sesame street

Today I was running errands and happened on This American Life, one of my favorite shows ever. It was the same show I had been listening to on my drive to key west but ended up losing as I headed south. It was a weird show because it usually has 3 or 4 stories on a theme, and this show they were trying to do short segments based on what a play group in NYC was doing. The play group would do 30 2 minute plays. They had one of the plays on TAL and it was hilarious.

Anyway, one of the stories was about the first day cadets are at West Point. I started thinking about my ex and remembering how we often would go into San Fran for the weekend and driving home on Sunday we would listen to TAL, and then I looked up and saw all these palm trees and for a moment was confused because it seemed I had actually gone back in time to the year 2000 and was driving on the freeway from San Fran to Capitola.

Another story was about this guy who was smoking up with his friends and he made the comment "the band Journey is the 80's equivalent to Dynasty". This caused a game to be created called monkeys to monkeys, the point being to name some band and the equivalent TV show. The final line in the monkeys to monkeys story, where the guy is talking about how he still plays that game with his friends is "and that's why marijuana makes you smart". Said very sarcastically.

I started thinking about how I would never be able to play that game. When I was growing up we didn't have a TV, and when we finally got one it was a black and white piece of shit with a wire hangar for an antenna. This was the source of many issues at school. I had to make up elaborate games when people would spend the night so that they wouldn't notice we didn't have a TV (living on a lake with haunted woods was useful). All the kids at school were obsessed with Sesame Street and I could never participate in the conversations about the show, not knowing any of the characters.

Then once, at a neighbor's garage sale, I happened on some books for this show called Sesame Street. So I bought the books, which were written like comic books, and assumed that they were transcripts of the actual show. I spent the entire weekend reading them thinking I could go to school and pretend I had seen the show.

I went to school the Monday and started talking about one of the story lines involving the cookie monster, who in the book was a king, and how he was having problems trying to find the perfect cookie to eat. Everyone looked at me strangely. Turns out the books had nothing to do with the show.

But I enjoyed them a lot and was very sad when my younger brother cut them up, ostensibly to make napkins for dinner because we were out and my mom was yelling about that. The reason we ran out of napkins is because I had decided they made good hats and had been riding my bike with my napkin hat, and then other kids in the neighborhood wanted hats, so I took all of our napkins and handed them out. When I cried because my brother ruined my books my dad yelled at me and said I shouldn't be reading comic books anyway.

Though he may have known more about raising kids than one might think. To this day I've never smoked pot.