Halloween

It's been a pretty hectic week and I'm finally getting a chance to relax and post Halloween pictures.

Last Friday, I took the kids to get pumpkins. Two minutes before we set out to the pumpkin place we go to every year, it started pouring rain, of course. Fortunately, the rain eased to a hard drizzle by the time we got to the pumpkin place.



It was fun watching them scope out the pumpkins, picking out the perfect one. I remembered doing the same-- there was something about it-- the pumpkin that matched the perfect one that you saw in your head.

The next night, we put newspaper on the dining room table and using the kit Kim picked up, carved the pumpkins.



While they worked, it was my job to sift through the "pumpkin glop"...



to extricate the seeds.



More on that later.

When they finished, I put tea light candles in the jack'o'lanterns and put them on the back porch.







Wondering about those pumpkins seeds? I cleaned them and put them in a bowl of saltwater, put them in the refrigerator for a day. Then I spread them out on a cookie sheet...



...and baked them at 350 degrees for about 35 minutes or so, turning them with a spatula several times.



One of the things I love about being a parent is that it gives you an excuse to do things that you're purportedly too old to do now, like pumpkin-carving. And to get some pumpkin seeds while you're at it. Maybe next year, I'll do a costume too, if I can think of a good one. The kids both had great costumes this year. Mel was one of the characters from High School Musical.



Adam, the Evil Dictator, became the Even More Evil Dictator, Dick Cheney, for Halloween. The picture is actually missing part of the costume-- a flannel shirt and a toy hunting rifle.



In the meantime, I'll post soon about the role that my love of pumpkin seeds played in my days as a fourth grade "playah." In honor of Halloween, here's a video of the Dead Kennedys doing my favorite Halloween song, about people who live their true lives only when they think that society approves.



Halloween

So it's Halloween
And you feel like dancin'
And you feel like shinin'
And you feel like letting loose

Whatcha gonna be
Babe, you better know
And you better plan
Better plan all day

Better plan all week
Better plan all month
Better plan all year

You're dressed up like a clown
Putting on your act
It's the only time all year
You'll ever admit that

I can see your eyes
I can see your brain
Baby, nothing's changed
[repeat]

You're still hiding in a mask
You take your fun seriously
No, don't blow this year's chance
Tomorrow your mold goes back on

After Halloween

You go to work today
You'll go to work tomorrow
Shitfaced tonight
You'll brag about it for months

Remember what I did
Remember what I was
Back on Halloween

But what's in between
Where are your ideas
You sit around and dream
For next Halloween

Why not everyday
Are you so afraid
What will people say
[repeat]

After Halloween

Because your role is planned for you
There's nothing you can do
But stop and think it through
But what will the boss say to you

And what will your girlfriend say to you
And the people out on the street they might glare at you
And whadya know you're pretty self-conscious too

So you run back and stuff yourselves in rigid business costumes
Only at night to score is your leather uniform exhumed
Why don't you take your social regulations
And shove 'em up your ass

Catching Up Friday Random Ten

One of my co-worker's at Jury's has been sick, so I've been covering his shifts the last week and a half-- it's gone a long way toward helping me catch up financially from my stint of working only part-time.

Got my mid-term grade in my Biology class-- I've got a B+ right now.

I got a call from my best friend Jim yesterday with good news: his mother had come through triple bypass surgery successfully. Kim and I are waiting to hear some good news on her niece's husband, who is in a coma since falling off a roof on Sunday. Keep him in your thoughts and prayers.


1. Grace- Jeff Buckley
2. Rose Darling- Steely Dan
3. Power In The Darkness- Tom Robinson Band
4. Complete Control- The Clash
5. L'America- The Doors
6. Viva Las Vegas- Elvis Presley
7. Whenever You're On My Mind- Marshall Crenshaw
8. Slip Kid- The Who
9. Yalla, Yalla- Joe Strummer and the Mesaleroes
10. Electric Guitar- Talking Heads

Notes:
1. From the wonderful post-humous album of the same name.
2. From the Countdown To Ecstasy album.
3. Tom Robinson mixed music and politics as well as anybody.
4. The Clash's account of dealing with record companies.
5. From L.A. Woman, the last Doors album that Jim Morrison sang on.
6. Elvis obviously celebrating his return to "Top-Earning Dead Celebrity" status.
7. Marshall Crenshaw should have been way bigger than he was. You might remember him as the guy playing Buddy Holly in the movie "La Bamba."
8. From one of the Who's lesser-known, but great albums, The Who By Numbers. Also one of my favorite album covers.
9. Joe Strummer twice in my Friday Random Ten? All right!
10. From Fear Of Music, one of my favorite albums of the seventies.

The King Is Still The King

Last year, after a long run, Elvis Presley fell from the #1 spot in the "Top-Earning Dead Celebrities" list. When Kurt Cobain's widow Courteney Love sold her dead husband's catalog, Cobain was vaulted to the #1 spot.

Cobain's reign has proved to be fleeting; according to Forbes Magazine, Elvis is once again the king of dead celebrities, earning $49 Million last year, beating out his main competitors, John Lennon and Peanuts creator Charles Schultz by wide margins. Cobain didn't even chart this year. Eat the King's dust, Cobain!

I Feel Like Nigel Tufnel These Days...

My lab partners in my Biology class and I got the go-ahead to do our group report on the subject we chose-- food allergies. We chose it because we had experience with it-- with family members, or, in my case, personally. I've mentioned before that I have celiac disease, an autoimmune condition that is triggered by wheat gluten.

It's entailed a lot of changes, diet-wise. I've mentioned before how I pretty much lived on sandwiches for long stretches of my life. I missed sandwiches.

Fortunately, I discovered that there are brands of bread made of non-wheat ingredients. They're dense and taste a little different from regular bread, but hell, it's bread, and I'm happy to have sandwiches again. There's just one little thing: the bread is small. You can see in the picture at the top that it's much smaller than the cold cuts and cheese. It's left me feeling a little like Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel. It's a complete catastrophe. I'll have to talk to my road manager about it.

The Greatest Sin

When I was a kid, my father and I would stay up late and watch old movies together. One of the movies we watched was Compulsion, starring Bradford Dillman and Dean Stockwell as two young guys who attempt, unsuccessfully, to pull off the perfect crime-- kidnapping and murdering a young boy and collecting a ransom from the family. Bradford Dillman's character is super-creepy, frequently referring to his mother as "Mumsy."

The movie was a lightly fictionalized account of one of Chicago's most infamous murder cases, the 1924 murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. I remember my father telling me about the case. Two young guys who were rich and very intelligent-- at 18 and 19 years of age, both had already graduated college. Leopold was enrolled in the University of Chicago's law school, and Loeb was planning to enroll. They lured a neighborhood kid, Bobby Franks, into a car, where the smashed his head with a chisel until he was unconcious, then suffocated him. They dumped Franks' body into a culvert and poured hydrochloric acid on his body to make identification more difficult. They typed up and sent a ransom note, though they were later to state that their main motive was the thrill of getting away with the crime; their rich families gave them as much money as they wanted. The fancied themselves "Nietzschean supermen" who could commit a crime and get away with it.

Bobby Franks' body was found and identified, despite Leopold and Loeb's efforts to thwart it. When the police returned his remains and effects to his family, among the effects were a pair of glasses. The family told the police that Bobby Franks did not wear glasses. It occurred to Chicago Police detectives that the glasses might have belonged to the perpetrators. They consulted the Almer Coe company, which had made the glasses, and discovered that the company had sold only three pairs of glasses with that particular frame. One was sold to an old lady, another to an attorney, Jerome Frank, who had been travelling in Europe at the time of the murder. That third pair had been sold to Nathan Leopold. Leopold was brought in for questioning, and then Loeb. The "Nietzschean supermen" quickly broke down and then tried to finger the other perpetrator as the murderer. They were, they told the police, going to demonstrate their intellectual superiority to the world with their crime.

Interestingly, Jerome Frank would have one more brief moment of fame in the 1950's, when, as a federal appellate judge, he denied the last appeal of convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenburg





The boys' families hired "Attorney For the Damned" Clarence Darrow to defend the boys. Darrow concentrated not on exonnerating the boys but in saving them from the death penalty. He was successful in this. The two were convicted and sent to Joliet Prison. Loeb was murdered by another inmate in prison in 1936 and Leopold was paroled in 1958. He donated the infamous glasses to the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago Historical Museum) upon his release.

Reading up on the case this morning, I found an answer to a question I'd had for years-- why hadn't Leopold realized that the glasses were missing in the first place? I discovered that he hadn't realized that he had them with him. He'd been prescribed the glasses when he'd had headaches months before; he'd worn the glasses for a few weeks, until the headaches disappeared. He no longer wore the glasses and didn't know that they were in a pocket of the jacket he wore when he and Loeb dumped poor Bobby Franks' body in the Eggars Woods Forest Preserve.

It had never occurred to me that I might actually someday see the infamous glassses. They're in a display at the Chicago History Museum on how historians determine the authenticity of alleged historical artifacts. On Sunday, I looked with macabre fascination at this item I'd heard about as a kid and I thought about Leopold and Loeb. Their crime was especially horrifying to me-- Bobby Franks was about my own son's age. It occurred to me, though, that in the end, Leopold and Loeb's greatest sin might not have even been murder-- it may well have been their hubris, thinking that they were smarter than everybody else, and thinking that they could completely control their own fates.

What Does This Bode?

Today, Adam and I went down to the "Museum Formerly Known As The Chicago Historical Society." It was closed for nearly a year, and re-emerged as the Chicago History Museum.

The Chicago History Museum is the plain-jane stepsister of Chicago Museums. Because it's not as flashy as other museums in Chicago-- no World War II fighters hanging from the ceiling or dinosaur fossils gracing the main floor-- it gets lost in the shuffle in the Chicago museum pecking order. It is, however, a favorite. I'll be posting over the next few days about the dense and wonderful visit Adam and I had to the museum today. But before that, I have to post briefly about a strange thing that happened today.

As we left our apartment to walk to the el, to go to the museum, we stopped to take note of a couple of bumper stickers we saw on a car. We stopped to take pictures of the stickers, which were on a hybrid car with Wisconsin plates. We surmised that perhaps the young guys who live next door had a college friend visiting.





We had a grand time at the museum and took the bus back home. When it came time for him to go to my ex's home, we got in my Blazer and got on the Kennedy Expressway. As we drove along, I pointed out that the car in the lane next to us had the "If You're Not Outraged..." bumper sticker we'd seen on the car parked in front of our home earlier in the day. At the same time, we both saw that it also had the "Impeach Bush" sticker. I think at the same moment, we both noticed the Wisconsin plates (cue "Twilight Zone" theme) and realized it was the car we'd seen in front of our home earlier in the day.

Does it bode good things to come? Hell, the Boston Red Sox just won the World Series for the second time in three years. Anything can happen.

A Promise Kept

Most days I take the bus and el to work. I've mentioned before how one of the things I've enjoyed lately is that it's allowed me to read more.

When my friend Mark died last year, a bunch of us helped his family clear out his house. They told us to take anything that had some personal meaning to us. Among the thousands of books in the house was a weathered copy of Jack Kerouac's classic On The Road. It was beside Mark's bed, and I knew that it was important to him. I realized that it was a book that helped define a generation, the so-called "Beat Generation," whose influence rippled to Mark, me and the people I went to college with, people who are my closest friends to this day. When I saw it, through my stunned grief, I realized that I had referred many times over the years to this book but hadn't ever read it. It was among the items I took. I made a promise to him that I'd read it eventually.

For the last year, the book sat in the garage with a handful of other things I'd grabbed that weekend. My grief was still too fresh to deal with it. When my landlord began the renovations this summer, I had to move those things out of the garage. When I started school, beginning the next phase of my life, and with my grief having become more manageable, I decided it was time to start reading the book.

Today, while sitting at the Wilson el stop here in Chicago, on the way to work, I finally finished On The Road.

I had a lot of feelings reading the book. Part of the enjoyment of reading the book is the near-poetic rhythm and pace of the prose. The travels of principals of the book, "Dean Moriarity" and "Sal Paradise," obviously Neal Cassady and Kerouac himself, evoked my own memories of travels and adventures with friends.

On the other hand, I found myself uncomfortable with how the women in their lives seemed to be second-class citizens, mere props in their lives, and how the children of those unions seemed to be non-entities.

Despite that, I can see how and why this book inspired so many people in the sixties. After childhoods spent in bland suburbs, the depictions of life lived on a level of passion must have been seductive and led to many road trips and adventures.

The group of people I met in college came from suburbs, small towns, the city-- many places. I think it would be safe to say that the common experience most of us shared was that a lot of our childhoods were staggeringly boring. Our parents were concerned with getting into, and staying in the middle class, and the fact that we were often bored to tears was rarely, if ever, noticed. When we all met in college, there was a joy and excitement that we'd found kindred spirits, people who wanted to live passionate lives. There are a bunch of things-- music, art, literature-- that were totems and shared experiences of this exhilirating time in our lives. The Replacements, R.E.M., the Velvet Underground, Monty Python-- and On The Road-- were among the things that symbolized our shared experiences.

Most of us have entered middle age as parents. A couple of years ago, I was visiting Deadspot, one of my friends from those college days, and while our sons played games and watched movies, he told me about the running joke he and his son have about the fictional video game, Gandhi Street Fighter. Everybody involved, including our boys, obviously, got the joke. And as I finally finished On The Road today, I realized how we've found a balance in our lives. We've continued to live our lives on a level of passion. We love art, movies and literature, good conversations, laughter, living rebelliously and great friendships. We still travel and have adventures. But our children are not incidental in our lives; they are the center of our lives. We have learned from both our boring childhoods and the exciting first years of adulthood that we had-- to teach our children that you can live a passionate life while living up to our responsibilities as adults, and as parents. And one the central missions in our lives is to make sure that our children don't grow up as bored as we did, while still evolving into functional adults.

Tomorrow, I'll put Mark's copy of On The Road into storage in the basement. Tomorrow night, my kids, Kim and I will carve the pumpkins we bought tonight, and talk and laugh. We'll talk about current events, politics, school, what my kids are reading, listen to music and have a grand old time.

And someday, one of my kids is going to mention On The Road. And when that day comes, I'll go down to the basement and fish the book out and give it to him or her. I hope that the road my kids take is as rich and fulfilling for them as its been for me, and that they find as good a group of people-- people like Tim, Dan, Ron, Andreas, Jim and of course Mark-- as I've managed to find.

Southern Treats

Had time to do some shopping the other day. It was quite the relief to pay for groceries with cash rather than a credit card.

A few months ago, Jewel's, one of the big food chains here in Chicago, mysteriously stopped carrying Talk O' Texas pickled okra, and started carrying a gourmet brand of pickled okra. In a word, the new one sucked.

Then, just as mysteriously, they started carrying it again. I treated myself to a jar of these little delights.

The other thing I was looking for was hot peppers in vinegar. When I was a kid, my family would travel down to central Louisiana to visit the relatives of my father's stepfather. My dad's step-aunt, Florence, would cook us a great "dinner"-- what they called lunch-- every day. My brothers and I would go back in her enormous garden and pick green beans for our meal. I remember a lot of the dishes that she cooked-- "shelly beans"-- green beans, pinto beans and bacon cooked in vinegar. Pork chops. Fried chicken. Corn bread.

At the end of our trip, we'd drive back to Chicago with several Mason jars of hot peppers Aunt Florence had picked in her garden and pickled in pint Mason jars.

Back in Chicago, my mother would make a dish Aunt Florence had taught her to make. She'd cook up navy beans (also known as Great Northern Beans) with a ham bone and a little salt. She'd serve it over corn bread. You'd sprinkle vinegar from the Mason jar of peppers we'd brought back from Louisiana over it. After the meal, we'd refill the jar with vinegar for the next time. We'd have this dish a few times a year. The jars would last a couple of years, until the next time we went down to Louisiana.

Aunt Florence has been dead for years, but I still have this dish once in a while since I discovered years ago that I could find the pickled peppers in stores in Chicago. I've adapted it a little. In the interest of lower fat consumption, I use turkey ham. And since I have celiac, I have the concoction over brown rice, rather than corn bread (corn bread has wheat flour in it).

Sometimes, when I have this dish, I think of a poem I first read in sixth grade, John Tobias' Reflections On A Gift Of A Watermelon Pickle. It's a poem I've come to understand better as I've become older. The poem is a rumination on a summer long ago with an old friend. The narrator reflects on a summer filled when the purpose of knees were to be skinned, watermelons ruled and unicorns were possible.

I remember those trips to Louisiana-- the sights, smells and sounds of Louisiana and the gentle kindness of Aunt Florence, who I always loved seeing. I remember how those Mason jars of peppers used to seem to stretch those trips to Louisiana out for a couple of years. Whenever I sit down to my adapted Louisiana "dinner," it brings me back to those happy summers.