15 November 2008

Watching Television in the Basement With Kool-Aid and Cookies


This happened a lot.

My boyhood friends and I would sit in front of a basement television the way kids sit in front of fucking video games today. Someone's mom would make sure our nutrition needs were met with cookies and kool-aid. On the television the hosts got us ready for the event by showing us action clips and interviews with the Daredevil we all dreamed to out-daredevil when we grew up: Evel Knievel.

Evel was so fucking cool. Yet as much as we admired him, his motorcycles and his broken bones, we did not want to be him like we wanted to be our other heroes like Coco Laboy and Spaceman Lee. That is because deep down in our detached suburban Canadian souls we knew we would die if we tried jumping shit at 90 mph like Evel.

Some do have a go at being just like Evel. In the great wild world of punk rock this would come to be known as Sid Vicious syndrome. Lots of punks, me included for a time, wanted to be just like Sid. There are graveyards full of those motherfuckers.

Our heroes in this century are rolled from a different bag of weed than Evel and Sid. That said, if Barack Obama, a rare man with Evel's, if not Sid's, heroic ambition, can steer, mid-jump, Great Motorcycle America away from the splattery crash that has been its manifest destiny for centuries, I will sew the motherfucker a cape.

6 comments:

Your driver said...

Everybody's hoping that he'll be the new FDR. I'm all for building a bunch of dams and bridges. It would not be a bad idea to try paving the ripped up streets of San Francisco for starters. Canadians have a long history of hoping that America will get it's shit together. I, for one, appreciate your concern. I have a long history of hoping that America will get it's shit together too.

Oh, and since I've discovered that everything everyone says everywhere is actually a reference to something about ukuleles, there's a great little uke tune by a guy named Jacob Borschardt, "Punks Not Dead, But There's a Lotta Dead Punks."

A while ago I asked that you keep the beaver pelts and maple syrup coming. We are struggling to maintain the northward flow of bourbon, methamphetamines and pornography. Pray for our troubled land.

Your driver said...

Unlike most Americans, I remember events that took place in my own lifetime. I was around for the industrial collapse of the 1980's. At that time it was decided that the problem was "over regulation". Subsequently, bookmaking, loansharking and bank robbery were deregulated. This did nothing for the millions of displaced industrial workers, but it allowed us to go deeply into debt with absolutely nothing backing our indebtedness. I'm guessing that next they'll legalize prostitution, narcotics and contract murder in hopes that this will stimulate the bank robbing bookmaking and loan sharking "industries". The Corleone family has gone completely legitimate.

RossK said...

jon--

All that stuff your talkin' about....is that part of the real or the imagined economy?

And thanks for the coolin' up with the Borschardt info.

_____
Beer -- Frances Bula says she's going to let the cat out of the municipal election bag @ ~7:30pm, half hour before polls close....might be away for you to make a few bucks in the new/old not quite really real economy that used to be ruled by bookies by instead is now owned, lock-stock-and-barrel by folks with connections to Paddy Kinsella.

Or some such thing.

.

RossK said...

You don't always have to jump through the sky to be a daredevil.

Sometimes you can just jump under the hood.

(weirdness starts at 1:00; daredevillishness begins at 2:40)

.

Your driver said...

I would call casinos, cardrooms and offtrack betting legal bookmaking. Readily available credit at 29% interest seems like loan sharking. Unsupervised investment banking looks a lot like bank robbery and all of them are legal and deregulated. A lot of activities that were formerly considered crimes are now considered to be a legitimate part of our free market business environment. I miss the glory days of the Reagan free market, when you could walk into any gunshop in Florida and walk out with as many machine guns as you could carry, no questions asked. Somebody had to pay for the contra war. Nowadays, heroin is cheaper than gasoline, but they've disarmed the motoring public. Aaah, freedom!

Mr. Beer N. Hockey said...

All the old Anarchists must be laughing in their graves. The ones who are alive now surely are.