I find it astonishing the things that, first, impressed each of us as children, and second, then became a part of us whether we realize and acknowledge it or not.
From one former lonely introvert kid with an obsession to another, I salute you, Roy!
Insects and reading--first, the dictionary, then the World Book Encyclopedia (made it to "M"). Yeah, the first 12 years of my life were pretty isolated.
Insects (later) check, dictionary check, World Book check (brought home an outdated set from 9th grade on a CTA bus). Isolated until college (I didn't talk in high school I hated it so much).
The World Book Encyclopedia, 1954-56 edition, here. My only companion for years. Read every volume but to this day my knowledge of anything beginning with the letter "E" is deficient because our dog ate that one.
Searching the Internet Archive, I can't find the actual page of volume G of whichever edition of the World Book it was that we had (c. 1958) with its schematic of the locations of endocrine glands, though I found it once before. Unlike the one I found (which I can't include here anyway), which has paired "female gonads" implausibly high up the outlined body, and paired "male gonads" floating in space just below the crotch, that one only had one pair of "gonads" located more or less mid-thigh. It was <i>very</i> confusing to my c. 10-year-old self (though I think the floating ones would have been yet more alarming).
15 years ago, I had hernia surgery. They did this with robotic arms through small slits cut into my mid-section. In order to provide working room for the instruments, they pumped air into the layer between my skin and my body wall.
That had the, um, interesting effect of inflating my scrotum like a balloon. It stretched to ridiculous size and took almost a year to shrink back to something approximating normal size. But that was a year of consistently landing on my testicles every time I sat down since they were now free to descend to what felt like mid-thigh. Most unpleasant, I must say.
Thanks for this, Roy -- I grok on it so much. I'm happy that the bewildering blusterade of nightmare news cycles have settled down enough so you can write in this vein once again. Music is a great way to organize the ol' attic.
I was a hyper kid too (I can be a bit more casual about my childhood, bc dad isn't on this page to slight). Constant chatter, naming dinosaurs, every object a focus of imagination, spinning stories about anything. My paternal grandma demanded my way-too-young parents give me to them to raise. Happily they refused (I see how he turned & am grateful -- love the man unconditionally but yeah), but I agree at the time the stigma was so high about psychiatric drugs that most folks would rather just suffer & become more neurotic. Or let their chidren suffer.
Luckily for me Sesame Street was the Ritalin I needed (or got me by). I grew up in gifted & talented programs & discovered I had a knack for words & languages. By 13, I failed to clear some hurtle & didn't get into that school's G&T program. The next year we moved to a new school, without G&T, and there the alienation set in, fueled in every way by hordes of 8th boys who called me "booky" & hounded me in the hallways. Could have been worse, I suppose, and cold-cocking one of them in gym class probably helped stem the tide.
But by then the lesson was clear: what made me special was to be appreciated by a select few, & mostly needed to be expressed in private. So private got weird, weird indeed. But fun too -- so fuck those clowns. With a wagon wheel. In the wind & the rain. Like a southbound train.
Never heard the backmasked version of Napoleon XIV. When it learned of its existence there was no YouTube. Always hated the original. Not for any sophisticated reason: I was 12 when I first heard it in full. But by then Weird Al was in the ascendant, and "Dare to be Stupid" had come out. That kind of silliness was much more hi-fidelity by then. Dr. Demento was on the radio. I was into Bullwinkle, though I had to get up really early to catch the reruns before the bus came.
The "backmasked" version was the flip side of the single, which I owned. 112-year old me found that the epitome of wit. Almost certainly they simply flipped the master 1/4" tape and played it backwards, but I was never creative enough to manually spin the record backwards to check. But I listened to it a lot: the shoop-shoop of the backwards parade drum was oddly hypnotic to me.
But where I get confused here, Roy, is how you can whine about your pedo pediatrician (can't spell theater without a lot of the former there) yet not only you do nothing to #SaveTheChildren but you mock the Qanuts and the children's savior, Killer Donnie.
Roy, it is by now no surprise that you and so many of your long-time readers were little weirdos just like me. Comic books (including, perhaps especially, Mad magazine), early '70s AM gold on CKLW, and late night horror movies did indeed make life a little less miserable for this geek. In fact, it was while watching the local UHF late night horror host the Ghoul where I first heard They're Coming to Take Me Away - he always played the goofiest sound drops during the intros and outros to his studio segments. I loved it, of course, and I would be ready with my tape recorder to try to catch a few seconds of the song because I had no idea where to find it. (I used to use that tape recorder to make up asinine interviews where the answers to all the questions would be lyrics from songs from my 45 collection, but I digress). I'm sure the 12 year old me would've have gladly traded my entire comic collection to be able to watch or listen to ANYTHING I wanted, ANY TIME I wanted, but there is something beautiful and poignant in the memory of anxiously looking forward to George Carlin hosting Saturday Night Live on the next week's episode or finally saving up enough money from shoveling snow to buy Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. Great piece, thanks for this.
"I used to use that tape recorder to make up asinine interviews where the answers to all the questions would be lyrics from songs from my 45 collection..."
(The accepted term at the time was “faggot.”) That reminds me of when I was in junior high in Texas - if you were a boy, you either played football, marched in the band, or were a faggot. So I tried football.
Now I'm going to have "puhleeze Mr Custer, I don't wanna go" stuck in my head all day because (now that I do the math) I was seven when Larry Verne charted with it. Your Backus song is new to me, altho I may have inadvertently sung it a few times last night (this is the year of the batched cocktail, you know).
Aah, 'faggot', replacing the daily and near-simultaneous 'retard' and 'professor' (which two I being shouted at one I think as good as a formal diagnosis of autism).
I had just come to realise that they didn't _really_ mean anything sexual by it, just a snarl-word meaning (uin terms I might use now) Blue Monkey—when the propositions started. From guys who _wanted_ to hang around other guys most of the time, when I can hardly stand a foreign Y chromosome anywhere _near_ me….
As a still somewhat lonely introvert, I was pretty weird as a kid -- really smart, liked almost anything, but pretty passive about doing much. I pretty much did what I thought was fun/interesting. I loved/still love sports and games, books, and music, and was fine with being made fun of for whatever, as I generally told better jokes about myself than they did, which I took great pride in. I never got called a "faggot", at least not to my face. I imagine my parents (who were fantastic parents for an oddball like me) often found me difficult and hard to comprehend
Damn fine writing, Roy, as usual. And it seems, you've hit the sweet spot for former childhood weirdos. I was one, too! But later than you, it seems, more in my awkward pre-teen years, stuck in suburban Georgia of the early 80s. I found my solace in books, weird college radio shows (WREK out of Georgia Tech played the Reverbs and the Hour of Slack! ), puzzles and bikes. I found the world these things offered was weirder, better and kinder than what Cobb County and its people offered. (I still find that.) The thing I wonder now is, what do the current childhood weirdos do? We know they're there, they always will be. But when 10s of millions of Americans embrace the violent, near-Lovecraftian weirdness of QANON and Trumpism, what's a gentle weirdo of the mind to do?
I find it astonishing the things that, first, impressed each of us as children, and second, then became a part of us whether we realize and acknowledge it or not.
From one former lonely introvert kid with an obsession to another, I salute you, Roy!
Yeah this. Fellow Former Lonely Introvert Kid (FLIK); mine were dinosaurs, then the Civil War (??)
Insects and reading--first, the dictionary, then the World Book Encyclopedia (made it to "M"). Yeah, the first 12 years of my life were pretty isolated.
Tom Sawyer
Insects (later) check, dictionary check, World Book check (brought home an outdated set from 9th grade on a CTA bus). Isolated until college (I didn't talk in high school I hated it so much).
The World Book Encyclopedia, 1954-56 edition, here. My only companion for years. Read every volume but to this day my knowledge of anything beginning with the letter "E" is deficient because our dog ate that one.
Searching the Internet Archive, I can't find the actual page of volume G of whichever edition of the World Book it was that we had (c. 1958) with its schematic of the locations of endocrine glands, though I found it once before. Unlike the one I found (which I can't include here anyway), which has paired "female gonads" implausibly high up the outlined body, and paired "male gonads" floating in space just below the crotch, that one only had one pair of "gonads" located more or less mid-thigh. It was <i>very</i> confusing to my c. 10-year-old self (though I think the floating ones would have been yet more alarming).
15 years ago, I had hernia surgery. They did this with robotic arms through small slits cut into my mid-section. In order to provide working room for the instruments, they pumped air into the layer between my skin and my body wall.
That had the, um, interesting effect of inflating my scrotum like a balloon. It stretched to ridiculous size and took almost a year to shrink back to something approximating normal size. But that was a year of consistently landing on my testicles every time I sat down since they were now free to descend to what felt like mid-thigh. Most unpleasant, I must say.
I think these personal essays are wonderful, Roy.
My parents used to play “Delicious” every New Year’s Eve as they swilled hot toddies.
Pheochromocytoma? Boy, the Democrat pedophiles would have loved you! “This one is 150 proof Adrenalin!”
Thanks for this, Roy -- I grok on it so much. I'm happy that the bewildering blusterade of nightmare news cycles have settled down enough so you can write in this vein once again. Music is a great way to organize the ol' attic.
I was a hyper kid too (I can be a bit more casual about my childhood, bc dad isn't on this page to slight). Constant chatter, naming dinosaurs, every object a focus of imagination, spinning stories about anything. My paternal grandma demanded my way-too-young parents give me to them to raise. Happily they refused (I see how he turned & am grateful -- love the man unconditionally but yeah), but I agree at the time the stigma was so high about psychiatric drugs that most folks would rather just suffer & become more neurotic. Or let their chidren suffer.
Luckily for me Sesame Street was the Ritalin I needed (or got me by). I grew up in gifted & talented programs & discovered I had a knack for words & languages. By 13, I failed to clear some hurtle & didn't get into that school's G&T program. The next year we moved to a new school, without G&T, and there the alienation set in, fueled in every way by hordes of 8th boys who called me "booky" & hounded me in the hallways. Could have been worse, I suppose, and cold-cocking one of them in gym class probably helped stem the tide.
But by then the lesson was clear: what made me special was to be appreciated by a select few, & mostly needed to be expressed in private. So private got weird, weird indeed. But fun too -- so fuck those clowns. With a wagon wheel. In the wind & the rain. Like a southbound train.
Never heard the backmasked version of Napoleon XIV. When it learned of its existence there was no YouTube. Always hated the original. Not for any sophisticated reason: I was 12 when I first heard it in full. But by then Weird Al was in the ascendant, and "Dare to be Stupid" had come out. That kind of silliness was much more hi-fidelity by then. Dr. Demento was on the radio. I was into Bullwinkle, though I had to get up really early to catch the reruns before the bus came.
The "backmasked" version was the flip side of the single, which I owned. 112-year old me found that the epitome of wit. Almost certainly they simply flipped the master 1/4" tape and played it backwards, but I was never creative enough to manually spin the record backwards to check. But I listened to it a lot: the shoop-shoop of the backwards parade drum was oddly hypnotic to me.
REsearch! Instant flashback!
But where I get confused here, Roy, is how you can whine about your pedo pediatrician (can't spell theater without a lot of the former there) yet not only you do nothing to #SaveTheChildren but you mock the Qanuts and the children's savior, Killer Donnie.
Roy, it is by now no surprise that you and so many of your long-time readers were little weirdos just like me. Comic books (including, perhaps especially, Mad magazine), early '70s AM gold on CKLW, and late night horror movies did indeed make life a little less miserable for this geek. In fact, it was while watching the local UHF late night horror host the Ghoul where I first heard They're Coming to Take Me Away - he always played the goofiest sound drops during the intros and outros to his studio segments. I loved it, of course, and I would be ready with my tape recorder to try to catch a few seconds of the song because I had no idea where to find it. (I used to use that tape recorder to make up asinine interviews where the answers to all the questions would be lyrics from songs from my 45 collection, but I digress). I'm sure the 12 year old me would've have gladly traded my entire comic collection to be able to watch or listen to ANYTHING I wanted, ANY TIME I wanted, but there is something beautiful and poignant in the memory of anxiously looking forward to George Carlin hosting Saturday Night Live on the next week's episode or finally saving up enough money from shoveling snow to buy Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. Great piece, thanks for this.
"I used to use that tape recorder to make up asinine interviews where the answers to all the questions would be lyrics from songs from my 45 collection..."
You, too? Wow...
(The accepted term at the time was “faggot.”) That reminds me of when I was in junior high in Texas - if you were a boy, you either played football, marched in the band, or were a faggot. So I tried football.
Now I'm going to have "puhleeze Mr Custer, I don't wanna go" stuck in my head all day because (now that I do the math) I was seven when Larry Verne charted with it. Your Backus song is new to me, altho I may have inadvertently sung it a few times last night (this is the year of the batched cocktail, you know).
Wonder what the Injun word for "friend" is?
Not kimosabe, I believe.
today it would be friend. In Lakota a male friend would be khola, a female friend mashke
You were on adenochrome before adenochrome was a thing!!!
Great column. Thank you!
Did they play this song in your city? https://youtu.be/XCejg_QWZP0
I have the cure you've been waiting for.
https://youtu.be/qLrnkK2YEcE
Aah, 'faggot', replacing the daily and near-simultaneous 'retard' and 'professor' (which two I being shouted at one I think as good as a formal diagnosis of autism).
I had just come to realise that they didn't _really_ mean anything sexual by it, just a snarl-word meaning (uin terms I might use now) Blue Monkey—when the propositions started. From guys who _wanted_ to hang around other guys most of the time, when I can hardly stand a foreign Y chromosome anywhere _near_ me….
After some group that did the following with "New York, New York": do the backward "They're Coming to Take Me Away", then reverse it.
As a still somewhat lonely introvert, I was pretty weird as a kid -- really smart, liked almost anything, but pretty passive about doing much. I pretty much did what I thought was fun/interesting. I loved/still love sports and games, books, and music, and was fine with being made fun of for whatever, as I generally told better jokes about myself than they did, which I took great pride in. I never got called a "faggot", at least not to my face. I imagine my parents (who were fantastic parents for an oddball like me) often found me difficult and hard to comprehend
Damn fine writing, Roy, as usual. And it seems, you've hit the sweet spot for former childhood weirdos. I was one, too! But later than you, it seems, more in my awkward pre-teen years, stuck in suburban Georgia of the early 80s. I found my solace in books, weird college radio shows (WREK out of Georgia Tech played the Reverbs and the Hour of Slack! ), puzzles and bikes. I found the world these things offered was weirder, better and kinder than what Cobb County and its people offered. (I still find that.) The thing I wonder now is, what do the current childhood weirdos do? We know they're there, they always will be. But when 10s of millions of Americans embrace the violent, near-Lovecraftian weirdness of QANON and Trumpism, what's a gentle weirdo of the mind to do?
Weird Al looms large.