white and headless and on the march

Something about this little tableau struck me as being very Blade Runner. Would-be replicants awaiting completion.

GOODIES FROM THE PHOTO ARCHIVE

I've been scanning in old photos from a box I found when I flew home to see my parents last weekend. Just the choicest cuts, mind you.

My Teenage Car Crash

For instance, here we have a photo from my high school daze, featuring the remains of the Mazda 626LX I totalled my junior year of high school.


It was a dark and stormy night in 1987. I was young and stupid, driving very fast down a curving road. The gutter from the road above opened out onto the road as it went downhill, so I hit this layer of water and took off like the car was on skis. The car flew off the road right before a bridge, over a stream, and hit the shore on the other side.

It knocked me out cold—I'm pretty sure I smashed the steering wheel with my face—but I was mostly unhurt except for a temporary limp and a nasty headache the next day.

I don't remember the moment of impact, and I don't remember being airborne. Instead, I remember bouncing and bumping off the road through a field and seeing the weeds in the headlights.

I still remember returning slowly to consciousness and thinking, "God, what an awful dream!" Then I realized where I was. The hood was crumpled up in front of me, and steam was drifting out from the engine comparment.

That was a great car, too. I still miss it sometimes.

Portrait of the Artist as an Irritating Young Man

This is my senior picture from 1989. People tell me I look young now, but they should have seen me back then.


High school sucked. Not much else to say about it.

The"Big Hair Shot" from Ball State

This one comes from an early-1990 road trip I took with my Indiana University dorm friends AP, MM, and WD (the girl pictured on the left) to Ball State in Muncie, Indiana, to party with MM's high school friend MB.


Either AP or MM took this shot in MB's dorm room. I was growing my hair out at the time and fell into this thing where I would hang upside down off my dorm loft with wet hair while 3 or 4 girls would mousse and gel the hell out of it on a quest for Robert Smith follicular elevation.

I enjoyed the attention.

WD was the designated "gel girl" on this occasion, and in the photo, she is examining her handiwork.

The object of the road trip was to go to downtown Muncie and see the Love Cowboys, a regional band surfing the wave of Red Chili Peppers-style funk rock that was taking off at the time. We saw them in some little dive performance space upstairs above a gallery or something in downtown Muncie. (Note: when I mentioned the band's name to someone about two years later, the guy laughed and questioned band's sexual preferences—in his typical fashion designed to paint everybody around him in an unflattering and inferior light. No, the Love Cowboys were not gay to my knowledge. All the same, I can see how the name might not gain traction among homophobic young Midwestern dudes. Then again, the guy I'm talking about was sort of a Moustache—see below—so what do you expect?)

The Love Cowboys were pretty good. The bassist did the snap-and-pop thing on one of those Travis Bean basses with the aluminum necks. I think the guitarist might have been his brother; they both had long, stringy hair and looked almost identical, but I don't know they were actual blood relatives. The vocalist was sort of a non-descript frat-looking sort of guy with a cap, maybe leaning little to the ska side of frat non-fashion.

One big highlight of the show for me was watching WD dance; she had this "dance club" solo move going on that I thought was cool. She looked like she knew what she was doing, while the rest of us just did our best to not look stupid.

My Completely Obvious Crush on WD—but she was MM's girlfriend, so she was out of bounds. I thought WD (and her roommate JT) were both pretty hip. They were into charismatic, artistic pop stars (Bowie, Robert Smith) and all things French, especially French New Wave cinema; WD later had her cut short like a woman who starred in a Godard film, and both WD and JT wore a lot of black. I thought they both reflected a sort of updated "Mod" sensibility common at the time in "alternative" circles in the Midwest, with a little Goth mixed in for good measure. (I actually had a crush on JT at first, but I quickly decided that I like WD better, probably because she was spoken for by my friend and therefore unattainable.)

MM had a similar sensibility, so he and WD were a good match, which I recognized regardless of my own crush on WD. MM later transferred to school in Kansas or Iowa or something—God only knows why—and WD soon after dated a guy who looked like he could have been MM's brother. The two met, and the new guy (who I knew as a distant acquaintance) later said it was a pretty weird scene, and it made him feel incredibly strange to be confronted with this near-doppelganger ex-boyfriend.

I have absolutely no idea what WD is doing now.

MM's Wild and Crazy Friend

MM's friend at Ball State, MB, was a similar kind of guy, but a lot wilder; he dressed in a Mod/Goth sort of way but had cut his hair into a mohawk. He and MM were into Ministry and the WaxTrax stuff going on at the time, maybe because they both came from Valparaiso near Chicago, and MB's claim to fame was that he could be seen in a Ministry live concert video running across the stage and grabbing his crotch (I have no idea whether this is true, and I've never checked).

MB later dated a super-hot Mod/Goth girl named Portia, and the gossip was that they were having out of control sex 3-4 times a day. MM thought the two together were bad karma; MM later drove with them to Chicago, and he joked (I think) that the happy couple were somehow magnetically drawing in hordes of animals to their loathsome deaths beneath the hurtling automobile; MM had never hit so many animals on the road before, or knew of so many animals dying because of one car in such a short stretch.

"What the Hell Happened to You?"

One surprise denizen of the dorm we stayed in was DS, who was one year ahead of me in high school. We had been friends on the Academic Team (how nerdy is that?), but I had lost contact with him. My main memory of him in high school involved being in a car driven by him, with one or two other Academic Team members. He made a risky pass on a state highway, and we missed a head-on collision with another car by mere feet. Everybody in the car was sweating and catatonic for at least a mile afterward.

A year or two later, he looked like a mess; he had a beer gut and was chain smoking. He looked like he had aged about 10 years.

DS's current whereabouts are also unkown.

Death to Moustaches

Anyway, everybody in MB's circle in the dorm was at war with the redneck types down the hall; MB and his gang referred to the rednecks as "moustaches," because of the wispy moustaches such types all seemed to grow, like it was a requirement somewhere (along with having to drink awful swill beer like Budweiser).

"Moustaches" were also all required to own a copy of Steve Miller's Greatest Hits, and it was hilarious later when we saw a Steve Miller live concert video on MTV (when they still showed music videos) and the entire audience was full of Moustaches. Whenever the camera turned to show the audience, the screen showed a sea of drunk young men with the regulation cheesy moustaches, all jumping up and down, eager to be immortalized on video.

Later, after the Love Cowboys show, we piled into a booth in the local Waffle House; we carried on about these "Moustaches" in disparaging terms, and MM later said he heard a couple of middle-age rednecks in a nearby booth grousing about us. MM said one looked at other and said, "Yep, them boys are pissing me off, too!"