This post is another re-run, from July 18, 2011 off E/E/. What is about July.... more news today of innocent people slaughtered at the movies. Our nation allows humans to carry weapons, and on occasion someone who shouldn't couldn't have one, gets one. And death is on repeat.....
On July 18, 1984 my family was driving back from Kelly's Island after picking me up from summer camp. I am thirteen years old and beyond myself that this washed up rock babe Tina Turner is hogging my airwaves with this crappy comeback album. Little did i know she would choke the life out of the hit parade for THREE MORE SINGLES. What's Love Got to do with it ? I don't know, shut the fuck up and play some goddamn new wave music i would think in my head. some Hall and Oates, anything ! My parents quietly talked about her comeback from Ike beatings but my sister and I could always still hear them. Clearly, I thought, this woman didn't get beat enough. Evil me had enough of the 70's hogging my newave airwaves. In the back seat of the sweltering car, I was very glad to be headed towards a real shower. Clothing. Bug Free. I had a great time running around the beaches of the Island, not knowing any of the kids and not caring. A vacation of silence from the human race. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the other kids in my bunk, dances, crafts, hikes and all the cute boys, but I actually just asked to go for some peace and quiet after the hell of middle school where you know no one and look like bettie page's horrible offspring with glasses and braces. Sold all my candy bars and won my own vacation before eighth grade. But a few days of horrible food and sleepless hot nights, I was ready for air conditioned suburbian comfort my parents provided. Maybe not my mom's food, but certainly a soda or two. On the radio the news came on and my parents could not act fast enough. Not that they normally would have censored us from the news that a jobless man from Canton named James Huberty ( the not so hot guy above here )had walked into a San Ysidro McDonalds in California where he relocated to and killed MANY innocent people with a gun. Actually, many guns. Women. Children. Workers. No one who had ever done anything to this man. They played a tape of someone talking about it that had been in the area and the chaos in the background was hysterical, horrible. It iced my hot suffering preteen body like a quick cut you don't expect, cold. I felt numb. Those poor people, or their loved ones who live on or lived through. I think we had just been to a McDonalds ! I felt very sick and somehow in the silence of the car after the news had ended and my father drove on through Lorain County, I was never a really a child or felt childlike again. After a few days in an eden of adultless fun and frolic with faceless peers; the reality of my future had come to call of odd occasional violence, unexpected but sometimes meditated by madmen. A false notion of safe in my burbworld in heartland ended over the years of Dunblane, Columbine, Long Island Rail Road and even a madman Mark Cunningham at Kent State University, hunting students at my own school during the winter of my junior year. Not that I thought the world would not be in Mad Max Situation by the time I was 40 with drooling zombies, commies or aliens would take over my american dream ( hey, it's the 80's here still in my rewind ), but the confirmation was a shadow over the rest of the summer. So the other day, when someone again too sick for rational thought has access to ammunition to kill and destroy, I often think back to that moment of driving home after the news of a madman shot thru my summer. the shots of a madman taking everyone with him while being hunted by the Kent police still screams through my dreams on occasion. But lately, I have been thinking about my own protection and it scares me to think that way. What's love got to do with it ? anyway....
