THE SURFING PIZZA

Like everyone in the world, we’ve been having crazy weather. You know, the kind of crazy stuff that you swore never used to happen in 1980s. In the past few years, we’ve had hurricanes, tornadoes, snowpacalypses, derechos, and other hundred years storms that never used to happen around here. You know, the kind of stuff I would have salivated over as a kid, whatever could get me a day out of school. I prayed and danced in my inside-out pajamas for the weather gods to be cruel and merciless upon us. And I guess they finally listened twenty years later.

A few weeks ago, it dawned on me that whenever these insane weather events happen, I’m completely reliant on the status updates of my Facebook friends for weather information. I never know if something is coming until I start seeing the various panicked musings of random people in high school. Then there’s The Weather Channel website, which always basically just says YOU’RE ALL GOING TO DIE HERE’S YOUR LOCAL 7 DAY WEATHER FORECAST YOU UNLUCKY BASTARDS. And then there’s the local reporters with the caffeine shakes, foaming at the mouth over their radar maps and thrilling on-the-scene videos of rain.

On the other side, there’s the morally superior people who think everything is hype and nothing bad is ever going to happen. I hate those people, too, and I wish a basement, sump pump, and underground spring pointed at their house on them. And then there’s my mother, who just wants to make sure I’m not standing outside in the storm in a puddle under a tree while holding an umbrella. Oh, mom. How did you know?

I wanted some kind of weather arbiter. Something that would keep me up to date on developing weather without all the prognosticating and sportsmanship. You know how in emergency situations, they say you should have stuff like bottled water, flashlights, and a battery-powered weather radio? Well, I’ve always felt woefully inadequate because what the hell is a weather radio and who even has one? Old people? Time-travelers from the 1970s? People who shop at Radioshack?

So I decided to get one. And after careful research, I splurged on one with fancy programmable features and a digital screen. The Cadillac of weather radios. I still wasn’t 100% sure why I might need something like this in the age of the Internet and smartphones, but I waited in anticipation for delivery. And when it finally arrived, I planned to devote my evening to it, programming and caressing it. “Whatever,” said the wife, “this is one of your weird things, just don’t bring it upstairs to junk up our house.”

Once it was all set up, I turned it on and a droll computer voice read the forecast over and over on the staticky weather band. What? That’s it? I secretly questioned if I had just wasted fifty bucks. (Don’t worry honey, I didn’t actually spend that much out of our joint spending account.)

No. That couldn’t be my reaction. I was going to love this thing. If there was ever an iceberg alert, avalanche warning, volcano warning, or contagious disease warning in the middle of night, we’d be damn grateful for that 70 decibel siren going off in the dead of the night. Sure we don’t live near a volcano, but that’s not the point. The point is we can’t just keep this life-saving device in the basement with my collection of “weird things.” It has to be in the bedroom with us.

I don’t know how I managed it, but I talked the wife into letting me keep it on my bedside stand. It doubles as a clock! You know how we’ve been saying I should get a clock for my side! And it will wake us up at 3am if there’s a rabid pack of bears roaming nearby! Wouldn’t you want to know?

“It will wake us up at 3am?” she asked dryly.

“No, it will never wake us up.”

She rolled her eyes. I won. It proudly went on my bedside stand. And every night, I’ve enjoyed listening to the droning, comforting sound of the robotic weather forecast before going to sleep. And it’s been fairly accurate. There’s no analysis or hype. It just says what’s going on. Even the wife came around to it. What the weather radio said has become a regular dinner conversation of ours.

And then one night it did was wake us up at 3am. I bolted from the bed fully prepared to beat down some bears or run from some volcano lava, but it was just a flash flood watch. In other words, rain. It woke us up at 3am to say it was raining. The wife didn’t insta-divorce me at that very moment though, so I’m happy about that.

Geez. I haven’t written in a while. My excuse is I’ve had one of those nasty summer head colds. When I get sick in the winter, that crap is usually gone in a day or two. In the summer, it seems to linger around, like it wants to be friends, lay in the sun, and get Rita’s Gelatis with me.

Colds are kind of like a mini-vacation though, if you let them be. I’m not that person who nobly tries to troop onward through life and work. I drop everything and hole up for a few days with a box of tissues, an eight-pack of Gatorade, and the remote control.

So I’ve been languishing couch-side, coughing and watching gobs of guilty-pleasure TV and movies. And by guilty pleasure, I mean I won’t even type out what I’ve watched. When you’re sick, TV viewing history is worse than browser history. It’s bad enough that the wife stalks my Netflix Recently Viewed and I’ve had to explain away a few things on there. At least Fios On Demand doesn’t leave behind a trail. Phew.

Oh and my dog has been a dog terrorist. I thought dogs were supposed to comfort you when you’re sick and bring you hot chocolate in a barrel around their necks. Not this one. This one has been stealing my tissues and racing around the house with them, and then actually growling at me when I attempt to extract them from the grips of her jaws and the back of her throat. I’ve heard about bone aggression in dogs, but used tissue aggression is a new one.

So I’ve had tons of time to myself and to think about life the past several days, and I’ve decided it’s time to introduce you to someone important in my life. The wife is going to be jealous that I’m writing this, but it has to come out. It’s true that I have always had another woman in my life.

Lisa is a body-length pillow in the shape of a fish. Lisa is my fish girlfriend.

I met her at the Bass Pro Outdoor World, where they sell boats, guns, baits, and camouflage for your entire wardrobe. One day I wandered in there to admire their amazing selection of wooden carvings in the shapes of bears. Well, I guess you could say fate sent me in there that day. There, in the middle of the aisle, was an enormous crate of body-length pillows in the shape of fish. They were on sale for $19.99, which I thought was an amazing deal for a body-length pillow in the shape of a fish. And to think, at full retail $24.99, I might have passed her by.

Lisa is always perfectly soft and not ever weirdly lumpy. She is 100% polyester and 200% true love. She may not have the prettiest face or fancy memory foam, but she does have lots of personality. When I lay on the couch with her, she doesn’t hurt my back and neck. When I flip her over to the cold side, she is refreshingly cool. And she never steals my tissues and tries to make me chase her while my head is pounding from a 101 degree fever. Ahem.

Her favorite color is cyan and her favorite food is macaroni and cheese, but don’t ask me how I know these things.

And to her credit, Lisa has never said a bad word about my wife, even though my wife has always been openly hostile towards Lisa. The wife never lets her sleep in bed with us, calling her “that ugly thing.” Then there was the time she shoved her on the top shelf of our closet for an entire year. Poor Lisa.

And now that I’ve typed that out, I realize I might have been better off just listing what I’ve watched on television. Oh well. Love is strange.

If you instantly recognize these, then you’re probably in your thirties and had no friends as a child. To those of us who know, they’re simply iconic. They’re like Ray-Bans and the Rubik’s cube, Tab soda and MTV. They’re the orange handcuffs from My Pet Monster, whom we’ll get to in a minute. My Pet Monster was awesome enough, but, but them orange handcuffs. Them orange handcuffs.

They had plastic links that broke apart when you pulled them. This feature alone put them on a pedestal well above the crappy plastic pair that came in my police toy kit. I didn’t pretend to be King Kong. I didn’t pretend to be the strongest human alive. No, I just sat on the floor handcuffing myself and breaking the chains apart over and over and over. Or occasionally, I switched it up by handcuffing the dog. Who looked at me, sighed deeply, and tried her best to fall back asleep.

Alright, and then there was the My Pet Monster doll that they came with.

Let me see if I can explain this thing. It was the Reagan years of two-income families and latchkey kids, so perhaps there was a collective guilt. It was the era of “friend dolls.” Toys such as Teddy Ruxpin, My Buddy, and Kid Sister weren’t just dolls. They were friends. They were hefty in size, weighing almost ten pounds and reaching two feet in length. They read you stories, shared your bike seat, and patted you gently on the back as you sobbed yourself to sleep over not having any real friends.

He was released by American Greetings in 1986, so basically, a stuffed animal released by a greeting card company. But like everything in the 1980s, it spawned a cartoon series, a direct-to-video movie, and the full smorgasbord of merchandise. But My Pet Monster was the coolest of the friend dolls. He was like that friend that shows up to your house with a six-pack of craft brews to share. A cool guy, not that like My Buddy. My Buddy was like the friend who comes over to hang out but when he takes his shoes off it smells bad and you suddenly become painfully aware there’s still two hours left of the movie you guys agreed to watch.

My Pet Monster came with those handcuffs to share. Which I promptly ran off with and never returned. Eventually, I gunked up the Velcro straps with dog hair and lint balls. Then I lost one half of the cuffs. I’m sorry, My Pet Monster. As a friend, I was scum. I left you slumped over in the corner of my bedroom for years until one day my mother asked if she could throw you in the yard sale pile, and I just shrugged coldly. You tried to make eye contact with me, but I just fiddled with my Game Gear and looked away.

Like an ex that gets fabulous while you just get fat, My Pet Monster showed me. Now he regularly sells in the hundreds to two-hundreds on eBay. But maybe somewhere, my old friend is still looking out for me, because I recently found a pair of them orange handcuffs at the thrift store. Excitedly, I showed the wife but she had no idea what they were. She had real, living, human friends growing up, whom she now disgruntledly follows on Facebook, while I follow mine on eBay.

Since every kid basically did the same thing with the handcuffs as me, they’re actually quite rare to come by. A pair of the handcuffs alone recently sold on eBay for $72. Which is insane. And since I found them for thirty cents, I basically have bragging rights for life. So thanks, old pal, where ever you are. And if you happen to see My Buddy, do me a favor and punch him in the face.

Now for old time’s sake, I’m going to go sit on the floor and break the cuffs apart forty-five times, handcuff the dog, chug a Hi-C juice box, and stare open-mouthed at the television drooling for five hours after that.

I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. The 1980s were weird. Take a slasher flick about a disfigured murderer of kids. Make a novelty talking doll out of it. Add poseable arms and legs. Make sure to advertise that on the box. Total selling point. Put it on the shelves at Toys R Us. The kids will really go for it.

And here’s the thing. WE REALLY DID GO FOR IT. I wasn’t even allowed to watch Nightmare on Elm Street and didn’t see it until my late teens, but like other kids at the time, I was completely sucked into the merchandising bonanza. When I think of Freddy Kruger, I don’t think of a psychotic who tortures and murders children in their sleep. I think of a nostalgic and iconic figure whom I really just wanted to be for Halloween.

Released by Matchbox in 1989, The Talking Freddy Krueger doll was controversial and didn’t hang around on the shelves for too long. And in fact, despite what I say about my cuddly nostalgia for all things Freddy Krueger, I most definitely would not have wanted this doll in my bedroom at night. You see, I was never scared of monsters under my bed/in my closet. I was far too intelligent for that. My fears were completely rational: like bees. Man, fuck bees. Or jellyfish. Or dolls strangling me in my sleep.

So it’s with all of this context that when I saw this Talking Freddy Krueger doll the other weekend at a yard sale, I had to have it. I even paid more than I normally would, although I still got a damn good price for fifteen bucks.

The box is in solid shape and the pull string function works like brand new. He spouts out fun phrases like “let’s be friends,” or my favorite, a shrill string of maniacal laughter.

Finding this book briefly inspired my next great life plan. The average game of Pac-Man lasts something like a minute and a half. And my average game of Pac-Man probably lasts less than half of that. I’m terrible at it. So when I found this book, my first thought was “oh cool, something neat for my retro gaming shelf,” and my second thought wasn’t really a thought but instead a moment of divine intervention. A beam of light broke through the clouds and shone down on the book while illuminating the world around me. In the distance, I heard a bluebird sing.

I could read this book cover to cover. Study it. Know it. Live it.

That dream lasted about five pages into the book when I reached the sentence: “I have attempted to put together an easy-to-understand guide to learning Pac-Man, starting with the simple beginning patterns and progressing to advanced ones—all diagrammed in detail on the Pac-Man schematics.”

Oh, Pac-Man schematics. You lost me. I am never going to be able to study schematic plans. I barely have the patience for untangling my iPod headphones. And I’m not ever going to remember the thirty-five different arrow directions of which way to go through the schematics. I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast. (And no, in fact, we are out of the waffles again since my last my post.)

Seriously. Look at this. Just look at it. This isn’t what I need to help me master Pac-Man. What I need is a Game Genie and a bottle of Adderall. Oh well, goodbye, dreams. I’ll be over here trying to see things in those Magic Eye picture books. (Still on my bucket list. FOREVER. NO I CANNOT SEE THE DOLPHIN.)

Finally, dinosaurs. There’s really not much to say about them. Except, well, dinosaurs. DINOSAURS. DINOSAURS.

The wife started it last month, when she brought home a box of the regular Eggo Homestyles. “Something easy for breakfast,” she said. Because sometimes cereal is exhausting and eggs are an odyssey.

To our horror, the box was gone in three days. “How the hell did we eat them that fast?” we asked. It was like an out-of-body experience. Because we don’t even really like these things. Do we? For God’s sake, they’re rubbery toaster waffles. I can’t even tell you what half the ingredients on the box mean. I haven’t eaten like this since middle school.

We shouldn’t be doing this. We’ve got to be adults about it. It’s just a kick, that’s all. You know, how we go on kicks with things. Then we’ll get of sick of it and move on again. It’s fleeting. A comet. A falling star. But man, something just feels so right about it this time.

We’ve gone through four boxes in the last month. We moved onto blueberry. Strawberry. Even chocolate chip. I didn’t even look the wife in the eye when I went to grab another one in the grocery store freezer section the other night. I just shrugged and she said nothing and the approval was tacit.

Every morning we engage in the ongoing waffle war. She gets up an hour before me. From bed, I strain to hear if she’s making those waffles. I listen for the subtle metallic tink of the toaster being pressed. If she’s having them, I’m having them. I’m not eating a measly bowl of cereal if she’s feasting on waffles. The next morning, it begins again. She quietly counts the waffles left in the box. Later, she confronts me.

“Are you eating all the waffles?” she asks.

“No! I had them once. Once and they’re already halfway gone!” I say.

“Once? I haven’t even had any yet,” she says.

“That’s not true. I heard you using the toaster this morning.”

“Oh, now you’re listening to me make breakfast?” she asks.

One of us is bluffing and one of us is eating all the waffles like a big fat pig that no one loves.

It wasn’t always like this. Life is basically a journey through waffles. There’s the waffles your grandmother served with the perfect proportions of butter to syrup. The ones you used to get late night and a little drunk at Denny’s. There were the kitschy road trips with ironic stops at the Waffle House. The smugness and authority of the ones you made at home with the waffle iron living in the city. You did the hippie flaxseed and waffles-from-scratch thing. The exotic chic of the Belgian waffle. The whole-wheat phase. The foray into frozen French toast. You won’t go back there again.

Is the Eggo habit a gateway drug into Pop Tarts? What’s next? Those frozen confetti-sprinkle pancakes? A slippery slope into Toaster Strudels? God knows rock bottom is when you’re desperately squeezing the last drop of frosting from the useless plastic packet.

Relax, it’s just a fling. So don’t get too comfortable around here, Mrs. Butterworth. And anyway, you’re a lie. You’ve never come to life and talked to me, and sometimes I think my resentment over it affects everything I’ve ever done.

Stuff. I’ve found it. We’ll start with this Tony the Tiger baseball because it’s not an awesome collectible or ridiculously rare holy grail. It’s just a random proofs-of-purchase send-away item from the late eighties. It’s just a random baseball. And yet I’ve wanted it my entire life.

I guess it was just one of those things I got hyper-focused on as a kid. I saw it advertised on the back of my Frosted Flakes box and suddenly nothing else mattered. I wanted this baseball so bad. People, I need caps-lock to properly emphasize this. SO BAD. I had dreams about it at night. And I guess I didn’t get it because my parents didn’t feel like buying sixty more boxes of Frosted Flakes or whatever it took.

My friend actually had this baseball and I even thought about stealing it from him. And it would have been the perfect crime, because he was the kind of kid who was always losing his stuff. I plotted the evil scheme for days, but eventually I decided Santa or God or the Easter Bunny would find out.

I don’t even know how or why I’ve managed to carry this memory into adulthood. It’s not like my parents didn’t bend over backwards to instill happy memories and fulfilling experiences into my life. But when I saw the ball at a yard sale last weekend, I handed over a dollar for it without hesitation, even if I felt a little sheepish about it. The random-ass-Frosted-Flakes-baseball-shaped-hole in my heart is filled in. I hope you understand.

And here’s Stridor, another piece to add to my junky Masters of the Universe corner in my basement. Seriously, I have the saddest MOTU collection there is. Figures with missing arms, paint chips missing, and not a single He-Man figure. Well, except for a random bootleg bendy He-Man who’s uncomfortably naked except for painted-on red underwear, and yet I don’t mind. I hope you understand.

Next, here are some garden-variety water-squirting toys. The Spit Balls are from 1988, and the other is a Street Shark, which is my pet favorite oddball Ninja Turtles rip-off from the 90s.

Found Robie the Robot. Robie was a mechanical bank sold at Radioshack that especially bombarded the shelves around the holiday season. Old Radioshack robots rule. Too bad this Robie doesn’t work. I nabbed him for only a quarter so it’s not a big deal. Besides, his motor gears always sounded as though he was on the verge of breaking, even when he was in brand-new condition.

The Ninja Turtles Movie Storybook. Which I honestly attempted to sit down and read straight through. I made it to page two before giving up my noble venture, and then I just looked at the pictures.

Star Wars Pop Up Books from the late 70s and early 80s. Most of the pop-ups and action tabs are intact. And when they aren’t, it’s totally okay because you find alternative-universe storylines like this:

Darth Vader fighting a puddle of poo. That was my favorite part of the movie.

The Mother of All Supersoakers, the CPS 3200. This thing is like a bazooka. It’s so big, the water had to stored in an over-the-shoulder seven-liter sling, which unfortunately is missing. As much as I’d love to rig up some kind of hose/water thing to get this thing working, instead I sold it on eBay for $55.

This amazing 1980s Star Tours hat from the Disney ride.

And finally, a Donny Osmond coloring book. Come on, you’d buy it, too, for fifty cents.

Also, bonus annotations from either an older brother or a spurned-fan:

I hope you understand.