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Latest Humorous T-shirt Slogan:
"You Wish!"
This one has to be taken in context to be appreciated. The girl wearing this belly shirt was maybe 5'0" tall, with a muffin top going on, despite the fact that she was clearly in her third trimester of pregnancy. In addition she was wearing a thong that came up past her low-rise jeans and pushed her muffin top down over the edge to really emphasize the roll. I'm not in perfect shape so I don't expect that others should be, but when you are wearing that shirt, along with the rest of the outfit, you open yourself to scrutiny (and perhaps random looks of horror).

It's fun to hate:
The Soccer Moms who insist that they drive gas-guzzling SUV's for the safety of their children despite the fact that they are 6 times more likely to be in a rollover accident than any other vehicle. It's like beating your child unconscious with the butt of your gun so that he will remain on the floor, thus making him less likely to be hit by a random bullet coming through the front window.

When Shadowtwin reigns supreme:
There will be mandatory, passive birth control required to participate in any form of government assistance. If you can't afford to raise your child on your own we are here to help you, but we must first make sure that your reproductive organs are adequately contained. If you don't like that policy all you have to do is support your kids your damn self!
Vote Shadowtwin!


Wildly inaccurate, yet shockingly precise, predictions based completely on happenstance and arbitrary universal fluctuations.
Your Horoscope:


Sagitarius: 11/22-12/21
A typographical error in your Church's newsletter will lead to you performing sex acts on dozens of anonymous strangers in your pursuit of "oral highground."

Capricorn: 12/22-1/19
The stars did recently tell your wife to "listen to her heart" regarding whether or not she should leave you. The stars did not intend for you to listen to her heart. But once you used that bonesaw on her sternum (not trusting the stethoscope which just responded with a cryptic thumping sound), we're pretty sure she made up her mind anyway.

Aquarius: 1/20-2/18
The stars would like to apologize for stating in their last prophecy, "Be wary of the stranger you meet at beach this weekend. The stars aren't sure why, but they don't trust him." Through a cosmic hiccup, that information was supposed to be released this month. The August prophecy should have read, "A dark and handsome stranger will approach you on the beach, profess his love for you, and sweep you away for a jetset marriage. After which you will lead a long, happy, prosperous, healthy life as the Queen of a small island nation." We apologize for any inconvenience this error may have caused.

Pisces: 2/19-3/20
Your new stopwatch will allow you to time how long you can hold your breath underwater down to the thousandth of a second. Unfortunately, poor planning will mean that you are not able to actually share the information with anyone.

Aries: 3/21-4/19
Your innovative new device for beauticians to use while giving pedicures can be wildly successful and make you quite wealthy IF you change the name. Trust us, no one is going to buy a "Ped-O-File".

Taurus: 4/20-5/20
Your Mother always told you to wear clean underwear just in case there was an accident and paramadics had to see them. But as you board that plane today, the stars want you to know that you needn't worry about it. The debris field will be more than 8 square miles, making it impossible to find most human remains. Not to mention that the ensuing fire burned so hot that it disintegrated not only all fabric, but most of the thin metals aboard as well.

Gemini: 5/21-6/21
You just had to get that genital piercing, didn't you? The stars tried to warn you not to, but you went ahead and did it anyway... Now all your worst fears will come to bear when, at a campground this weekend, you run afoul of this guy:


Cancer: 6/22-7/22
The less traveled by areas of the Grand Canyon's north rim offer some of the most breathtaking views of this natural wonder. You will soon find out they also include some of the worst footings and none of the handrails. They do, however, provide equally awe-inspiring, terminal velocity impacts.

Leo: 7/23-8/22
The stars heard your pleas, begging for someone who you could share your love with and embrace for the rest of your life. If you are still single, throw your arms around the closest person to you at 3:44pm GMT on Dcember 9th -That'll be the one. Trust us, you won't have time to be picky...

Virgo: 8/23-9/22
The stars have piled up most of your things on the front porch. You can stay at a friend's house, but you aren't coming back home until you admit what you did and apologize. The stars' Mother was right about you... (you must have really pissed them off; the stars were in tears while they told me this)

Libra: 9/23-10/22
The stars have been doing a little thinking and a lot of math. The population of planet earth is roughly 6,796,590,704. That means that roughly 566,382,558 people share each astrological sign. About 18,620,796 have the same birthday. Based on average life expectancy as many as 248,277 people were born on the same day, in the same year, for every zodiac sign. How can one statement possibly predict the future of all of them? Ehh, fuck it. "A full moon while Venus is rising is an omen of good things to come."

Scorpio: 10/23-11/21
They say you never know how you are going to react to a crisis. After a home invasion this weekend you will: You will scream, "Do whatever you want to my wife, but leave me alone!" You will then create a distraction by throwing your newborn at the assailant as you dive through the window to safety. Now you know.

Music lost to history:

Aerosmith - Dream On When I started doing these, I could never have imagined that I would be putting an Aerosmith song here. Since I was born in 1974, this song is well before my generation. It was recorded in 1972 and released in 1983 on Aerosmith's Self-Titled Album, but to read the information on it at Wikipedia most of us would become familiar with it from a re-release in 1976.

Like most of the music being released in the late 60's/early 70's that was pushing the rock-n-roll envelope, Dream On relies heavily on solid composition and and melody. Before the era of the modern effects processor, these bands had no distortion to hide behind (or very little), and synthesized instruments hadn't yet made their way into music. In that way the music always sounds more raw to us today because, quite simply, it was. While it seems laughable to think about today, music like this was so far removed from the bubble-gum pop of the 50's that it still wasn't accepted into the mainstream. As the baby-boomers became the target demographic, the rock-n-roll movement really started to pick up speed, with bands like Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith clearing the path for the much darker and heavier bands like Black Sabbath.

While I (and most of my generation) are probably far more familiar with the Aerosmith of the late 80's and early 90's, the reason this song makes it onto my MLtH page comes down to one thing: Age. Not necessarily the age of the song; In fact, as I sat down to do the research for this today, I had no idea when it was released, but would have guessed (closely) the mid 70's. Tyler was born March 26, 1948, meaning that this song was written when he was only 24 years old. I'm not sure why, but I have always thought this song was pretty amazing given his age at composition. I suppose it is human nature to wax poetic about the days of yore and the imminent passage of time, but the melody sets a mood that makes you feel it right along with him. As the song nears the end and his lyrics become more more frenzied, you can almost feel the pain (longing?) in his voice. Listen to it with headphones and no distraction sometime, you'll see what I mean.

I wrote a short bit some time ago about Kelly Sweet's cover of this song (see the video on Youtube). While I have since gotten over the initial hatred I felt towards the cover of the song, I still just can't like it. The words are there; she hits the notes; but I just can't hear it in her voice. As if there is somthing very personal about the song and Tyler's deliverance of the lyrics that just can't be duplicated. At least to me.

That said, I have heard Aerosmith doing the song with an orchestra, and it also seems to lack the passion of the original. So perhaps the thing that I like so much about it is the under-produced, raw sound of it, or it may be that I am still hearing it through the ears of that impressionable youth that heard if for the first time in a dusty old Van with my Uncle Art. Either way, it seems it is Lost to History.

Music Lost to History Archive


I Can't Believe it's Not Porn!
WhorePresents.comYep, it's not porn. It's not a site with gifts for sale either, which is probably a good thing since I can't imagine that any woman would be at all flattered to get a gift -no matter how nice- in a box that says "Whore Presents.com" on it.

Daily Reading:
BlackChampagne
Magazine Man
Shane Nickerson
Wil Wheaton
Boners
Hoyazo's Poker Blog

My reading list changes from time to time, and there are many sites that I visit that are not on the list. They are listed in the order that I visit them, enjoy!



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Shadowtwin.com: Cardboard hill



Sunday, October 09, 2005
 

Cardboard hill

It takes so little to entertain a child, well it took very little to entertain me when I was a child. I really was one of those kids that would play with my new toy at Christmas for a few minutes, then get hours of entertainment out of the box that it came in. And I wasn't alone.

There were railroad tracks mere feet from our door, there was a river just beyond them, there was a creek in my back yard, there was also a small park (with a huge ass tree in it) just across the tracks. There were so many ways that I could have had fun, but that was for personal fun. No one else really played in any of those areas. There were a couple of seasons, however, where everyone in my block liked to engage in the same two activities. One was to tube down College Dr. (which, of course, only worked in snow) and the other was to take a run down cardboard hill.

I don't know if the cardboard hill thing existed anywhere other than the particular block, on the particular street, in the particular town where I was living, but damn those was good times!

It was really a simple concept. Behind Jason Friedman's house (well, technically it was his parent's house) there was a big old hill. In fact they actually had a strange terrace of car tires buried into the hill behind their house to keep the hill from flowing down and destroying it. Those made for an excellent ladder to get to the top of the hill. The hill itself was nothing more than a bunch grass (well something like grass) that would be dry and yellow at the correct time of year. It was easy to knock it down (usually just took a few runs down the hill on a piece of cardboard), and carve trails to zoom down on a piece of cardboard.

When the season was right we would all go dig through the dumpsters behind the Albertson's store, which was less than a block away, and try to find the best, largest pieces of cardboard that we could. If you had a wimpy piece of cardboard it would likely tear out on the way down and leave you with a blistered ass, and a run back to Albertson's to find another piece (what is totally unfortunate is that we all lived in Oregon. Oregon was way ahead of the curve on recycling. The majority of the cardboard from the Albertson's was put into this huge compressor thing and recycled. The best we could usually find was some small scrap no bigger than 12 inches square).

Once the hay weeds grass whatever the hell was covering that hill was pushed down, it acted like sex wax on a surfboard. Imagine barreling down a hill, completely out of control, no steering, no brakes, no protection, on nothing but a very thin piece of cardboard (unless, of course, you happen to be my mother --who actually does read this-- so for her sake let us pretend that our safety measures went beyond the 'just jump if it gets too bad' mentality --which they did not-- ). Good times.

There was a blackberry bush right at the end of the run, how close you got to the bush was a sort of character building machismo kind of thing. If you rode your flimsy little cardboard close enough that the briars actually stuck your little sliding body as you bailed, that meant you were a dare devil. Of course this was at the time that television was airing (I am not going to link to them) The Fall Guy, The Dukes of Hazzard, Starsky and Hutch and The Smurfs. While the Smurfs might not seem to be such a motivational factor in all of this, considering the other programming, the Smurf's was really the biggest motivation. Nobody wanted to be Brainy Smurf, you know, the guy who didn't fit in.

Each kid would speed down the hill on his/her (no female entity would be stupid enough to try this) tiny chunk of refuse (call it what you will. I saved many pieces of cardboard from the local landfill, for a few days at least), each successive run would make the path a bit longer. Eventually it would lead to the patch of briars that separated us from the unknown (well it was known, even to me, but I have to save the reveal for later).

So you sit on a piece of cardboard and then let gravity take its course. You end up totally tearing ass down the hill. I don't know what the top speed acquired on that hill was. It seemed to me that it was akin to a rocket launch, or at least a Dragster, but I was quite young at the time. Memories do have a way of glorifying the past, don't they?

It so happened that one of us found a watermelon bin behind the Albertson's one day. If you have never seen a cardboard watermelon bin I will give you a brief synopsis. It is a huge piece of cardboard, way thicker than any normal cardboard. It is stapled (with seriously heavy-duty staples) at its only break. The dimensions that matter are that it was about 30 inches tall (which translated to 30 inches wide for riding purposes), it was at least four times thicker than normal cardboard, and it looked like it could really survive anything (the thing was about a half of an inch thick FFS).

We were all pretty young at the time. We knew what Math was, but only in an abstract manner. 1+1=2 for sure, but acceleration, gravity, velocity and other such was a bit beyond our reach. So, in our infinite wisdom, we called this piece of cardboard "the truck" and decided that we would all ride it down the hill together. Big Mistake.

Looking on this with my adult eyes (or what pass for them around here) I realize that this was pretty damn stupid. While "the truck" was certainly the best piece of cardboard ever, it was also enclosed on the front and back (when you are doing what we were doing), which meant that you have no idea which way you are going. Gravity will take its course and you will be at gravity's mercy for the rest of the ride. Of course I was young and stupid, one of those two, I am happy to say I have overcome, but I am still stupid. I really don't think that anyone who jumped into "the truck" went on to be a math major.

Our little minds didn't seem to put together the 2+2 equation. We had no idea that having four of us in "the truck" would make us accelerate a hell of a lot faster than just one kid on a piece of cardboard. We tore ass down that hill! Since we were now in an enclosed traveling device, no one knew when we were getting close to the briars. We tore ass through them as well. We had, at this point, gone fifty or so feet further than anyone else had ever dared. Not on purpose, mind you, had someone voiced concern over getting close to the briars we would all have bailed, but no one did...We were in for the whole ride...

That was when we went careening off the cliff. No nets, no wires. We all went off the cliff, quite fabulously, with a piece of cardboard as our vessel. We all hit with a thud. It was a thankful thud, as I noticed that everyone else had immediately exited the vehicle. There were whoops and cheers up above, coming from the people who didn't just crash their cardboard into asphalt, they thought it was the best thing ever. I couldn't even ham this one up, well, I suppose I could have, but the wet spot in the front of my pants might have given me away.

I don't even think that we were gods for a single moment; Once the other kids knew that the fall to the street was survivable, not to mention that we had mowed down the berry briars in advance, they came in droves to try it. Damn my luck.

I had the opportunity to visit cardboard hill when I was 20 years old. The hill was only about fifty or sixty feet down to the drop. The drop was only about six feet. It seemed so much bigger back when I was so much smaller.

Still, good times. That is an experience that you will never forget.

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