Post by Stephen on Mar 3, 2012 11:32:32 GMT -6
MARCH MASHUP MADNESS
Some things are best done in pairs. Filet mignon is no good without red wine
sauce, and six-man 3-on-3 territory control Nerf wars in your best friend's
basement are ten times more Rambo with the lights off. Toejam and Earl only
has singleplayer mode because Johnson and Voorsanger wanted you to enjoy their
magnum opus even after you killed your wife for opening a Randomizer on
level 20. But of all the experiences improved by cooperation, misdemeanors
are by far the best, and that is the most important thing I learned in school.
Stretch was 6'4" in 9th grade, raisin-colored rings around his eyes from all
the sleep he lost because of his chronic night terrors - otherwise he looked
like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, with his burnout goatee and unkempt sandy blonde
mop. Dad was a career alcoholic working on his third marriage to some English
woman, mom was a witch doctor who once famously prescribed him herbal crap
for liver flukes (those are parasites, if you don't know). His only biological
sibling is a deadbeat elder brother who went to a vocational school for auto
repair in Vincennes and spent two semesters there in the parking lot dealing
cocaine out of the back of his van. His half-sister from a previous marriage
smartly stays as far away from that family as she can.
In the 4th grade, long before we ever met, some old God-fearing redneck with
Jurassic tenure didn't like the way Stretch looked and acted, thinking this
kid's strange Tim Burton dialogue and fanatic preoccupation with every school
of physical science was a certain, certain indicator that he was a natural-born
psychopath and that he was going to kill somebody sooner or later. The Indiana
state primary education system's protocol for handling children who are
suspected of harboring Satan is to put them on "Level One," a disciplinary
initiative overseen jointly by school administrators and local police, and
these damned souls are escorted to the building every morning by an officer
assigned to the campus. Daily assignments for Level One kids are compiled
by student aides and (maybe!) delivered to the child's isolation room in the
main office. In accordance with this disciplinary policy, the child is not
permitted to have contact with other students or receive instruction by
teachers; they wake up at 5:00am sharp so an armed policeman drives them to
school, wherein they spend eight hours in a sterile "meeting room" struggling
to learn unfamiliar material from unhelpful books, and at the end of the day
the cop comes back to drive them home - that other prison.
If you don't believe anything in the last paragraph, I admire your skepticism,
but my duty to the truth obligates me to destroy it: Everyone in Fishers is
aware of the long-standing tradition of mutual cooperation between local law
enforcement and school staff. Years ago, the current chief of police and the
current superintendent were drinkin' buddies, and as they handpicked the
future lieutenants and enforcers of their respective cult empires, their most
sacred commandment placed above all other directives was to cover each other's
asses. Present-day, the police inform school faculty of the locations of
random vehicle stops days in advance, personnel caught having sex with students
are silently removed from their current position and installed in a neighboring
district, and police refuse to investigate the annual year-end reports of
guidance counselors corralling all the seniors who failed the state's ISTEP
standardized testing battery and compassionately suggesting they drop out, thus
omitting them from key paperwork that determines how much government funding
the school receives. The incident with Coach Lydie has all but vanished from
public conscience, but the Dr. Syverson incident of 2008 is still fresh news;
vice principal Syverson was caught driving drunk on the way home from a roaring
holiday party, and with one call to the responding officer's supervisor,
good ol' Syverson was escorted home, and his wife was sent to collect the car
left on the side of the road. The cop valiantly sacrificed his career for the
good of the public by posting the dashboard cam of the incident online... for
what little good it did. Everybody already knew about all of this for a while,
and after Syverson was suspended with pay, pending a disciplinary
review which was naturally closed to the public, the town was ever-so-briefly
alive with discussion.
This was the only Planet Earth that Stretch could call home. He was life's
prisoner from birth, and Death was having too many chuckles at his expense
to take him back. Math and literature didn't really click with this poor kid,
but he had a lot of personal experience with cruelty, and vice, and lies, and
he had studied the effects of deferred dreams on a soul in a jar. He understood
morality as the set of unwritten rules that everyone knows but nobody obeys,
and that the more creative you were about getting away with your savagery,
the more money and power you were bound to reap. Freedom was the precious
moments when nobody was looking; Hell, when everyone was. And his mother's God
never did anything but watch.
He made other friends, thankfully, even if most of them lived in his
neighborhood. A fringe benefit of negligent parents is that you're free to
explore the undeveloped forests near your house and salvage discarded home
appliances from the Dirge Swamps of the Mosquito Dominion. Our meeting was
a freak accident which had nothing to do with any of the above, which, you
must realize, made it very unique. But that story is really boring.
Our favorite activity was fire. The graveyard shift at Walgreens knew us both
by name, and didn't bat an eye when we bought half a dozen lighters, two
bottles of isopropyl rubbing alcohol, and a bag of Mike 'n' Ikes. Our free
weekends were spent soaking tennis balls in flammable chemicals and batting
them back and forth in the seat of an abandoned quarry - the winner was the
guy who hit the ball hard enough to fracture its brilliantly burning shell,
the exposure of its hollow core creating an evanescent vacuum with a sharp pop
and a billowing flare. We turned his old shoeboxes full of action figures into
an elite squad of pyronauts, and He-Man's landmark contribution to the field of
Explodometry was forever memorialized by gluing his surviving extremities to
a Campbell's soup can containing the rest of the pieces we recovered over the
following two years.
An expert in creating diversions, and a veteran grand master at justifying
misbehavior, I think my most valuable asset to Stretch was keeping him
out of trouble, which only emboldened him to push that envelope as far
as he could while the opportunity was there, and I never failed him. He was two
separate entities, the transformation triggered by proximity to me: Sullen,
mumbling, awkward Gollum when alone, jolly and eagerly incensed to adventure
when Steve was involved. He would never have dared flush those cylinders of
industrial silica beads down the toilets in the men's restroom on the ground
floor of our high school if I didn't bring them with me in my backpack to
summer school geometry. Broad Ripple Avenue would never have had its garish
modern bar music overwhelmed by The Best of Scottish Pipes and Drums set to 34
volume in his mom's silver Corsica if I didn't mess with the radio at that red
light. He would not have mooned that old woman in the elevator at Anime Central
2007 if I spoke up and let him know that someone else had stepped in while his
maniacally laughing head was pointed at the floor. Also, if I didn't shout and
tell him to drop the solid fuel charges he was holding in his hands while he
hammered on the faulty detonator's controls, he would have lost his arms before
he remembered to actually put the charges in the chamber of our homemade
dual-axis mobile potato launcher turret.
Over the seven years we knew each other, we amassed so many war stories that
we never knew where to begin when introducing one another to acquaintances.
Fritz Leiber's sword and sorcery adventure stories about Fafhrd and the Grey
Mouser were both our instruction manual and our abridged history - there was
nearly nothing we hadn't done, or that we weren't willing to do if we just
had some alcohol or more gas money. We would prospect for quartz crystals, we
would walk around the strip mall with black t-shirts wrapped around our heads
pretending to be ninjas, we would stargaze on the rare nights when the absence
of smog permitted it. We were evenly matched in a contest of longswords, but
his mastery of the knife was unrivaled - even my command of hafted weapons,
with their obvious reach, could not afford me more than a few seconds
before he parried, or ducked, and swatted me. Secretly, we were hoping for
nuclear winter, so we could play D&D in the wasteland a la Fallout.
Since the day we met, all that vivacity and raw life energy that had been
agonizingly pressurized up until then, he'd burn it as hard and as fast as the
laws of nature allowed. When the paramedics pulled him out of the car he parked
in the front door of our favorite Chinese buffet, he was topless, a tattoo
of Blackblade burned down the length of his sternum and fresh abrasions on both
knuckles consistent with repeated punching, wearing an oversized bright pink
wicker sombrero and his Beavis and Butt-head boxers underneath a pair of cargo
jeans loaded to capacity with lighters, matchbooks, and expired half-eaten bags
of Doritos and party mix, and Don't Fear The Reaper was still playing when they
removed the cat carrier full of partially-burned college books and coursework
wrapped in an immaculate American flag from the passenger seat. The fuzzy d20s
hanging from his mirror and most of the bizarre mix of occult and Buddhist
memorabilia cluttering the backseat and the rear window didn't survive the crash.
I saluted and clapped for the clown I hired for the funeral until his mother
threw both of us out.
---
All titles are eligible! CAVEAT: Your submission has to be
a mashup!
What is that? A mashup is where you take two tracks and artistically
unify them into one semi-listenable whole! If you're a club dance DJ, all this
means is stretching one of the tracks so they both have the same tempo, and
having one of them fade into the other. If you're an actual composer, you do
anything but that.
Most importantly, you should have fun! Only 9 months until the foretold end
of the world!
Some things are best done in pairs. Filet mignon is no good without red wine
sauce, and six-man 3-on-3 territory control Nerf wars in your best friend's
basement are ten times more Rambo with the lights off. Toejam and Earl only
has singleplayer mode because Johnson and Voorsanger wanted you to enjoy their
magnum opus even after you killed your wife for opening a Randomizer on
level 20. But of all the experiences improved by cooperation, misdemeanors
are by far the best, and that is the most important thing I learned in school.
Stretch was 6'4" in 9th grade, raisin-colored rings around his eyes from all
the sleep he lost because of his chronic night terrors - otherwise he looked
like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, with his burnout goatee and unkempt sandy blonde
mop. Dad was a career alcoholic working on his third marriage to some English
woman, mom was a witch doctor who once famously prescribed him herbal crap
for liver flukes (those are parasites, if you don't know). His only biological
sibling is a deadbeat elder brother who went to a vocational school for auto
repair in Vincennes and spent two semesters there in the parking lot dealing
cocaine out of the back of his van. His half-sister from a previous marriage
smartly stays as far away from that family as she can.
In the 4th grade, long before we ever met, some old God-fearing redneck with
Jurassic tenure didn't like the way Stretch looked and acted, thinking this
kid's strange Tim Burton dialogue and fanatic preoccupation with every school
of physical science was a certain, certain indicator that he was a natural-born
psychopath and that he was going to kill somebody sooner or later. The Indiana
state primary education system's protocol for handling children who are
suspected of harboring Satan is to put them on "Level One," a disciplinary
initiative overseen jointly by school administrators and local police, and
these damned souls are escorted to the building every morning by an officer
assigned to the campus. Daily assignments for Level One kids are compiled
by student aides and (maybe!) delivered to the child's isolation room in the
main office. In accordance with this disciplinary policy, the child is not
permitted to have contact with other students or receive instruction by
teachers; they wake up at 5:00am sharp so an armed policeman drives them to
school, wherein they spend eight hours in a sterile "meeting room" struggling
to learn unfamiliar material from unhelpful books, and at the end of the day
the cop comes back to drive them home - that other prison.
If you don't believe anything in the last paragraph, I admire your skepticism,
but my duty to the truth obligates me to destroy it: Everyone in Fishers is
aware of the long-standing tradition of mutual cooperation between local law
enforcement and school staff. Years ago, the current chief of police and the
current superintendent were drinkin' buddies, and as they handpicked the
future lieutenants and enforcers of their respective cult empires, their most
sacred commandment placed above all other directives was to cover each other's
asses. Present-day, the police inform school faculty of the locations of
random vehicle stops days in advance, personnel caught having sex with students
are silently removed from their current position and installed in a neighboring
district, and police refuse to investigate the annual year-end reports of
guidance counselors corralling all the seniors who failed the state's ISTEP
standardized testing battery and compassionately suggesting they drop out, thus
omitting them from key paperwork that determines how much government funding
the school receives. The incident with Coach Lydie has all but vanished from
public conscience, but the Dr. Syverson incident of 2008 is still fresh news;
vice principal Syverson was caught driving drunk on the way home from a roaring
holiday party, and with one call to the responding officer's supervisor,
good ol' Syverson was escorted home, and his wife was sent to collect the car
left on the side of the road. The cop valiantly sacrificed his career for the
good of the public by posting the dashboard cam of the incident online... for
what little good it did. Everybody already knew about all of this for a while,
and after Syverson was suspended with pay, pending a disciplinary
review which was naturally closed to the public, the town was ever-so-briefly
alive with discussion.
This was the only Planet Earth that Stretch could call home. He was life's
prisoner from birth, and Death was having too many chuckles at his expense
to take him back. Math and literature didn't really click with this poor kid,
but he had a lot of personal experience with cruelty, and vice, and lies, and
he had studied the effects of deferred dreams on a soul in a jar. He understood
morality as the set of unwritten rules that everyone knows but nobody obeys,
and that the more creative you were about getting away with your savagery,
the more money and power you were bound to reap. Freedom was the precious
moments when nobody was looking; Hell, when everyone was. And his mother's God
never did anything but watch.
He made other friends, thankfully, even if most of them lived in his
neighborhood. A fringe benefit of negligent parents is that you're free to
explore the undeveloped forests near your house and salvage discarded home
appliances from the Dirge Swamps of the Mosquito Dominion. Our meeting was
a freak accident which had nothing to do with any of the above, which, you
must realize, made it very unique. But that story is really boring.
Our favorite activity was fire. The graveyard shift at Walgreens knew us both
by name, and didn't bat an eye when we bought half a dozen lighters, two
bottles of isopropyl rubbing alcohol, and a bag of Mike 'n' Ikes. Our free
weekends were spent soaking tennis balls in flammable chemicals and batting
them back and forth in the seat of an abandoned quarry - the winner was the
guy who hit the ball hard enough to fracture its brilliantly burning shell,
the exposure of its hollow core creating an evanescent vacuum with a sharp pop
and a billowing flare. We turned his old shoeboxes full of action figures into
an elite squad of pyronauts, and He-Man's landmark contribution to the field of
Explodometry was forever memorialized by gluing his surviving extremities to
a Campbell's soup can containing the rest of the pieces we recovered over the
following two years.
An expert in creating diversions, and a veteran grand master at justifying
misbehavior, I think my most valuable asset to Stretch was keeping him
out of trouble, which only emboldened him to push that envelope as far
as he could while the opportunity was there, and I never failed him. He was two
separate entities, the transformation triggered by proximity to me: Sullen,
mumbling, awkward Gollum when alone, jolly and eagerly incensed to adventure
when Steve was involved. He would never have dared flush those cylinders of
industrial silica beads down the toilets in the men's restroom on the ground
floor of our high school if I didn't bring them with me in my backpack to
summer school geometry. Broad Ripple Avenue would never have had its garish
modern bar music overwhelmed by The Best of Scottish Pipes and Drums set to 34
volume in his mom's silver Corsica if I didn't mess with the radio at that red
light. He would not have mooned that old woman in the elevator at Anime Central
2007 if I spoke up and let him know that someone else had stepped in while his
maniacally laughing head was pointed at the floor. Also, if I didn't shout and
tell him to drop the solid fuel charges he was holding in his hands while he
hammered on the faulty detonator's controls, he would have lost his arms before
he remembered to actually put the charges in the chamber of our homemade
dual-axis mobile potato launcher turret.
Over the seven years we knew each other, we amassed so many war stories that
we never knew where to begin when introducing one another to acquaintances.
Fritz Leiber's sword and sorcery adventure stories about Fafhrd and the Grey
Mouser were both our instruction manual and our abridged history - there was
nearly nothing we hadn't done, or that we weren't willing to do if we just
had some alcohol or more gas money. We would prospect for quartz crystals, we
would walk around the strip mall with black t-shirts wrapped around our heads
pretending to be ninjas, we would stargaze on the rare nights when the absence
of smog permitted it. We were evenly matched in a contest of longswords, but
his mastery of the knife was unrivaled - even my command of hafted weapons,
with their obvious reach, could not afford me more than a few seconds
before he parried, or ducked, and swatted me. Secretly, we were hoping for
nuclear winter, so we could play D&D in the wasteland a la Fallout.
Since the day we met, all that vivacity and raw life energy that had been
agonizingly pressurized up until then, he'd burn it as hard and as fast as the
laws of nature allowed. When the paramedics pulled him out of the car he parked
in the front door of our favorite Chinese buffet, he was topless, a tattoo
of Blackblade burned down the length of his sternum and fresh abrasions on both
knuckles consistent with repeated punching, wearing an oversized bright pink
wicker sombrero and his Beavis and Butt-head boxers underneath a pair of cargo
jeans loaded to capacity with lighters, matchbooks, and expired half-eaten bags
of Doritos and party mix, and Don't Fear The Reaper was still playing when they
removed the cat carrier full of partially-burned college books and coursework
wrapped in an immaculate American flag from the passenger seat. The fuzzy d20s
hanging from his mirror and most of the bizarre mix of occult and Buddhist
memorabilia cluttering the backseat and the rear window didn't survive the crash.
I saluted and clapped for the clown I hired for the funeral until his mother
threw both of us out.
---
All titles are eligible! CAVEAT: Your submission has to be
a mashup!
What is that? A mashup is where you take two tracks and artistically
unify them into one semi-listenable whole! If you're a club dance DJ, all this
means is stretching one of the tracks so they both have the same tempo, and
having one of them fade into the other. If you're an actual composer, you do
anything but that.
Most importantly, you should have fun! Only 9 months until the foretold end
of the world!