you know, stuff like:

"looking at the monitor screen, the desk lamp took me back to my graduate school apartment, which was entirely furnished with stuff from my friend’s apartment that had been across the street; only now he was moving to san francisco. a desk lamp—not at all like this one—illuminated those days [intentionally cheesy]. the one i got from my friend was held together with a paper clip."

* see, no one would have stood for that forty years ago, only really poor people, not someone able to afford graduate school ... until recently (late sixties, when teens and young adults became too bored with the privilege afforded by their parents, that "poor" became cool (it happens now every couple of years; it’s getting faster (the turn-over)). almost everybody would have been too ashamed to own a lamp held together with a paper clip. they’d have simply gone out and purchased another one and thrown the old one into a giant, very-very-very-slowly decaying land fill. that no one gave a rat’s ass about (also, intentionally cheesy). <

lying head to toe, sideways on the bed, with my dog between us, my brother and i poured over a box of photos that mom left for us. chet would undoubtedly be sleeping in one of the childhood bedrooms ... the one that became the guest bedroom once we both moved out. the remaining bedroom, with the box of pictures and me and my brother and my dog, had been both mine and his at one point or another. neither of us could remember who had lived there last. it wasn’t the better bedroom or anything, so as to say that i wouldn’t necessarily have moved into it when my brother moved out. so who knows who had it last. right now it seems to hold the last vaguely recognizable vestige of either of us having ever lived here. their growth, our parents—my mother and her husband—is obvious throughout the house. when i finally left home and went to college, they gutted the place. they actually started it when chet left and they were holding back the big stuff until i was gone.

the whole place is stuffed with knick-knacks and chotcki. stuffed. they never seem to throw anything away. only they did when i finally moved out. they threw everything away and started fresh. now it’s stuffed with nicer stuff—like they’d said, "ok, now that the kids are gone we don’t have to live in squalor." but still it’s stuffed. only with nicer stuff.

you could hear old john whistling in the kitchen as he stood in front of the refrigerator with the door wide open trying to decide which ice cream to eat. and he got almost through a verse of "the yellow rose of texas" before he could decide. we would have lost our heads for standing there with the door open like that—like, "do you think [our parents] work for the power company?" or "your lousy dad never contributed a dime to this house," type thing—or at least be grounded.

grounding was the surburban father’s only acceptable form of child abuse at the time. you’d get grounded for some lame shit, like sneaking over to your friends to watch the basketball game or something. you’d get grounded like a motherfucker if you actually got caught doing something you weren’t supposed to.

smoking pot would have maybe even merited a physical manifestation of surburban child abuse—something small in the way of a belt to the ass—but here we are now, freely smoking pot, while looking at the pictures in the big box mom brought in. <