Tuesday, 25 October 2011

• Currently The Elements of F*cking Style: A Helpful Parody By Chris Baker, Jacob Hansen see related

  The Elements of F*cking Style

  Style?  Me?  I'm a before person.  You know what I mean.  On those makeover shows, I'm the before, not the after.  I could earn a living posing for before pictures.  But anyway, @MelFamy has tagged me, so here goes. 
  
  1.  I spent the summer of 1974 living on a Greyhound Bus.  In 1974, a Greyhound bus pass cost $150 and entitled you to two months of unlimited travel in the United States and Canada.  I graduated from Princeton in 1974 with honors in psychology and no idea what to do next, so I climbed onto a Greyhound Bus departing from the Port Authority in New York City and two months later, I climbed off.
  
  Well, not exactly.  I would board a bus in the early evening, sleep until morning and get off when the sun came up, wherever that happened to be.  I'd spend a day there, or a few, camping in the woods outside of town,  or renting a room in town to do my laundry and eat a decent meal.  Then I'd get back on the bus and do it all over again.  In two months I traveled through 42 states, plus one very long bus trip from Vancouver to Toronto.  
  
  2.  One of my favorite stops that summer was New Orleans.  When I got off the bus, I hitchhiked out to Fountainbleau State Park on the bank of Lake Ponchartrain and pitched my tent.  The park was busy during the day, but I was apparently the only one camping out, so after the park visitors had gone home at the end of the day, I was alone in Fountainbleau State Park.  You can imagine my surprise when I woke up the next morning.  You see, I had completely lost track of little things that summer, things like the calendar, and when I awoke the next morning, I was surrounded by the Louisiana NAACP Fourth of July picnic.

  3.  When my bus pass expired, I stuck out my thumb and spent most of the next year hitchhiking.  It was my intention to hitchhike until something gave me reason to stop.  Almost a year later, back in NJ, I was stopped by an offer to teach at a school for children with autism.  By winter break,  I was itching for some hitching.  So I decided it would be fun to hitchhike from New Jersey to California and back during the ten day vacation.  I figured it would take me four days to get to California.  I'd spend two days with friends in Newport Beach and then another four days getting home.

  Then I realized that in order to get back in time for the first day of school I would have to leave California on December 31.  I didn't relish the idea of standing on the side of the interstate on New Years Eve, dodging the drunk drivers.  I decided to take a bus until morning, getting off wherever morning was and then hitchhiking the rest of the way to New Jersey.

  It was sometime during the evening hours of New Years Eve that I boarded the Greyhound Bus heading east.  It was approximately 11:45 pm when the bus driver picked up the intercom and cleared his throat.  I guess we all expected he wanted to deliver some sort of New Years greeting.  Instead, he announced that we had just passed from the Pacific Time zone into Mountain Standard Time.

  It took a moment for the meaning to sink in.  We had lost an hour.  There would be no ball dropping, no horns tooting.  There would be no midnight.  It was 12:45 am.  Happy (sort of) New Year!

  4.  I ate mucuous membrane at a Korean restaurant in Japan.  It was June, 1988.  My wife and I were sitting in a Korean restaurant in Kofu, Japan with the Ariizumis, Hitoshi-san and Fumiko-san.  We had been staying with them for a week.  Hitoshi-san spoke almost no English.  My wife and I speak no Japanese.  Thankfully, Fumiko-san, could speak a little English.  Through-out our visit, she clutched her Japanese-English dictionary.

  We drank a good deal of sake and sampled all of the food.  One dish came out.  We sampled.  It was crunchy.  It was chewy.  And through-out dinner, Fumiko-san rifled through the pages in her dictionary, determined to find the words to explain to us what this crunchewy treat was called.  Finally, as dinner came to an end, she found the words in her dictionary.  Pointing to the now empty bowl of food and then to the page in her dictionary, Fumiko-san looked across the table and smiled.

  "Mucous membrane."

  5.  At my high school graduation, a representative from the Board of Education accused me of being unpatriotic and lectured me on citizenship.  Two months later, he was arrested for hiring someone to murder his wife.  I’ve never been arrested for hiring someone to murder my wife.  But I did get a ticket in Tempe, Arizona for jaywalking.  That's right... I'm a dangerous man.

  "I'm a dangerous man from a dangerous city and I lead a dangerous life
  I've got a dangerous car goes dangerous speeds and a very dangerous wife
  I've got sixteen dangerous girlfriends, not counting one or two
  Look out kid you don't want to get hit, I'm dangerous to you.
  You better look out."
  (David Bromberg, Danger Man)

  6.  I saw the Temptations in concert at the Copacabana in NYC in 1970.  The Temptations know a thing or two about style.

  7.  I have a lipoma in my corpus collosum (and I have the pictures to prove it).

  

  Now for the tags.  Perhaps some of you have been tagged already.  Such is life.

  @starmanjones
  @heart_beep
  @RighteousBruin
  @AdamsWomanFell
  @kurasini
  @lakakalo
  @SamsPeeps

  Oh yeah, one more thing.  If you find Strunk and White's The Elements of Style just a bit too conventional for your writing, may I suggest you take a look at The Elements of F*cking Style by Baker and Hansen.  Really.

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