Bad TV

I always lie about my childhood. There was enough turmoil and drama in it that it is easy for things to slip into the vast sulcal chasms that riddle my brain. There are fleeting, half-formed images that pop up from time to time (did we really have a cat with a perpetual hole in its head?) like Lovecraftian phantasms that exist in a fictive space somewhere between embellishment and truth. Part of this, no doubt, comes from my father's work in experimental cinema. Fortunately, although my memory might not be the sharpest, the relatively objective record that does exist confirms that one episode did indeed occur.

I was already somewhat unlike many of the other children at the private school where my mother had enrolled me, and where I would be a student from age 2 ½ through the fifth grade. Whereas their parents were typically still married, mine had divorced around the time I began pre-kindergarten. My family wasn't destitute by any means, but it seemed that we were in a lower income bracket than most of my peers. And their parents certainly did not party the way mine did. My mother, ever the conscientious parent, would invite over her firecracker of a drinking buddy and down Cuba Libres deep into the night while my sister and I entertained ourselves by watching Animal House. My father was an active user of marijuana, something he never attempted to hide from his children. He lived in the house that he and my mother had built together; and impressive log cabin on the most remote 63 acres they could find. He had chosen to decorate the lengthy driveway (over a mile off the road, with a serpentine route and devastating craters littering the way) with bleached animal skulls, rusty chainsaw blades, and car hoods tagged wit...

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...ters; to quote Flipper “life is the only thing worth living for.” You are your own master, and you create the world in your own image every day, so live your life to be remembered and let your death be forgotten. You get to create your own narrative and, if you don't like the one that has surrounded you, shoot it to hell while surrounded by your friends and family. Was this something I knew at the time? Of course not, at the time I was just happy spending another weekend with my dad. I didn't know what was going on around me except that I was having fun, and no doubt it beat the hell out of whatever the other kids at school were doing. The thing is, this wasn't that anomalous of an event, it just remains one of the few for which there is concrete documentation.

The tape, the full half hour, was submitted to the MTV network. I don't think he received a reply.