Franz Liszt and Other Reasons to be Scared Shitless

I've been trying (and failing) to write an essay about my relationship with my father. The problem I'm finding is, I don't remember much about living with the man. So, for the last couple days, I've done nothing but think about a way into this essay. How does one deal with a relationship that one does not remember? The conclusion I'm starting to come to is, find examples of the parts of my childhood that I do remember that were directly or indirectly influenced by the parts that I don't. It came to me while watching a program about the "thrill rides" at Disney World. When I see anything about Disney World, I automatically think of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. When I think of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, I automatically think about what a huge pussy I am. Mr. Toad's Wild Ride scares the shit out of me. I don't even remember the whole post traumatic stress inducing experience. I only remember a shadowy room with weird looking sculptures and being terrified to the point of tears, praying that it would all end soon. I've had similar experiences with other child-friendly amusement park rides, which brings me back to my father.

I grew up in Dayton, OH. Forty miles south of my hometown there lives an amusement park called, King's Island. Once a year, my family would enjoy a Saturday of fun at the park. Things at King's Island have changed a lot over the last fifteen years or so, but when I was a wee thing, there was a section of King's Island designed especially for kids. This section was called, Hanna -Barbera Land. Hanna-Barbera Land was fucking sweet. All the rides were based on cartoons produced by, who else, Hanna-Barbera. For the under forty crowd, these cartoons include, Yogi Bear, The Jetsons, Huckleberry Hound, the Fintstones, Scooby-doo, and the Smurfs, just to name a few.

It didn't matter what time of day you showed up. The longest line in Hanna-Barbera Land was always for the Smurfs ride. The Smurfs ride was like an acid trip for the 2-12 set. Folks would stand in line for what felt like hours so that they could eventually climb into a taffy colored boat and wind their way through the Smurf's Village. The color's were bright. The anamatronic Smurf's were life-size. The cheery little theme song echoed at a deafening volume off of every lacquered surface. Most importantly, the air conditioning was cranked to the max. For one reason and one reason alone, I wanted nothing to do with it. GARGAMEL.

For the first half of the Smurf's ride, everything is sunshine and daisies. Who doesn't love little blue midgets living in mushroom houses? Well about halfway through the ride, the first movement of Liszt's "Piano Concerto 1 in E flat" starts to mix in with the "laa laa la la la laaas" and this sinking feeling that shit is about to go down starts creeping into your consciousness. As you round a corner, you see him. Twelve feet tall and cackling in a dark room next to a giant boiling cauldron, Gargamel stands with his branchlike arms lifted over his head, fingers spread as if he's either going to reach down and snatch you or break into the world's bitchinest air piano solo. My money was always on the former. Petrified. I was petrified. As in too scared to move. Too scared to breathe.

Every couple years I would convince one of my parents to take me on the Smurf ride again. I would explain how I knew what was going to happen and that I was older and surely not as much of a wuss. The result was always the same no matter how old I was, and until a few years ago, I couldn't understand why. Is it weird that I think Gargamel looks just like my dad? The giant hooked shnaz. The dark hair. The bald spot. The satanic, I-am-fucking-crazy-and-there's-nothing-you-can-do-about-it, look in his eyes. It all makes sense. I know at the end of every episode, the Smurfs got the best of Gargamel, but they didn't have to live with him, and there were dozens of them and only one of me and I wish that ride was still around so I could give it one last shot.

Waiting for the Sky to Fall

When I was little, the thing they told kids about tornadoes was, "they sound like a train." I didn't question what seemed like an absolute, so every time I heard a train whistle in the distance, I shit my pants a little.

When I was in the eighth grade, my science teacher, Mr. Bruns, showed my class a horrible made-for-t.v. movie called, The Day After. It was an uplifting little film about nuclear holocaust. Here's what I remember about that movie, after all the bombs went off, people started drinking well water without realizing that it was loaded with radioactive deliciousness. Someone had the unfortunate experience of being outside at the time of the explosion and was instantly blinded. Some man sat on an overturned cow carcass with a shotgun and blew anyone's brain's out who came near what was, presumably, the man's only food source. Steve Gutenberg, of Three Men and a Baby fame, got stir crazy and went outside, then, after a few days, his skin started rotting off. A few days after the explosion, a disgusting looking Gutenberg hobbled to the hospital to find it packed to the gills with people in varying degrees of gamma-ray-induced decay. A baby was born to symbolize hope. Jason Robards (an older, now dead, actor) went looking for his family, and when he got to where his house should have been, he just crumbled in a heap of despair and waited for flesh-eating death to take him away. After the movie, Mr. Bruns emphasized two things. First, the shit in these bombs has a half life of hundreds of thousands of years. Thus, if one ever goes off, even if you survive the initial blast, which you won't, you can never go outside again for the rest of your life or your flesh will rot off, begging the question, how many packets of Ramen Noodles should I buy to get through the next 80 years. Second, "this could totally happen. Right now, Russia has dozens of Nucs pointed right at us." The Cold War was over by this points, but I didn't sleep for five years. I grew up close to an air force base, and every time a cargo plane flew over my house, I thought the end had come.

There's a satellite falling out of the sky. It's expected to crash sometime in late February or early March. We're not to worry. In the past five years, 328 satellites have fallen out of the sky, and no one has been hurt. After all, the earth is mostly water. In the unlikely event that there is damage or injury, the government is fully prepared to offer some monetary compensation to the victim(s). At four-in-the-morning a few nights ago, when I was sleeping as deeply as I ever do, which is not deeply at all, a window rattling clap of thunder startled me and my heart nearly to death. My first disoriented thought was, the satellite has come early, and it's landed on the White Castle across the street.

Last night I dreamed that I was on a plane that crashed. No big deal, we were only hovering about ten feet from the surface of the ocean when we went down, and we landed on a sandbar. It was really more an inconvenience than anything else. As we switched planes and the young pilot responsible apologized for the mishap then took his seat in the new cockpit I turned to the flight attendant next to me and asked, "are they really going to let this guy fly this plane too?"

"Not to worry," she said, "he just gets it off the ground. Then the real pilot takes over from there." Apparently getting off the ground is the easy part.