Forcefield
Update to the last post
I told this to my mom and she filled in a huge gap:
All of us kindergarteners were wearing “Indian vests” made out of paper bags that we had drawn on with markers. And we had paper bag headbands with colored feathers sticking out.
Jimmy kindly said that our costumes were offensive. I guess he was trying to educate us politically and let us know that American Indians were people, and my classmates thought he had just come from hunting buffalo on the plains.
Man, that must have been awkward. This would be like if I went to talk about being Jewish and a bunch of kindergarten kids were wearing Hassidic hats and fake hair.
MAN.
In Washington, near where my uncle Jimmy grew up. Jimmy is/was Muckleshoot (I am not sure what tense you use to describe the race of a dead man. It’s not like he became Chinese after he was buried, but he’s no longer with us and it feels like everything needs to be in past tense. Anyway.) and was kind enough to come into my kindergarten class to answer questions about what it was like to be American Indian.
I remember two things about this:
1. My mom picked him up and brought him to my class, and they were a little late because of traffic, which made me embarrassed.
2. One of the first questions was “How did Indians communicate with each other? Did they draw pictures?”
My uncle must have felt like an ape.
Flying to Warshington tomorrow. I imagine the same feeling will hit me all weekend: it will be like waking up from a nightmare about going to class one day and realizing I’ve never gone to any previous classes and the final is THAT DAY and I’m screwed.
But the feeling isn’t the dream. The feeling is waking up. “Oh right, I’m not in college anymore and I haven’t been for a while, so haha what a dumb nightmare!”
Except this really happened to me, before I had transferred out of Washington. Second quarter of freshman year I took a philosophy class that met early in the morning. I barely went, assuming I could skate by on knowledge that had carried over from the previous quarter, when I had excelled in another course with a similar reading list. I was also “going through shit,” which is honestly a dumb excuse for anything. I got a 0.0 on the midterm. 13/100. Dropped the class the day after that grade came in. A zero point zero! Isn’t that kind of incredible? Isn’t that impressive in a weird way?
Bossk. Everybody knows who Bossk is. You can’t even say it’s just because he looks cool, because everybody also knows who Lobot is, and Lobot looks so goofy.
Knowing that you and I somehow know about Bossk and Lobot makes me happy.
To complement my recent post about how digging deep into Grandaddy’s non-album tracks gave me one of their best songs, I’ll post “Red River” by Walkmen.
The Walkmen are one of my favorite bands. They make very tight albums, all of which are worth owning. And then they put out one of their best, most rocking songs out on Music From and Inspired By Spider-Man 3, which is an album in literally tens of collections. I’m sure this was just a song that didn’t cohesively fit onto one of their studio LPs, and their management made a deal to get them onto the Spider-Man 3 soundtrack. I’m sure this song wasn’t actually inspired in any way by Spider-Man 3. But damn it if that weird source didn’t give us a kickass Walkmen screamer.
