A Comment On Now, And A Memory From Then

Almost done dog/house-sitting, and have to say things have gone delightfully well. Amber has been a sweet & patient dream, and though her hearing is sadly not what it used to be, she intuits well-- very, very well, in fact-- and behaves pretty much perfectly. When I'm with her, she doesn't go very far from my side, which is almost unbearably adorable. She's also a trooper: no whining or acting up, except at play time, when the latter's surely to be encouraged in a dog her age. (It shows vitality.) So beyond the relatively minor inconvenience of shuffling from here to there, the whole thing's been good, and remarkably easy. Animals, I'm reminded, do tend to be very good with me-- Jeremy and his animals..., as an ex once said to a visiting relation-- and so also remind me how much I prefer animals to humans. Animals are never false or malevolent. They simply are. Treat almost any animal according to the Golden Rule, and it'll respond in kind--- most of the time. Certainly the case with the animals I've ever owned or cared for.

All this also reminds me of a (true) story. When I was doing my MA, I agreed to housesit for one of my professors, which entailed caring for three dogs, five cats and three horses. Trouble did half my work for me, renegotiating the relationships among the cats & dogs so he was at the top of their chain, first by humiliating all but the oldest and frailest of both species, and then defending them in a beautifully elder-centric reconstruction. (Trouble, like me, has a fondness for old animals.) The horses, however, were my concern. After several days with them, and many warnings from the owning professor, I found myself in a dilemma as I tried to get two of the horses, the alpha horse and the old-and-loony-and-likely-to-cause-me-no-end-of-grief horse, up a steep and badly iced-over hill. Lead the alpha, I was told advisorly, and the loon will eventually follow.

Let's see if you can guess what happened.

The alpha started to freak, and here I was, all 110-pounds of me, trying to get both these beautiful animals up that hill. It was the crazy old horse that stood there and stood there, I think trying to survey the situation. As I tried to calm the alpha, the old horse (I'm sorry, I have since forgotten their names, unfortunately) must have taken pity on me or something, and began the slow-- and rather treacherous-- march. He did so steadily, sedately, beautifully-- and on his own. Eventually the alpha, whom I was holding by the reins only very barely, followed her elder's lead. It was as if the loon had said to the alpha, "it's a rough night, let's not fuck around with him now." And he-- not me, really-- escorted both of them back to their stables, and I just guided the alpha and locked them in when they arrived.

(Is there an allegory for teaching assistants in there? Hmmmmm.... No comment.)

It was something deeply beautiful. The wacky horse with the propensity for jumping fences and causing trouble turned for me into the docile master when things were obviously grim. The alpha scared the hell out of me several times-- and worse, fell once and nearly fell another three times making that scale. (I assure you, there's precious little more terrifying than a horse falling on ice.) But the so-called loon, the one more ostensibly given to injury by the situation, proved stalwart, and thankfully commanding, else I'd have turned up somewhere like a frosty and unquartered Hector.

The moral of the story? (Is there one? ) Maybe it's that eccentric beasts prove themselves, or prove themselves the most stable, when least you might expect they would. Or maybe it's that the ones most champing at the bit can be the ones most capable of taking you-- and themselves-- down. Or maybe it's just a tale about horses, heaven forfend.

As for me, I saw more nobility in that wacky horse's steady climb in that one night than I'll probably ever see in any animal politics, human or otherwise. It was sublime. Old, more often than we care to think, is beautiful. And crazy is as crazy does.

O Commodore, My Commodore!

Most of my readers either won't remember or won't want to remember the Commodore 64, but some of us, way back when dinosaurs were turning into oil, spent more hours on it than we would care to admit. Oh, the sophistication! The graphical detail! The luxury of having to type LOAD "*.*", 8,1 every time you wanted to run a programme! (On the other hand, your computer served you rather than you endlessly serving, and servicing, it.) I won't even begin to bore you by explaining how many hours I spent playing Qix, Ghostbusters, Bruce Lee, Alter Ego and Defender of the Crown; or how I turned the entire Spanish Main Dutch in Pirates!; nor even how I eventually and heroically-- to my friends at the time, anyway-- disproved the titular claim of Impossible Mission. ("Stay a while! Stay forever!!!" It's also where most of us learnt the word "cormorant.") At long last, however, those of you brave, bored or nostalgic enough can finally play some of those warped blasts and blast-em-ups from the past, collected for your retrogressive satisfaction here. Then tell me how much time you spend waste on all that antiquated silliness. ;-) Providing, of course, you can get the games to work....

Misty Water-Colour Mammaries... or, The Shames of Juvenile Retention

Oh dear: a few things to note in this article's regard, all embarrassing, almost all dumber-than-dumb, and without exception rooted in my own experience as a 9-13 year-old in deeply provincial Ontario during those odd days of the early 80s:

1. I remember watching every single one of the movies mentioned in it. And then some. Oy vey. Mostly on the then-new invention called videotape, and rented with surreptitious glee. In those days, though, it was still common for parents to send their kids to get cigarettes for them from the store. Those were the days....
   
2. I also remember sneaking into movie theatres exactly, EXACTLY, the way the author describes. I hope there's a statute of limitations on that crime.
   
3. And yes, things were damned tougher then for boobie-batty boys. (Say that ten times fast!) No internet for easy access to all things perverse; no wardrobe malfunctions; no lolita-wannabes going half-way for you just by walking down the street. Porn proper was almost impossible to acquire, unless Dad had something hidden away that you weren't supposed to find. So even a brief and partial boobie-flash, like Judi Bowker's in Clash of the Titans, was a kind of Kinder-Surprise that would have to tide one over for ages. Or what SEEMED like ages. Movies like Porky's then were like hitting the mother-lode, the cornucopia, the Lands of Plenty and Cockaigne.
   
4. These were also the only, er, exposure most of us had to Canadian movies. At the time, for adolescent and pre-adolescent boys, Canadian movies were the equivalent of the Amsterdam Red Light District. You knew you could get what you were looking for. Then again, none of us were really looking for Caligula or the raunchier stuff. It was bums and boobies, rather than the intrauterine gynocolism that makes its way into even the so-called SFW pages now.
   
5. These were the movies of the Star Wars babies going through puberty, or trying to. Hence the pervasive innocence and naiveté, to say nothing of the smarmy villains and the manifest bimbos, all of them (of course) easy substitutes for Darth ("Preppy") Vader and Princess Leia. And sure, I was on the young side for that stuff, but I was a precocious little bugger. A LOT of us were. BTW, Princess Leia in that gilded bikini in Return of the Jedi sent most of our eyeballs right out of our stupid little heads.
   
6. When it came to nudity, the interest was largely the reverse of the way it is now. The obsessions weren't so much with getting the youngest things to show some skin; it was with getting the more ostensibly "mature" women naked, the women like Sylvia Kristel and Kelly LeBrock. Believe it or not, I remember one of the common qualifiers of the time: She's not a girl, she's a WOMAN!!!! Contrast this with the Britney-LiLo-Keira-Natalie thing these days. There's a sociology paper in there somewhere.
   
7. The line "enough wool you could knit a sweater with" -- from Porky's, for the only one among you who doesn't know where it comes from-- became a lurid mantra, and a short-hand movie review. (Aside: See, you are not required by law to follow the word "lurid" with "details.") Then again, you almost never saw pubic hair in a movie back then.
   
8. Similarly, you almost-never saw male nudity, and a guy's bare-ass was more horrifying than anything Mama Voorhees ever did. It wasn't, of course, but if you didn't act like it, if you didn't protest your disgust as if you'd just seen an autopsy performed before your very eyes, you were in shit. Deep shit. Deep, deep rhino shit. The key phrase at the time was Awwww, groooooss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
   
9. Heather Thomas was The Rage. Mind you, Victoria Principal and Morgan Fairchild were pretty big, too. *shiver* But so great was the mammary-mania, some people actually rented S.O.B. just to see Julie Andrews' -- yes, you read me properly-- breasts. *shudder* (The hills were alive, after all.) On the other hand, it was during this period that I fell permanently in love with Michelle Pfeiffer.
   
10. What did we learn from these movies? Not a god-damn thing. It was like studying Botticelli by leering at caricatures. But maybe it kept some of us from fainting upon the first, and eternally blessèd, revelation of The Real Thing. And maybe it kept us from doing some of the most ridiculous things one could do in that situation. Perhaps there's something to learning sexual stupidity from the very stupidest.
    

But as lascivious as all this probably seems, it was all rather innocuously innocent. We're in much more cynical times these days, as ten year-olds with a little technical sophistication can with ease get their paws on darker and often more intensely misogynistic material. It's all so easy now; a few key-strokes, a couple mouse-gestures and half-an-hour online without Mom and Dad peering over your shoulder, and viler plenties can be had. No wonder so many of the current crop of young are jaded about all things sexual. And that, as far as I'm concerned, may be one of the more disturbing aspects of our grab-and-get-it culture-- maybe even more disturbing than Julie Andrews' scary poppins. Now that's spine-chilling.