning, but hey, the birds aren’t chirping yet, right? He goes on to explain that what was supposed to be a chill gathering of only two people “got out of hand.” I remember the last time a gathering of mine “got out of hand.” I asked the two people I’d invited to come on in and I told the others to beat it. Master your domain, bro! He then explained that “it will NEVER happen again” and he values his relationship with his neighbors. There was no explanation if the impromptu drum clinic was part of the regularly-scheduled three-person chillfest or if it was a late addition to Outofhandaroo. Regardless, I did appreciate the effort and the apology and will respond in kind.

Dear Downstairs Neighbor Guy,

No hard feelings, but I gotta ask: 3:00AM? Seriously, dude. 3:00AM? In what alternate reality is that even close to being acceptable? I guess what I’m asking is, how high were you and can you get me any?

Love,

Craig Spradlin

Secondly, last night, I dropped a line to Single Mom from Neptune, saying “It’s OK if you’re not digging my scene. You can tell me. I’m a big boy.” At that point, I hadn’t heard from her in well over a week. I just wanted her to “man-up” and tell me she thought I sucked. I figured I’d tell her to join the club, give her the membership information, and we’d go our separate ways, both a little wiser. Tonight, she replied to my gentle prod.

Turns out, she did reply to my last email. She even invited me to join her and her young son at a cookout this weekend. But I never got the email due to the hyper-vigilant spam filter at my office. Boy, is my face red! Not only did she reply and I didn’t get it and, as a result, I wrote her a nice but unambiguous email telling her to shit or get off the pot, but I’ve already got plans for the weekend! Oops!

I woke up this morning to find some neo-Nazi wingnut had posted a bunch of neo-Nazi wingnut garbage in the comment section of the “History in the Making” post below. (Truthfully, someone had to alert me to me. I hadn’t seen the blog yet.) It was all “half-breed” this and “white guilt” that, then he linked to a white supremacy site. (I’m not just calling this guy a neo-Nazi. He actually is a neo-Nazi.) Sadly, you won’t be able to read his comments because I squashed his first amendment rights.

A hundred people read this blog–maybe. How this guy found it, I haven’t the faintest idea. If he’s simply Googling blogs which mention Obama then commenting with neo-Nazi spam, he must be a pretty busy guy. I found it particularly amusing that he employed the old “white guilt” trope in the first sentence.

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Dad and I had a conversation the other night about a 1972 family trip to my grandparents’ place in Florida.

Dad asked me “Do you remember [your grandparents] trailer?” I answered “Absolutely!”

“It wasn’t that bad, right?”

“Well, I wasn’t much of a judge of construction quality or anything. I was only seven.”

“No, you weren’t seven yet. You were six.”

“Oh.”

“But you seemed older, for some reason.”

“Because I was so mature, right?”

“Oh, yeah. You used to do my taxes.”

“Haha! But I did them all wrong.”

“Yeah, you’d hand them back to me and they’d just have ‘taxes taxes taxes taxes taxes’ written all over them.”

Here’s one of the ways I can tell I am, without a doubt, an actual “grown-up”:

There are currently no circumstances under which I find playing the drums at 3:00AM acceptable.

It’s true. When I was twenty-four, played in a band, lived near the campus of Ohio State University, where no one over the age of thirty lived, and I was drunk, and my friends were drunk, and it was Saturday night I could see myself thinking it might be acceptable to play drums at 3:00AM. There are a lot of qualifiers in that sentence–a very strict set of criteria that has to be met before I would even consider playing drums at 3:00AM. And even then–even after all of the criteria were met–I’m certain I would still have thought better of the idea out of respect for my neighbors. My neighbors might well have been into a 3:00AM drum solo, I don’t know, but that wasn’t a chance I was willing to take, even at such a young age and inebriated state.

Not so my young, hippy neighbor.

Apparently, he thinks it is perfectly appropriate to play his drums not just at 3:00AM, but from 3:00AM onward into the night until he gets tired of it or passes out. My neighbor lives on the bottom floor of a three-floor apartment building. Above him is me–a forty-two-year-old guy who quietly lives his life. Above me is a thirty-something single dad who, aside from the occasional action film at full blast on the surround sound, lives his life in quiet harmony with the rest of the building. No one in the building makes a peep after 11:00PM, at the latest.

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Last winter, with high hopes and low expectations, I plunged head-first into the world of online dating. Much to my surprise, I was overwhelmed with the number of responses I got to my ad. I assumed the market for fat, forty-two-year old, agnostic, smokers would be acutely bearish and was pleasantly surprised to find otherwise. Over a couple of months, I was in contact with ten to fifteen women, I suppose. One of the advantages of online dating was apparent early: By talking to someone via email or the telephone, one can quickly gauge the other person and determine if one wishes to proceed further by meeting in person. All but three of these contacts fizzled in those initial stages. A few of the women just stopped talking to me. I told a few I didn’t think we were a good fit.

I spoke to one woman on the phone who went into great detail about her gastric bypass surgery and how it had changed her life in so many ways and also gave her occasional bouts of diarrhea, so she always had to make sure she was close to a bathroom. Our relationship never made it past that initial phone call.

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When I was a boy, there was a commercial for the local electronics and appliance store that they played every summer. In fact, they still play it to this day. If you’re from around Dayton, Ohio, you know the one I mean: An Eskimo has installed an air conditioner in his igloo. The VO guy asks the Eskimo questions about the AC unit, which the Eskimo answers with single words. Finally, the VO guy asks the Eskimo why he would buy an air conditioner in the first place. Cut to a green field in the middle of which is the Eskimo’s igloo. The Eskimo exclaims “SUMMUH!”

So, it’s summer here in Pigspittle. The college students have been gone for a month. The campus is inhabited only by staff, whatever faculty isn’t abroad, and the various groups the college accommodates during the summer: barbershop quartet conventions, writer’s workshops, The Rainbow Girls, a group of Ghanan expatriates, swimming camps, and a whole boatload of Christian youth groups. I always wonder if the fundamental Christian groups that come to the college ever think about how the college is a hotbed of secular progressivism the other nine months of the year. I know it concerned Franklin Graham’s group enough that they assembled a week ahead of their scheduled event to “purify” the campus with prayer.

One of the things I do as part of my job is record the readings the participants of the writer’s workshops have each evening. I walk over to the auditorium a half hour before the reading, set up a single microphone, a digital interface, and an iBook equipped with Cubase, hit “Record” and go back to my office. Once the reading is over, I go back to the auditorium, shut everything down, pack it up, and haul it back to my office. I do this approximately twenty-five times a summer. Most nights, I don’t leave until 9:30PM or later. Later in the summer, I’ll split the readings up by reader and post MP3s on our website so the participants can have the recordings for posterity. I’ve done this each summer for the past three years.

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