Tag Archives: middle school

March 3, 2011

Giant’s Despair

By welcometoflavorcountry

I grew up in the same neighborhood as Tim Showalter.

Our families went to the same church for a number of years and I was in the same grade as his older brother. After I graduated college we got to know each other fairly well while we both lived in our hometown. We’re still friends although now he lives in Philadelphia and I live in Boston.

Tim is also a musician and under the moniker Strand of Oaks he has put out a remarkable album, Pope Killdragon. Having known Tim for a long time, I thought that connection made for a unique opportunity for my own creativity. I decided to take each of the songs on the album and use them as inspiration to write something. Hopefully you like some of what you read. You can listen to each of the songs off Pope Killdragon here.

6. Giant’s Despair

My first kiss was a great experience. (Note: It actually took place across the street from Tim’s house.) It was filled with an energizing connection between endless Christian guilt and its counterbalance of what was surely demonic horny-ness.

The first girl I kissed was in 8th grade. Her name was Jen Stauffer. Jen was pretty cute but kind of an outcast. She wasn’t super popular but wasn’t some crazy kid, either. She was just one of those kids who flew under the radar. She wasn’t a horrible student, nor was she a brainiac.

But she was friendly and a flirt, which was about all I needed to have someone attract my attention in those pubescent days. She had brown, straight chin-to-collar length hair (although knowing the early 90s it was probably partially or entirely permed from time to time) and one of her teeth was a little crooked (I think it was an incisor) but it was cute and I didn’t mind.

We rode the bus together home from middle school, which was just a couple miles from where we lived. Jen had liked me for a long time but always had a boyfriend. In fact, she had a boyfriend when we first made out.

I went over to her house after school on a Wednesday (I remember that part because I had to go to church later that evening) to “do homework” or some such bullshit excuse but knowing that we were going to make out. I knew this because of her incessant flirting and interest in me, which didn’t seem to stop despite her being in a relationship. I don’t want to think that Jen had lost her virginity at this point in time (I really don’t know) but she was certainly the more experienced of the two of us.

We first sat on her front porch – it was the fall – and acted like we were going to do homework but instead just talked. Eventually we went back to her tree house. I had never seen it and it was pretty cool. The tree went right up through the middle of the square structure, its branches erupting over the top.

We sat there and even though I felt intensely awkward at what I knew was to happen, I also knew it’s what my penis wanted, so I did as the dominant part of my personality demanded and went through with the locking of lips. However, she slipped her tongue into my mouth, which was a surprise, but a pleasant one. It was warm and wet and seemed to add a bit more passion to the already dangerous situation (remember, she had a boyfriend).

The thing is, Jen was a good kisser. A really good kisser. As I made my way into high school, I compared the handful of girls I kissed against Jen and frankly none of them came close. There were some good ones in there but perhaps it was the surprise of the whole tongue in my mouth thing that made it so good. However, I do believe Jen had a passion and intensity in her. Perhaps it was her experience. Or perhaps I was just imagining things.

And then it hit me: an incredibly heavy, deep weight in the pit of my stomach. It hung there like a greasy, fattening meal, but it was entirely emotional. I thought I was going to throw up. And despite my erect penis I remember feeling just these waves of nausea and guilt as soon as it was over.

I was feeling weird. I left the tree house and got to the end of her driveway and she followed me. I rested my right arm on the mailbox and lay my head on it and felt as though I would throw up right there. “I gotta go,” I told her.

I know I felt sick and guilty partially because she already had a boyfriend, J. L., who was a really nice guy. I don’t think he forgave me for that for a long time and understandably so. But I also felt guilty because something told me that having an erect penis was wrong and weird and I had never been taught to masturbate or that it was okay to feel that way.

Afterwards I went home and continued my adventure into self-flagellation of the stomach and nerves. I don’t think I threw up but instead after an hour or two I went to church and ruminated on what had occurred for the rest of the evening.

The next day I went to school and Jen had told J. L. and while I didn’t get into a fight over it (thankfully J. L. wasn’t that kind of guy) I still felt horrible and it was very awkward and embarrassing. But like all things in life it passed and J. L. got married to a pretty girl.

Jen on the other hand…well, to put it bluntly, Jen is dead. She died the summer before our senior year of high school. She and I had grown apart as she fell in with a bad crowd and was going to the private, liberal Mennonite high school in our city for a while.

I don’t know where she was at in her life when she got pregnant by some guy I didn’t know, but after having the baby (a girl, if I remember right), evidently there were some complications from the pregnancy and she died. I want to think it was a blood clot that went unnoticed and then like that she was gone.

I remember we heard about it when I was in my summer government class and it was surreal. I, as well as a number of my fellow students, hadn’t talked to her in quite some time, but a lot of the girls in my class were crying. I think I went to the viewing although I don’t know for sure. And the daughter went to live with the father who joined the Navy or something of that sort. No doubt someone’s parents ended up raising the child to a large degree. That girl is about fourteen now, which was about the age Jen and I were when we first kissed.

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February 6, 2011

West River

By welcometoflavorcountry

I grew up in the same neighborhood as Tim Showalter.

Our families went to the same church for a number of years and I was in the same grade as his older brother. After I graduated college we got to know each other fairly well while we both lived in our hometown. We’re still friends although now he lives in Philadelphia and I live in Boston.

Tim is also a musician and under the moniker Strand of Oaks he has put out a remarkable album, Pope Killdragon. Having known Tim for a long time, I thought that connection made for a unique opportunity for my own creativity. I decided to take each of the songs on the album and use them as inspiration to write something. Hopefully you like some of what you read. You can listen to each of the songs off Pope Killdragon here.

 

1. West River

Listen to me read this entry by clicking here.

“Under the Bridge” by Red Hot Chili Peppers (RHCP) was one of those songs that was big about the time I was in middle school. It was the reason for the band’s propulsion into somewhat mainstream knowledge before they then seemed to disappear for a few years only to find, years later, their album Californication available quite prevalently in used CD bins all over the country (right near the excessive copies of REM’s Monster).

Beyond its prevalence on pop radio in the early 1990s, the other place “Under the Bridge” made a mark was at middle school dances. Tied with the pressure to participate on sports teams, school dances were always one of the most nerve-wracking experiences of what was already a considerably awkward time period for myself, and from what I’ve come to understand, every other American. Amazingly, I survived this all without getting braces, my perfect teeth being compensation for my balding that started at nineteen. Regardless, it did little to take away from my middle-ground position in the hierarchy of the early teens.

Neither popular nor a total outcast, my position in the academically accelerated classes with some of the other students who also happened to be popular enabled me to have a connection, however tenuous, with a number of the attractive girls in our grade as I had four classes a day with the same group of twenty-five or thirty students. While the position we were put in by being placed into what (for lack of a better term) was the smart kids’ classes is a story for another time, it did enable me to fantasize about having a chance with being able to date one of those beautiful girls like Sinead McGahan or Sarah Kanagy.

The other thing that “Under the Bridge” did for me was tap into a sense of introversion and melancholy that would often come to define my condition throughout middle and high school. The lyrics, although simple, seemed to suggest a longing, slightly mournful tone from Anthony Keidis. I’m not sure all the students at my middle school appreciated Keidis’ sense of loneliness in the midst of a metropolitan area or his interest in shedding tears. We just liked it because it was a good pop song with which we were able to sing along. But I could still sense something in the low-key nature of the music that made me interested in whatever deeper emotion that the RHCP were trying to tap into.

Thankfully, “Under the Bridge” was not a power ballad or cheesy slow song. And seeing as to how those were the types of songs that required awkward intimacy at middle school dances, I have no association with it and dancing with two of the most prevalent camps of girls of which I was aware of in middle school: those who were interested in me but which I wasn’t interested, and those with which I had no shot. Inevitably, dances were a place where, like much of middle school, unease reigned and emotions were thwarted. After dances my mom would come pick me up in the early evening (when all the dances seemed to end) and ask me if I had a good time. I always felt uncomfortable talking with my mom about anything that might involve boners on my part (as dancing with girls was likely to lead to).

But when I hear or think about “Under the Bridge” I often recall that drive from my middle school after the dances. While short in mileage it seemed to take forever. And the whole time I had my head filled with hopes and wishes of relationships, and so many things I didn’t understand about girls and dating and boners.

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October 7, 2010

The Persian Gulf War

By welcometoflavorcountry

You can hear me do a reading of this piece as part of the One Step Beyond Radio podcast from September 21, 2010.

Originally from issue #19, March 2010.

The Persian Gulf War started in Iraq on Thursday, January 17th, 1991. Here in the States, it started in the early evening on Wednesday night. I was eleven years old at the time and in sixth grade. Seeing that it was Wednesday night, I was at church that evening, taking part in youth group activities. I was a dutiful attendant of the church youth group. I hadn’t reached my disenfranchised teenage state as of yet and while my life consisted of a general nervous and anxious disposition as well as having a girlfriend for one or two weeks (as was the custom of the time), things were pretty good for me. I wrote stories about my two-year-old cat as a superhero/detective for my one-page (ONE PAGE?! ARE YOU SERIOUS? I CAN’T WRITE ONE PAGE! This is seriously what went through my head when we went over the assignment at the beginning of the school year) hand-written weekly writing assignments for my English class. My English teacher’s name was Mrs. Bontrager and she had really long brown hair and I thought she was pretty, which was one of the only times I’ve ever found any of my teachers attractive. It was a simple beauty, which was added to by her friendliness and patience. At that time I didn’t appreciate her personality and how calm she was teaching sixth graders. God, what a pain we must have been. But I digress.

Somewhere along the way I was indoctrinated with the ideas of premillenial dispensationalism (the Biblical notion of Jesus Christ’s immanent returning to earth and ruling for 1000 years – although there’s a lot more to it than just that) and the Rapture (where a trumpet sounds and all the Christians are taken up to Heaven). And someone had put the idea in my head that the Persian Gulf War was going to be the beginning of the end of the world. Thanks to Iraq’s geographic location and that it contained the ancient city of Babylon (which is mentioned frequently in Bible prophecy), multiple sources assured us that there was a good chance that attacking Iraq and its gigantic army might start the end of the world. An attack against Iraq would no doubt lead to an attack against Israel (which it actually did, but the Israelis never retaliated. Praise Jebus!), which would then lead to an all-Arab army moving on to Jerusalem to crush the Jews. It was all in the Bible. I bought in to much of this partially because I respected pastors and thought they knew everything and also there was an anxious part of me that was ready to give in to any fears. I also was probably already watching Jack Van Impe at that point and finding he and his wife ridiculous but also compelling (the guy can cite Bible verses off the top of his head!)

My mom and I listened to the radio on our way to church that night. The news was on and things were gearing up. I think the bombs may have been dropping as we entered the church parking lot. And I sat there in the passenger seat and thought to myself at eleven years old, “Well, this is it. It’s the end of the world.” And I knew that this would be a war that would potentially last for years and engulf the whole world in the process. I would no doubt either be killed somehow (my neurosis wasn’t big on details) or if I survived to eighteen I would be drafted and that was that. I distinctly recall thinking, “I’m never going to get married. This is it for me.” It was a rather gloomy evening and honestly, I blame a lot of it on the media and even more so on my general semi-paranoid state.

Of course in youth group that night it was hard to talk about much else and afterwards on the way home my mom and I listened to the news some more. Over the next few days it became apparent that the Iraqi Army, in spite of being one of the largest armies in the world at that time, wasn’t really much of a fighting force. The one hundred hour war, the media called it. It took less than a week.

As is normally the case, the war was an excuse for Americans to chant “U-S-A! U-S-A!” repeatedly in large gatherings and to listen to Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American” ad nausea. Because if there’s something to be proud of, it’s doing the work for rich, oil-producing countries that then don’t even foot the entire bill. (Saudi Arabia and Kuwait only paid for two-thirds of the war.) I have never entirely understood patriotism but I have learned that chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” always brings life to a party and it’s even more fun when no one knows you’re being ironic. However, I have never appreciated “Proud to be an American” primarily because I didn’t exactly understand how the lyrics to the song relate to many of the wars we’ve fought. Evidently pre-emptive war somehow kept us free. Or building a coalition of forces to take out the Iraqi army that had invaded Kuwait because Iraq was almost bankrupt and owed money to Kuwait from fighting a war against Iran for eight years in the 1980s in which we supported Iraq with weapons and supplies in the hope that Iraq could keep Iran in place because we felt threatened by their Islamic Revolution that occurred because the U.S. had backed the Shah of Iran who was a brutal leader against the Iranians…somehow that kept us free. I wondered if it mattered that at the time, I didn’t have much of an interest in “stand[ing] up next to” Mr. Greenwood to “defend her still today.” Did that make me a bad person? A bad American? I couldn’t really comprehend a situation where Iraq would attack us. I just figured that America would send me over to the Middle East to fight in the pre-Armageddon that Hal Lindsay and his moustache had predicted in the 70s. And that would be that. I’d be dead at eighteen from an artillery shell from some coalition of Arab armies aligned with Russia. What a gyp.

Of course, that day never came and instead I breathed a sigh of relief when we all – the whole coalition – pulled the entire thing off (thanks for doing your part Bangladesh!) And so I relaxed as much as an eleven-year kid working on a heavy case of anxiety could. Until the next year when I turned twelve and the Presidential elections came on in full swing and I began to wonder…could Bill Clinton be the anti-Christ?

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