1990

The recent mentions of Vanilla Ice in the news cycle made me think back to a specific and relatively short-lived time when my friend Kenny and I would hang out at the home of our dweeby neighbor Jason. The big sell for Jason is that he had a computer with a lot of games, one of which was a title in the legendary adult video game series Leisure Suit Larry.

While playing the video games that weren't necessary to hide, his mom would stop in to check on us and occasionally offer snacks. Jason had the cassingle of "Play that Funky Music" by Vanilla Ice, which we would listen to on repeat while playing computer games. There was one instance where Jason's mom was in the room, the song was just starting for the 50th time, and she looked at all of us boys and smiled contently as she walked out. (Ya know those moments where you realized that you were "different" from the others? Kenny and Jason were obliviously playing a video game while this dopey song was playing in the background, and Jason's mom was lovingly like "Oh, those boys!," and you realize how corny that is and that you had inadvertently become part of this geeky scene in this suburban home, and you're the only one who noticed?)

As I mentioned before, this was a relatively short-lived time where I would go to Jason's house, and he and I had an altercation on what was probably the final time I was there. The three of us were sitting in his bedroom hanging out, and for whatever reason he had put me in a headlock. I generally prided myself on being able to get out of headlocks put on me by kids who were even bigger wimps than I was, but he really had this one synched on. I eventually had to tell him to let go of me, and once he did I realized that he had knocked a tiny screw out of the side of my glasses, and that it had made a lens fall out.

I was furious, and even though he assured me it was an easy fix, I immediately grabbed a pair of glasses off of his dresser (newer than the ones he was currently wearing) and bent them all out of shape. He started wailing, and his mom ran in to see what was wrong. "HE DISCOMBOBULATED MY GLASSES!" he shouted, as his mom tried to console him. In a scene straight out of a TV sitcom, Kenny and I immediately turned to each other with a bewildered look. ("He discombobulated my glasses!" was phrase we repeated to each other for quite some time). I don't know if "Play that Funky Music" was playing while this was all going on, but it'd be a crime if it wasn't.

So while I admit my punishment didn't fit his crime, I was embarrassed that he had put me in a headlock I couldn't escape from, so his glasses got dealt with. I had to waste an afternoon going to the eye doctor to get the screw put back in my glasses (which seems absurd?), and I definitely held that against him. 

By the way, for a little while this kid had the Vanilla Ice stripes shaved on the side of his head. It was a hell of a thing.

Fall 1988

When my grades started to slip, I had no explanation for my parents. Had I been able to offer an explanation, I don't know if it would have made a difference. Back then when you were being observed as a 10-year old, people didn't assume that there was a complex reason behind a lacking school performance, they just assumed that you were lazy or had poor study habits. Looking back, I find it a bit ironic that as a "gifted" student that people assumed there were simple explanations for my grades going from 60 to 0 in a matter of months. To be fair, I've only been able to recently wrap my head around it.

5th grade was a hell of a thing, and I was an easy target for bullying. People's hormones were raging out of control, and who better to target than the smallest boy in the world. As time went on, it was collectively agreed by all interested partied that yes, anxiety and depression was the culprit, and that it wasn't "my fault." I can trace the beginning of the end back to a specific time, and that was Mr. Heller's class.

I had Mr. Lindberg as my primary teacher, and for the first time another teacher for English, Mr. Heller, as a way to get students acclimated to changing classes. He was the football coach for the middle school, kind of a tough guy but in a lovable way. I believe our class met in the mid-morning, and I had never had any interaction with him before. He started out by calling role, and he never stopped. For each student he called, he started a conversation with them and made jokes while they spoke to each other. When he asked about the name of a girl in the class, she told him "I'm New," and he replied with "Oh, nice to meet you, 'New'!" (He called this poor girl "I'm New" for most of the rest of the year) He ridiculed a jocko boy he already knew for saying he was "related to his dad," and by the time the bell rang, it turned out we hadn't done anything the entire class except laugh and have fun. My friend got up from his chair and was like "I like him!," and I sure did too. I later told an older friend on the bus that we didn't do anything during class, and he said that he heard "He does that."

As it turns out, Mr. Heller didn't do that. It was the first day, and he was trying to make things light for everybody. His class was usually fun, but he gave us work to do every day after. I kept waiting for another day of laughing and doing nothing, but it never came. Instead, I kept doing nothing, and my parents weren't laughing. On my mid-semester progress report, I got a 'D', something that had never happened to me before. I don't think I'd ever even gotten a 'C' grade up until then, at least not on a report card. My parents were furious, and even debated cancelling the plans we had made for my birthday (they didn't in the end). I had no explanation to give for the grade - I knew deep down that the reason was "I prefer to laugh and not do anything," but of course that would never fly. In retrospect, I think I was just awakened (see photo) to different possibilities, and there was no turning back. I became instantly addicted to this feeling, and I couldn't regain any motivation for school from then on.

Things just got worse from then on - in 6th grade I got my first 'F,' and by the time I got to 7th grade an 'F' was the norm. It makes me sad to think about how disappointed my parents were after I had previously shown so much promise, but I also wasn't trying to hurt them. In all my youthful moments of rebellion and acting out, none of it was ever done with the intend to hurt them. It's just how I was and how I kind of still am, and there was/is really no changing it. I eventually ended up flunking the 10th grade, and dropping out in the middle of the next school year. A month later I was almost killed in a car accident. Good times.

*******

Once caveat to my story is 9th grade summer school. I had flunked everything except for gym that year, and so I ended up going to summer school in a different city so I could get enough credits too advance to the 10th grade. I took two classes, and I got an 'A' and a 'B.' A flunky friend of mine did the exact same as I did, we had the two highest grades in our English class. And you know what? It's because we were both there to do a job and go home. No social anxiety because of others, because we'd never have to see them again after that. Something to think about, I suppose.

Electric Grandmother: Hello Man.

Fred Trump: Hi Man.

EG: Please state your name for the record.

FT: Frederick Christ Trump Sr.

EG: Wow.

FT: Yes.

EG: So you died in 1999, correct?

FT: Right-o.

EG: So you never saw 9/11.

FT: What’s that?

EG: It was a terrorist attack on the United States.

FT: Ok.

EG: There’s something else you never saw.

FT: Lay it on me.

EG: Your son Donald became President in 2016, tried to overthrow the government in 2020, then became President AGAIN in 2024.

FT: That’s wild.

EG: You’re not surprised?

FT: Well, maybe a little. I didn’t know you could be President in non-consecutive terms. I guess Taft did it, come to think of it.

EG: You’re thinking of Grover Cleveland.

FT: Do we own any real estate in Cleveland?

EG: I think so? The Trump name is on a lot of property.

FT: Like Trump Plaza! Is Mike Tyson still the champion?

EG: As far as I know. Why did you die?

FT: I was sad.

EG: I see. I read that Donald said that your funeral was the closest he came to ever crying.

FT: That’s kind of weird.

EG: Why does your ear look like cauliflower?

FT: From years of boxing. 

EG: Boxing Helena?

FT: My mother? Hardly. I boxed in boxcars in railroad stations until I died.

EG: Ever beat Tyson?

FT: *laughs* Get real, smarty.

EG: I bet you could beat Tyson and Holyfield at the same time.

FT: Yeah, maybe in my dreams.

EG: Are you proud of Donald for becoming President?

FT: I guess a little. I was hoping he’d maybe build a giant building.

EG: He still could. You seem sad, are you sad?

FT: I miss my son.

EG: You died.

FT: Correct.

EG: What is the last thing you remember?

FT: Going to church.

Excited to make the first public announcement of an upcoming EG greatest hits collection being put out on vinyl by Means of Production Recordings. It’s slated to come out in February, more info about a release show(s) to come!

1988-1994

The house where I grew up in my hometown of Aurora bordered right on the city of Twinsburg, so much so that once you turned the corner on the street where I grew up, you had crossed over into the village of Reminderville, where (according to Wikipedia) 83% of the area is part Twinsburg City School District. When I was very young, I was not allowed to go into that area, which was divided by a marina which had a small beach and a playground at the end of our block, so I didn’t give it much thought for a while. I recall my older sister once making a remark about how the ice cream man was probably scared to come to our block because “Those kids would probably throw a bomb in his truck” if he chose to leave their neighborhood. I never thought about the kids that lived there being different from us, or even had a concept of who they might be.

One late summer day I was at the marina with my friend Kenny, and we were building a sand castle by the lake. We were minding our business when this gruff, portly boy began to cave in our sand castle with his feet. I yelled at him to stop, but he kept on doing it. As I started to rise to my feet to challenge him, he reared back and punched me in the face. I had never been punched in the face before, I was only in fourth grade, and this action seemed so adult. He hit me in the face a second time, and my glasses went flying off. At this age, I only knew how to do the “let’s try and maybe wrestle the other guy to the ground?” move, and so I tried that against him, but he seemed to get the better of me with that, too. I found out later this kid was only in second grade, but I think he was a little taller than me and definitely more beefy. 

After this pummeling, I walked home with Kenny crying and defeated, and I told my dad about the whole thing while blubbering through tears. My dad walked with us back to the marina to confront the kid, and made us both laugh by stomping and “making muscles” when we left. I’m not sure what exactly he would have done to resolve the issur, but by the time we made it back to the marina he had left. That Monday at school I told my friend Doug that my face was sore because this second grade boy punched me, and I really don’t know why I chose to offer that information. He didn’t seem to believe me, in a weird way. Kenny and I both saw the boy again at the marina a couple months later, and he had a pair of nunchucks that he was playing around with, hitting the playground equipment and almost daring Kenny and I to get hit with them. He bizarrely claimed that it couldn't hurt that much, because the nunchucks might as well be “made of ice.” 

I would see this same boy again at times over the next several years, and I always quietly wondered if he (or any of the Twinsburg other boys) were able to tell us apart or cared enough to remember us from one encounter to the next. There’s a season 6 episode of the Simpsons called “Lemon of Troy” where the boys of Springfield were engaged in a bitter battle with the boys of the bordering town, Shelbyville. The boys in Shelbyville (Twinsburg) are bigger, badder, dumber, and more homely than the boys in Springfield (Aurora), and I’ve always told Mary Alice that this is a mirror image of what it was like. In the still frame here, Bart has just triumphantly reveals to a Shelbyville boy (who is basically the Shelbyville version of him) among some other townies that he’s “Bart Simpson,” which draws blank stares from the group. It’s only after he tells them he’s from Springfield that they want to beat him up, and I always suspected the Twinsburg boys were the same kind of self-absorbed toughs who didn’t know or remember us from anyone else, they only knew to be physically aggressive once they realized we were from the other block up the hill.

One evening my family and I came home after being out all day and saw that the basketball hoop in our driveway was all bent and mangled. This was particularly upsetting to me, as I was really into playing basketball at the time, and had dreams of being the next Mark Price. A few days later my friend Louie told me that he and my friend Aaron had witnessed what happened from down the street; Aaron’s bedroom window had a view of my driveway, and he said that they both watched a boy he knew from Twinsburg (where he had once lived) named Justin hanging from/pulling on our hoop in an attempt to break it, along with a few other boys. I decided to overlook the fact that Louie and Aaron were bigger than the kids they were watching and might have thought to go stop it, because at least I had an ID on the culprits responsible. I had never even heard of this kid, but Louie and I were on the same baseball team, and lo and behold a short time later we played against a Twinsburg team that Justin was on. 

On the night of the game, I was playing second base in the field, and at one point I had an opportunity to face the kid while he was standing on the second base bag. I was still a little guy in the 8th grade at this point, but had suffered enough abuse in life that I was becoming a real hothead and wasn’t too worried about consequences. I said to Justin something to the effect of, “So, destroy any basketball hoops lately?” He looked at me with dead eyes and said “Yuuuup!” Then I followed with something like, “And you broke my basketball hoop?” He turned to me again and gave another “Yuuuup!” After the game, I hatched a plan - if you know anything about youth sports, at the end of each game they have the kids line up and high five each other while robotically saying “Good game, good game, good game…” When I passed Justin in the line, instead of high fiving him I gave him a shove. He stopped in his tracks and turned around looking confused, saying “Who you pushin’?!” I began to wonder if he knew what the hell I was even talking about when I had confronted him. It seemed par for the course for the Twinsburg boys, just to brainlessly act and react without any thought. The coach on their team bellowed something like “COME ON GUYS, NONE OF THAT!”, and I seem to recall the guys on my team being happy for me that I least got a shove in. 

I was still upset that Justin had gotten away with breaking something so important to me, so Louie hatched a plan where I would call his house and menace him. When I called, his mother answered the phone, and asked who was calling. I paused, and replied “Some kid.” She angrily demanded “Some kid WHO?,” and I blurted out “SOME KID WHO JUSTIN BROKE DOWN A BASKETBALL HOOP OF!” I then told her everything I knew he’d done, and she started yelling out to him for answers from the phone. I heard some murmured whimpering from him in the background, and she assured me she’d take care of it. Looking back, it absolutely reminds me of the part in The Christmas Story where Ralphie falsely tells his mother that Schwartz taught him the F-word, and then you hear Schwartz crying and getting smacked over the phone when Ralphie's mom calls Schwartz’s mom to tell on him.

They weren’t all bad times; One summer afternoon in around the same time period, the toughest boy in my grade at Aurora (who could have easily taken any one of their guys) was playing baseball with me and my friends at the marina, when a Twinsburg boy came by riding his skateboard, which prompted our version of Nelson the bully to yell out, “So what’s this kid gonna do, kick all of our asses?!” We all laughed confidently behind our fearless leader, as the kid passed without a word. It was a nice position to be in for once, because it felt like it was me and my friends who were always outnumbered and getting bullied by them. For example, there was a time when I was at the marina tossing around a football with my friends Scott and Bob, and we were greeted by five Twinsburg boys who asked us if we wanted to play a game. Instead of doing a four on four game, they insisted that the five of them play the three of us. After a brief time of getting obnoxiously mauled by them, Scott suggested the next time we have the ball we just take it and walk away without saying anything. Once we did, they started after us, calling us names. This one boy ran up to me to douse me with a full bottle of water, and he either missed me on purpose in order just to be threatening, or had terrible aim at point blank distance - I wouldn't be surprised if it was the latter, because it was pretty typical of them to seem completely deranged.

You’d think eventually they’d have grown out of it, but they never seemed to. In the Summer of ‘94 I had purple/red-ish dyed hair à la that one era of Kurt Cobain, and one afternoon I was walking in the Twinsburg area with my friend Mikey, when we heard heckles coming from a nearby yard. They were coming from a boy I was familiar with, who I had watched grow up and go through different phases of his life. He had gone from being kind of a geeky glasses guy, then had an alternative rock look, and was now a tough guy wearing a gold necklace and a white v-neck undershirt. He was standing on his porch with two other giggling oafs. “Hey!” he called out to me, “Nice hair! I used to have hair like that, but I never went out in public!” I had remembered when his hair was like that, and wondered to myself why he'd chosen to have hair like that if he didn’t want it to be seen in public. I could also tell that, as usual, based on how he was addressing me that he had no idea who I was, despite my having seen him around my entire life. He yelled more and asked me “Who my fat ass friend was,” and since we were outnumbered and outmuscled, we had no choice but to keep walking.

Later that Fall, I was riding the school bus in the morning and the driver asked me if I knew a kid from Twinsburg named (using his initials only) named M.B. I knew the name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. She told me that he had been killed in a car accident the previous night a couple miles from my house. Louie was also on the same bus route, and when he got on the bus he confirmed that M.B. was the porch heckler. I couldn’t believe it, I had just seen him that Summer in my driver’s ed class, where once again, I don’t think he recognized me. When I got to school, I found Mikey smoking pot behind a tree and I told him what had happened to M.B., and he said something like “Sweet! That’s so awesome.” I honestly felt upset by the news; Unlike Mikey,  I had watched this guy grow up and now he was gone. I found out that he had been driving like a maniac with a passenger I knew (from Aurora, ironically) who was also a total dickhead, blew through a four way stop and got slammed into by an oncoming car on his side (passenger survived). Even though I felt rattled by what had happened, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was a fitting end to the rivalry seeing that we were now on the verge of adulthood, and hopefully this would teach all those jerks a some kind of lesson about karma. (Never mind that I almost died in an accident months later). I know that sounds a little inhumane, but I was 16, and I’m certainly not using his full name in case anyone in his family ever Googles it.  I recall seeing a memorial plaque for him where it said something like “Sweet Loving Angel,” and I remember thinking that they couldn’t have known him that well.

Excited to announce that we have a salubrious and sudorific concert film that was created by our friend/filmmaker Dylan Mars Greenberg. As you can see by the title card, it was shot in Brooklyn, this past June 19th. It starts with a short interview of us, and then to the show. So check it out for a few or more, I'm sure you will adore and not find a bore, snore, or chore.

Mary Alice is leafing through old photos for reasons we’ll get to in due time, but we came across this one from 1997 of a man who we dubbed “the jerk” who was walking around Sea World with sunglasses and green suit when she visited my hometown for the first time.

This one photo does not do this guy justice for how weird he was acting, at one point culminating in his looking back to check out a woman who passed by him which caused him to walk face first into a bush. It was like we were watching a TV show, and to this day I don’t know how he could be such a miracle.

I had a dream last night that I was on a quiz show with Barack Obama and Bill O’Reilly. They were to face off against each other to determine who knew more about politics, and I was to team up with O’Reilly. I wondered why I was invited to be there, because while I have a decent knowledge of politics, I should certainly not be on a quiz show about it. There was also cooking involved, and Obama was spilling sugar everywhere. He was casually swearing and wearing street clothes, joking that he didn’t have to worry about such things anymore.

Michelle Obama was the host of the show, and one of the questions was “What was my father’s name?,” and none of the contestants knew. Michelle had tears running down her face, saying that she had been married seven times, and I wondered how she had time for that. I was in the midst of admitting to everyone that I didn’t know we could use our phones to look up the answers, and then we switched locales to my old middle school.

I was talking to my teacher Mr. Miller about how even though I was a college graduate, I could never figure out how to finish high school, and I wasn’t going to worry anymore about going back. We decided to take a group picture with all the middle school students on the top of a hill, and I noticed a pair of my sunglasses was lying on the hill. I then accused a man and a woman who passed by behind us in a truck of stealing it from me. It turned out that the dealership had my truck all along.