Aperture for Destruction

The holidays brought the annual trip to the grandparents' house, along with their stores of unnecessarily scented household items and skirted furniture. While I'm happy to be back in a home where the phrase "decorative garbage can" doesn't exist, I did manage to find a few photos in the basement, in an homage to the man who did it first and best.




This is the most 80s picture ever taken in the history of moment capturing-devices. It is an analog TV, playing SuperBreakout on the Atari 2600, with a VHS and Betamax VCR also hooked up. Also, that's MC Skat Cat on top of the TV.

Who dresses their child up as a harem slave girl in order to take them fishing?

I know I've said it many a time before, but there's not a lot to do in Northern NY. If it gives you a better idea, I had been staring at that spot for three days straight. You can't imagine what a relief it was when those flowers actually grew- it was a real cliffhanger.

And yes, my house was orange.

I only put this here as insurance- insurance against all future opponents who seek to thwart me through blackmail. Now that this picture is out there, for all the world to see, nothing can touch me ever again.

I find it odd that if anyone other than my parents took this--and I really do hope it was my parents who took this--asked a small girl to pose naked next to something as uneventful as a fridge, it would land them in jail for 10-14 years. And yet, somehow, not only is this OK, it's being saved for posterity.

Here I am slaving over a hot stove. While other kids were getting kites, dolls, and games, my parents didn't want me to enter into the world of indentured servitude with any happy-fluffy illusions, and only bought me toys that would prepare me for a lifetime of hardship. I only wish I had been given a plastic database and Etch-a-Excel-Spreadsheet at a younger age.

Another example of the nudity trend. In what situation would two people, cousins, find themselves where one is fully clothed, and the other is completely stark naked, and not one party involved so much as thinks twice? What is the possible explanation for why this happened, and why my cousin was so cavalier about it?

I've never really commended my mother for much, but here she managed to capture the exact millisecond in which I went from "precocious youth" to "angsty teen", using some ethereal camera that captures otherworldy transitions. You can actually see the evil Green-Day listening, world-resenting spirit enter my body. It has friggin gills, for Chrissakes. This thing's more impressive than that flag-lifting Iwo Jima shot.

If I were to sustain some sort of blunt head trauma that resulted in retrograde amnesia--I'd love to say that "a la Mulholland Drive" was the first thing that came to mind, but it was more like "Samantha Who?"--and I forgot my entire life and had to piece it together based on old photographs, I would surmise that I grew up in a small fridge, one of many in a city of fridges. On the night of the Fridge Prom, me and my friends from my fridge district would get together to take pictures in front of each others' fridges, then we'd go off to the Fridge, which we'd decorated with a "Under the Sea" theme. Of course, I'd have no idea what the "sea" was, partially due to the amnesia, andmostly due to the fact that I never once left the front of my fridge during the course of my entire childhood.

Amazingly, I won the "best hair" contest that day.


I'm no psych major*, but it's just fascinating to me, how the world, in all its diversity and diverging paths and varying tastes, manages to craft little girls to just be so goddamn...girlie. Most standard-issue girl things are pretty much inherently without merit, and yet millions of girls the world over covet them, yearn for them, even kill for them. Dolls? Dresses? Fluffy bunnies? I'm thankful for the one shred of damn-the-manedness I exhibited in this room. Because that's a unicorner.

I stand by the brilliance to this day.


*Actually, I am, but the intro doesn't work that way