Helpless in Seattle: Standing On Your Own Two Feet

My elementary education was divided between two schools. I started out at Crown Hill Elementary in North Seattle (conveniently located at the top of … (wait for it…) Crown Hill.)

When I was a kid (by this, I mean “less than 18 years old”) I thrived on comic books, the Star Wars trilogy, Battlestar Galactica (classic) and Star Blazers. (After I turned 18, all these things thrived on me.) Ostensibly, my life was not dictated by the books I was assigned by my teachers, but rather by the books I loved to read on my own.

OK, maybe “thrive” is a strong word, but it is safe to say that Marvel and DC comics, George Lucas, Glen Larson and a handful of nameless Japanese animators each had a hand in my upbringing.

I have not particularly benefited from this monetarily (and nary a single thank you note from Stan Lee, George Lucas or that tiny island nation of Japan.) Nor have I been bitten by a radioactive spider, been bombarded by cosmic rays. I was never presented with my father’s lightsaber nor have I fired a “wave motion gun.” (Yet.)

Educationally, kindergarten through third grade breezed by for me, as I easily earned straight “A” grades (back when you still got letter grades.) My teachers allowed me to wander freely about the classroom (read: they didn’t notice me wandering freely about the classroom.) They let me write short stories and then read them to the class as book reports.

The fact is: I wasted a lot of my time whiling — or is that meanwhiling— away my time, hoping that some radioactive frog would crash through my window, bite me and unleash my mutant super powers.

“The Mighty ThunderFrog! Amphibian Avenger!” Faster than a speeding turnip truck, more powerful than a Volkswagen, able to leap tall buildings without a sound! It’s a burp, it’s a belch…it’s ThunderFrog!”

My secret lair would be the Lily Pad. My battle croak: “I’m hopping mad!”

And of course…I would only use my powers for the forces of good. Truth, Justice and the Amphibian Way!

Then again, with my luck (living in the Pacific Northwest) I would more likely be bitten by a radioactive moose (Mighty Moose.), skunk (The Striped Avenger), or a salmon (GLUB! The Caped Coho!)

Alas, I was doomed to a life of normalcy. OK, ‘normal’ is a misnomer in my case. By ‘normal’ I mean I never got to fight crime until I became a police dispatcher for a short time in my late 20s, and again as a casino Security Officer where I spent most of my time battling the evil forces of ‘Second-Hand Smoke.’

Where was I? Oh yeah… writing short stories and reading them for book report credit in third grade.

I used to include my classmates in the stories I wrote. My stories were about a young superhero called “Adventure Kid,” who had all sorts of adventures… as a kid. He was always a year younger than me, but could lift an amazing 100 lbs!
My classmates were his companions in the adventures. Typically all the boys in the class would team up with Adventure Kid to rescue all the females in the class who would be captured by some sinister force or other.

When I was writing, many of my classmates became my biggest fans. (OK, by this, I mean that... while I was writing, many of my classmates came to tolerate me.
But I got a taste of power while I was writing. If someone did something to offend me, (which happened easily with my frail ego structure,) I would threaten to take him or her out of my story. This usually got them to treat me nicely.

In retrospect, I now understand that this was a manipulative form of abuse. Powerful, but effective. (I didn’t master it until much later in life.)

Fourth grade was a little tougher. Crown Hill elementary had two fourth grade teachers. One was known as a strict disciplinarian who was merciless in her maniacal pursuit of filling young minds with all the important information about Greek, Roman and Norse gods, and how to write Roman numerals to the million-billions. The other teacher was a man, and hence would have been my first male teacher.

I got the female, who was a “sink-or-swim” kind of person. No more skating by on short stories for book report credit.Then my school closed, and I was sent to a new school.
…where I got the same teacher for fifth grade. More Roman gods and numerals, more Greek gods and the like. I did not flourish.

My sixth grade teacher was a kind, “tough-love” sort of man. My first male teacher, he taught us a lot about self-respect. He also taught us some rudimentary Italian. He told us he was 63 years old. He said he’d gotten to 100 and then started counting backwards again.

A few years ago, his son was almost elected governor of Washington State. I voted for him, not because I thought he had a better plan or “mandate”, but because I figured; if his father could have such a huge impact on an attention-starved 11-year-old in just 180 days, he should have been an incredible influence on his own offspring.
Something happened in sixth grade. One day our teacher said “ You should appreciate my doing this for you. Once you get to middle school, you’re gonna be on your own.” (I don’t remember what he was explaining.)

I entered middle school with trepidation. Was it really going to be as cutthroat as Mr. Rossi described? In many ways it was: expectations were definitely higher. You had to learn to fend for yourself. I spent most of my time in the computer lab, programming in “Basic” on ancient PET 2001 computers. (Based upon the fact you haven’t heard of “CreelmanSoft,” you can see how far I got with that.)

Then one day, my eighth grade social studies teacher said: “ You know, you people should appreciate what I’m doing for you here. When you get to high school, you’ll have to fend for yourselves.” (I don’t remember what he was doing for me there.)

High school was definitely a step up. I struggled with keeping grades up, even though I was always in the top three percentile on standardized tests. (This was when my novel series “Phoenix Flight” first saw the light of day. I was always busy writing and drawing rather than studying.)

During my senior year of high school, one teacher warned us that in college, teachers were not nearly as helpful.

“I hope you guys appreciate everything we do for you here,” he said. “Once you’re in college, nobody is going to look out for you!” (I don’t remember what he was doing for us.)

At the community college level, I struggled through my freshman year and then sputtered through what I call my “five sophomore years of college.”
Eventually I got back fulltime, and finally flourished again.

One of my instructors advised me one day that, “at 4-year schools, nobody’s going to wipe your nose for you.” (I do specifically recall that this instructor never physically wiped my nose. I wouldn’t have ever forgotten something like that.)

As I slogged my way through Washington State University, I indeed wiped my own nose, except for the times I allowed some exchange student majoring in biology to do it for me, but that was just ten or twelve times.

And, I swear this is true, my communication history professor said to my senior class: “You should appreciate what we do here, When you get into the workforce…”
Sadly, I don’t remember what any of them “did…”

…except make lasting, lifelong impressions on me.

Oh, and I do get to capitalize on it by writing about it, years later.

Men in the Kitchen (Part One): Torched Food Trilogy

Men in the Kitchen (Part One)

 Over the past four and a half decades, I’ve done my fair share of eating.

Actually, if you take a peek at my girth, you could argue that I’ve done significantly more than my fair share.

After years of painstaking (and weight gaining) research, which included millions of consumed calories, hundreds of hours pretending to be shopping, and two lifetime barrings from a couple of wholesale warehouse stores, I have compiled a non-scientific, non-exhaustive and completely frivolous list of “ do’s” and “don’ts” for you to consider when visiting places that offer free samples.

Remember: Past successes do not indicate future performance, especially with modern surveillance technology.

1)        Change your appearance frequently. This is especially easy to do if the store also has samples of makeup. Special tip for males: save the “ extreme makeovers” for your last run of the food samples.

2)        Don’t just stand in one place taking samples from the same table. Move around for crying out loud.

3)        Don’t say “Eww! Can’t you make it without calamari?” Not all samples are meant for all people. On a positive note, if you tend to like Calamari (and who doesn’t? Admiral Ackbar was awesome!) and you hear someone saying “Eeewwww! Can’t you make it without calamari?” Just think: More calamari for me.

4)         If you grab several samples ostensibly to take them to your “wife/children/friend/great aunt Imogene from Oregon,” DO NOT consume all of them in front of the sample demonstrator. (This might invalidate your credibility.)

5)        Don’t try to scare someone off from taking the last sample ahead of you by saying “Dude, do you know how many calories are in that?” You have to be more subtle: Say something like “Dude, did you see the size of the fly that just flew out of that thing?”

6)        If you disregard item number five, and muscle a calorie-conscious “dude” out of the  “last one;” also hang on to taste the first of the next batch. You are helping the salesperson to “make sure the taste of the product is consistently good whether it’s fresh or older.”

7)        Carefully schedule your rounds around shift changes, but avoid asking “When’s the other lady coming back?”

8)        If you go back for seconds/thirds/fourths, make sure there’s no residual evidence from your first trips still on your lips or chin. (Special tip for males: Check your beard too, really.)

9)        Avoid making statements like  “Man, at Cost Club they give you the whole thing.”

10)    Don’t say “Just one more cup to make sure the pretzel to M&MÔ balance is correct.” Well, at least don’t say it more than once.

Most of my eating hang-ups came from my father. Being the son of a diabetic mom, my dad was always the food police in our household, ostensibly to prevent me from also developing the dreaded disease.

Because of this, my father became pretty consistent in hiding his candy. Unfortunately, he didn’t become consistently good at hiding his candy. This was coupled with the fact that my mom was a frugal shopper. So when Heath™ Candy Bars were on sale, she’d buy a couple hundred of them, storing them in the same hiding place. This usually meant I could scrape a few dozen off the top before Dad noticed any shrinkage in his supply.

Result: Type-2 diabetes.

Not really. I mean, I really did develop Type-2 diabetes, but it wasn’t because of what I ate. OK. Maybe a little, but it mostly is genetic.

Dad hated letting food go to waste.

When I was a teenager, my mom was on one of her frequent church “retreats.” I never quite understood what she was retreating from, until I realized how poorly she got along with Dad. Anyway, my dad wanted to feed me, apparently. (Probably my mom called him from Camp GimmeGodOverHubby and reminded him that the children (the two strange people who occupied his house while she was gone) would need sustenance.)

So, out of the blue, he comes to my room and asks, “Do you want me to cook you a frozen pizza for dinner or something?”

This is an odd request. My mom lost her sight (a side-effect of her diabetes) when I was twelve. I’d been preparing my own bachelor dinners for years.

I knew how to cook a frozen pizza, but I was hard at work accomplishing all the great things that make me who I am (a middle-aged overweight nerd with a penchant for anything that is science fiction or comic-book related.) I considered my options: If he makes me a pizza, it’ll give me fifteen minutes to do more comic book reading. I could probably knock out Spider-Man #256 and the new issue of Alpha Flight.

“Sure,” I replied.

Twenty-five minutes later, the smoke-detector went off. I kicked myself for not following up on it. My sense of frozen pizza timing was pretty solid. I should have known it once I got to Fantastic Four and Power Pack.

I repaired to the kitchen, where I discovered a thick plume of blue-grey smoke pouring out of the oven. My dad was there with an oven mitt, and a distinct odor of beer on his breath.

Dad was what you might call a problem drinker. The problem was it didn’t take too much beer to turn him into something else. My theory was that Dad’s mood was exacerbated by the drink. If he started drinking in a good mood, (very seldom,) he was transformed into a very good mood. This usually meant breaking out old Kenny Rogers and Roger Whitaker LPs. If he was in a foul mood, (more often) he wound up being an angry drunk.

Needless to say, my mom’s absence and the presence of alcohol make me very leery, but his mood so far was at worst neutral.

The strangest part about the smoke-filled kitchen was the smell.

I’d burned my fair share of frozen pizzas over the years of my pre-bachelorhood. If it wasn’t completely charred, I’d probably still eat it.

Unfortunately, I had also melted my fair share of plastic (usually experimentally) to see what could be done with melted plastic (usually first-degree burns.)

The kitchen didn’t smell of burned pizza, it smelled of melted plastic.

Dad pulled the pizza out of the oven. It was shiny.

“Did you remove the plastic before cooking the pizza?” I asked.

“Geez, no” he hissed, looking red-faced and embarrassed. “I thought you left it on and it just melted away.”

“No, you have to remove the plastic,” I said. My pre-bachelorhood apparently had much better prepared me than my Dad’s dependence on Mom’s cooking.

Ohh Geez, I thought. This has to get out of the house before we all get high from the fumes.

“You can still eat that,” my Dad said. “You can peel off the plastic and eat that.”

“No way,” I said. “I’m not eating food that’s been covered in melted plastic.”

“You can still eat that,” he said.

“You can have it,” I told him. “I’m not hungry.”

Dad looked at the pizza, which more and more resembled a small car tire.

“Nah,” he said. “I really don’t like pizza.”

He tossed the pizza into the garbage can, subsequently melting the plastic garbage can liner.

And this was years before the advent of wholesale warehouse stores that could sell us thousands more garbage bags.

…which leads us to…

11)   If your father is offering to cook you a frozen pizza, check after TWO comics.

12)   No matter how much your father is trying to help you, don’t eat food that has been cooked in melted plastic.