Out of the Nineties: In which we attain power through organizing

My mother remarried when I was in college. When she moved in with her new husband, I had to sort through and consolidate what was left of my childhood in her basement. The item I excavated that I cherished most, whose attached memories were most pure, was a huge chest of Transformers from the Eighties, most of which I’d shoplifted. I found that of the toy robots I’d kept, the ones I loved most were the subsets that combined Voltron-like into one master robot. Constructicons, Protectobots, Predacons, Aerialbots, Stunticons, Technobots, Combaticons, Terrorcons—every set of five to six individual pieces, each with its own self-contained personality and story, combined to attain a power and complexity none of the individual parts could attain on their own. These were the only pieces of my childhood I kept.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which I nod to Bob

When I tell people now that I was once an evangelical Christian, most don’t believe it. Many times I tell them it’s a phase every kid in Kansas goes through, and remind them that this was the state that twice elected a school board that forced teachers to teach creationism alongside evolution in science class. I like to say that the more I learned, the less blind faith I placed in fundamentalist Christian doctrine. This is only true to a point—the full truth is that I simply supplanted my mythologies, mostly through the music I listened to. I segued out of CCM into the music it was aping—heartland rock like Bruce and U2, “spiritually conscious” hip-hop like PM Dawn and Arrested Development, loopy power pop like the Breeders and Throwing Muses. But mostly, I listened to Dylan. I started with his late-70s Christian phase, then plunged right into his ’62-’69 heyday. What I loved most about him wasn’t his nasally voice, but the persona he created. Robert Zimmerman left his Midwestern home, moved to New York City, absorbed the world of American folk and pop culture, and remade himself as Bob Dylan. And everyone believed him.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which the lens wanders

In the fall of my sophomore year in college, I took a photography class to fulfill a gen ed requirement. I photographed fenceposts, country roads, and coeds, but my professor never gave me above a C. He said I lacked focus, and had a tendency to lose the subject in the background.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Big month so far!

Wow, so many developments over this past month! I figured I'd take the day off from updates to The List and the Story to give said developments in list form:

•  Patrick Madden wrote a wonderful little review of The List and the Story on Brevity this week - you can read it here, and I also added it to Further Reading.
  
• Superstition Review released a podcast of me reading my piece "The Revelator," and I also wrote a guest blog post in conjunction with its release about The List and the Story, which I also added to Further Reading.
• I also got some nice side traffic from my caps lock rant on dog-on-girl sex fiends misunderstanding my post "The Dog Who Made the Little Girl Cry on the F Train," which was retweeted frequently after my friend Kris Jansma commented on it. 

OK, all for now. Tomorrow, back to the Nineties!

Out of the Nineties: In which I fall in

For my first two years of college, my sole social connections were members of the track and cross country teams. My first girlfriend, a devout Christian dairy farmer, was the star distance runner my freshman year. She broke up with me right before the end of the school year, writing me a letter saying she just couldn’t foresee being married to me. My second girlfriend beat out my first girlfriend as the number one runner on the team, then dropped out of school when her other boyfriend picked her up and took her back to Oklahoma City.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which I channel Woody Guthrie

In total, I lived in 17 different apartments and dorm rooms in the Nineties. One roommate, in 1997, postulated a connection between this and the fact that I went to seven different schools in the Eighties. She told me I had no home.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which I weigh my options

Hope is always strongest when plans are weakest. I knew, having survived childhood and high school, I was destined for something great. So the summer of my graduation, I enrolled at a private Mennonite college in southeastern Kansas. Then I enlisted with the Marines. And I started working at the plastic factory. I had options. When the registrar at the Mennonite college called me and asked how I was going to pay my outstanding balance of $12,000 before registering, I hung up. When I found out that the other recruits cussed and had sex and weren’t terribly impressed with my religious sensibility or my ability to run faster than them, I stopped answering my Staff Sergeant’s calls. And after 27 straight nights of the midnight shift sorting Cool Whip containers and sippy cups, I called my cousin Monica to ask her about the community college she’d attended before becoming a dental assistant. I enrolled at Highland Community College three days after classes had started, and begged the coach there to let me run for the track team.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which I stumble into something, and duck

After meeting Wayne Martin I also discovered my half brothers, who also went to my high school. Both of them were gifted athletically—one was a star player on the junior varsity football team as a freshman, and the other was already winning varsity track races as a sophomore. By then I’d solidified my reputation as one of the top five worst players ever to attempt the game of football at Lawrence High School. But three months before I was to graduate the track coach heard I was related to a great runner, and he made me run once around the track as fast as I could. I ran it in 55 seconds, which would make me a solid backup on the 1600-meter relay team. So I joined the track team, and I won my first race. The rest of the team was as astonished as I was, especially when I ducked to avoid the tape at the finish line.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which I work well alone

My second job was at the local publisher Allen Press, cleaning the bathrooms. My favorite part of this job was the weekends, when they were closed and I could steal books from the stock shelves and mailroom in the basement. In that basement I first read Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with his illustrations. I swiped it thinking it was a religious tract, similar to the Chick Publications pamphlets I collected. Reading the Proverbs of Hell in that dim, solitary basement, with the pigeons in the ventilation shafts piping like siphons of Hades, terrified me more than watching the world end on The Day After in grade school, and for far different reasons. The seeds of doubt—in my goodness, in my salvation, in the benevolence of the world—were sown in the underworld of Allen Press.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

My latest caps lock rant, into cyberspace

YOU, MOTHERFUCKERS, HAVE FUNDAMENTALLY MISUNDERSTOOD MY INTENT IN WRITING THE BLOG POST "THE DOG WHO MADE THE LITTLE GIRL CRY ON THE F TRAIN." WHILE I LIKE TO SEE A SPIKE IN MY HIT COUNT AS MUCH AS THE NEXT WRITER, IT DISTURBS ME, AND BREAKS MY HEART FOR YOU, TO SEE HOW MANY OF YOU GOT TO THAT POST BY GOOGLING SOME VARIANT OF "DOG F**** LITTLE GIRL." I MEAN, YOU PROBABLY ALREADY HAD YOUR FLY UNZIPPED WHEN YOU STUMBLED UPON AN INSTANCE OF GENUINE EMPATHY I OBSERVED IN THE NEW YORK CITY SUBWAY. THERE IS NO DOG-ON-GIRL SEX, AND IT REALLY CREEPS ME OUT TO THINK SO MANY OF YOU PERVS ARE READING IT WITH THAT INTENT. HOPEFULLY YOU STOPPED READING A SENTENCE OR TWO IN, AND FOUND SOMETHING MORE SUITABLE TO YOUR MASTURBATORY NEEDS. LORD KNOWS THERE'S ENOUGH OF THAT STUFF ONLINE.

Out of the Nineties: In which I work well with others

I had two jobs my senior year. One was working at the Red Hot Garage, the Chicago-style grill across New Hampshire Street from Wayne Martin’s furniture store and next door to the Bottleneck, the main music venue for KU students. The sound guy always came into Red Hot for lunch, and in recompense for the free Chicago dogs he let me sit in with him during the shows at night. I had just burnt all my cassette tapes of secular music and only had my recordings of bland CCM, so I was a blank slate. I took everything in—reggae, punk, power pop, folkies—but stubbornly refused to buy their records or commit their names to memory. But then there were the aftershows at the Outhouse—literally an outhouse on the old gravel road that 15th Street turned into east of town, where the skinheads, anarchists, goths, and stoners all went to mosh until night became morning. I had no parental supervision so I came home at daybreak sweaty, took a shower, and repressed all memory of the glorious, bruising night, then went to my morning bible study.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which I'm stuck in the middle

For the high school football end-of-season banquet, my mother made me invite Greg Proctor, whom I hadn’t talked to since he'd beaten her unconscious with a chair and she'd initiated divorce proceedings. She was still as confused as I was about whom I should think of as my father—the man she was married to for eleven years whose name I had, or the man who’d left her fifteen years ago and whom she’d just seen again after I’d discovered him. Greg Proctor came gladly, wearing a black leather flight jacket with a sheep’s wool collar. He must have been trying to tell my mother that he was fashion-conscious, but it embarrassed the hell out of me to have to sit with two stylistically challenged parents who so disliked each other. I introduced Rob Coleman, the black offensive lineman whose sister was married to Wayne Martin, to Greg Proctor as Uncle Rob. Greg Proctor looked at him rigidly and said, “This guy is not your uncle.” My mother never asked me to invite him to anything again.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which I lay waste

I thoroughly wasted my senior year of high school reforming myself in the image of Christ. I burned all my tapes, from hair metal to the Steve Miller Band, and listened only to Contemporary Christian Music (CCM)™. The girls I used to be infatuated with I now dreamed of bringing to salvation. Those girls used to merely ignore me, but now they consciously avoided me. I preached to my mother about the evils of abortion. In the midst of one particularly heated conversation my mother began sobbing. She revealed to me the next day that she’d had two abortions after I was born, so maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to judge.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which I go south

One of my mother’s post-divorce suitors was my Uncle Buster, Wayne Martin’s best friend. I didn’t know at the time they were dating, only that Buster began regularly changing the fluids on my Chevette and watching Kansas basketball with me my senior year. We regularly argued about the latter, as I’d become a fan of the Arkansas Razorbacks.  My reasoning was simple: I’d decided I was going to go to the University of Arkansas. As an attempt at finding any of my family outside the one I knew, I’d connected with my cousins Nicki and Becky, daughters of my Aunt Joyce who were roughly my age and lived in Fort Smith, Arkansas. I regularly visited them as well as my other family on Petit Jean Mountain nearer to Fayetteville with my Grandma Ruby, my mother’s mother and Joyce’s sister. Uncle Buster broke up with my mother before the end of my senior year, and I didn’t go to the University of Arkansas.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

From the Breaking Bad finale to this...

My TV watching has devolved today to the point that I'm arguing with my 4-year-old over whether to watch Dragon Tales or My Little Pony.
STRINGBEAN: I don't like dragons. They're scary.
ME: Not these ones, they're friendly. They're pretty much like ponies.
STRINGBEAN: But some of them have two heads.
ME: But both heads are friendly.

Out of the Nineties: In which my father calls

The summer before my senior year of high school, I was saved. In the born again, radical, Midwest fundamentalist Christian way. I went to summer youth camp to get away from my mother and Greg Proctor’s messy divorce, and there, at an altar call after a full day of Bible quizzes, swimming, and pestering from my cabin counselor, I found the Father I’d always imagined—caring, powerful, and a safe distance away. I came home from camp and changed our answering machine message to say, “Jesus loves you.” My mother was mortified, as she was just starting to get calls from potential suitors.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Kim Dana Kupperman's essay from the Hunger Mountain selected as notable in Best American Essays

Huge news! I linked earlier this year to the James Baldwin Project I edited with Jennifer Bowen Hicks for Hunger Mountain; well, last week I found two things out pertaining to this year's Best American Essay anthology that will be coming out in a couple of weeks:

• Kim Dana Kupperman's essay "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone: A Letter to James Baldwin on the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of His Passing" was selected as a notable essay for this year!
  
• My co-editor Jennifer Bowen Hicks also had an essay included as notable in the anthology: "Attention," originally published in the North American Review!
  

Anyone interested can read all the essays selected for the anthologies, and the list of notable essays, here.

Out of the Nineties: Which I enter with a sense of hope and possibility

I entered the Nineties without a father, and with an unbound sense of hope. My mother was divorcing a man I’d been forced to call Dad for eleven years, and I was just getting to know the guy who had left her after getting her pregnant, remarried, and now, fifteen years later, wanted to be my friend. I had no past. There was only possibility.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Against the Eighties is in the books!

Or online at least. Take a look at the complete list/story mosaic here. (And by complete, I mean that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I imagine I'll be changing/adding to it for the rest of my life.)

And without stopping for breath, we plunge headlong into the Nineties starting tomorrow, the first of October!  So many loose ends, so many cliffhangers: Do I ever succeed at anything I try? What exactly happened in popular culture in the Nineties, and was it any better than the tripe served up in the Eighties? A fundamentalist Christian?

All these will be addressed, with a slew of new complications. Feel free to let me fill that Breaking Bad-sized hole in your life. 

Against the Eighties: In which we look to the future

When I came home from meeting Wayne Martin, I told my mom. She told Greg Proctor, who locked me in my room for the rest of the night. By the end of the next year, the advent of the Nineties, they were getting divorced after Greg Proctor had beaten my mother unconscious with a chair. Wayne Martin had expanded his business. And I was a fundamentalist Christian.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties