Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

I have only experienced recurring dreams once. When I was a kid, and remembered my dreams with more frequency, and in greater detail, I had a dream that kept coming back for a few weeks. It was very detailed, and in hindsight, I'm not sure if it was exactly the same, but it had many of the same features. I  remember being confused that I kept having it because it never had before. One funny thing about memory is that you believe something happened in a specific way, and it might not have. Remembering a dream is even more challenging because nobody but you remembers it, so you cannot ask them if it really happened that way.  Visually, the dream was striking, memorable, and very strange. It was like I was trapped in a Scooby-Doo episode, except the animation was crisper and more bizarre than the Hanna-Barbera cartoon. There were two witches that looked like they had escaped from The Wizard of Oz that flitted in and out and a sled race that led me back to the beginning of the dr...

Sometimes I wonder why I write since I seem to be running into more roadblocks these days. I put many hours into a project even though it might never reach fruition due to someone else's disinterest or rejection. Worse yet, I might never finish the project because I am tired or do not know how to complete it. The obstacles keep mounting whether they are external, such as committee meetings or more papers to grade, or internal, especially self-doubt and inability to commit to ideas. I seldom have writer's block, but I often lack the commitment to do the hard work of editing or revising.  Writing is a commitment that sometimes feels too much like a compulsion because I often find myself writing when I should be relaxing. I want to write in my free time, but I also want to sleep, watch television, or listen to music. Instead, I try to push through, but my job and other commitments have made it increasingly hard to do so. There are only so many hours in a day is a truism that does ...

Fear felt different when I was a child. I remember cowering under the covers once after someone knocked on the door in the middle of the night. I could hear faint adult voices. I think I remember my father telling him that he could not stay here. I stayed under the covers shaking with fear. Another childhood instance of fear occurred when my uncle first told me the urban legend of "The Killer in the Backseat," where a woman driving on a dark road late at night is annoyed by a truck behind her flashing its lights. She stops at a gas station to get away from her pursuer and finds out that there was a man in her back seat with a knife. The person in the truck was only trying to warn her. Of course, certain details of this story are obviously apocryphal, but it serves its purpose of cautioning people to look in the back seat. I still always do when I get in the car. As a child, this story was very scary to me, and I took it at face value. Another time I felt true fear was w...

My memories of the first place I lived are fuzzy. I remember orange carpeting and brown walls in the trailer my parents rented the first three years of my life before we moved into the house on 6th Avenue that they still live in thirty years later. I remember a car my mom drove a few years later when she first got her license a little better. It was a tan sedan, a nondescript Ford or Mercury model with leather seats that smelled vaguely of cigarette smoke and oil, making my young mind think of the piles of dog poop soured by age that sat in the back yard of my parent's home until we got around to cleaning them up. I cannot remember if most of these experiences were truly real. I know that car was because I was around seven years old when my mother finally learned to drive. She had a series of cars that came from my grandfather's Ford dealership. Later she got her own, but my grandpa drove cars from his garage my entire life; they too smelled of cigarette smoke and old oil. ...

As spring turns to summer, I often feel old as I remember all of the summers I have spent lazily reading comics and fiction or watching television when I know that I should be writing. Of course, I also spend time outside, usually bicycling, walking, or swimming. These days, however, I generally feel too warm as the humidity and temperature creep up to a shocking eighty degrees. There were many summers where I spent time fishing or running down the sidewalks of my old neighborhood, tripping over the roots of tired trees that lined the walk. One year a friend and I shamefully rode our bikes into sapling poplar trees, leaving black, oozing marks on their trunks. Last time I checked there was only one of those trees left, still battle scarred and defiant. The tree is thirty feet tall now, but its trunk is gnarled and shrunken from our youthful transgressions. Another time I rode my bicycle into a nearby water-filled ditch to avoid bees that were chasing me. They still stung me, and it...

The snow is piling up outside even though it is April, and I am sitting in my office procrastinating. I think of winters past, that time of year when it gets so very dark out and the creepy, childhood monsters seem to be waiting at your door. I would get off the school bus and run through the short space between the street and my house like I was afraid. The lights were bright in the house and there was spaghetti on the stove. The family would sit down to eat and discuss the events of the day. I played batman video games and listened to oldies radio. Perhaps, I drank some hot chocolate. Now I work and think about that hot chocolate. Tonight when I go home, I hope it won't seem that dark, but I bet the hot chocolate will be just as good.

Sundays used to be a time to relax with a good cup of hot cocoa. My grandfather would swing by our house for a cup of coffee. He would stay for a long time before going into work at the garage. Or I would climb into my dad's old red F-150 and we'd go partridge hunting down the back roads outside  town, prowling for startled birds. We would drive down those lonely old dirt roads for hours, searching for dinner, scouring in the musky air. Sundays have always held a peculiar fascination for me. Days of rest, maybe, but they can also be days of great excitement. Lately though, they're just more days to work. In front of a computer screen, I dole out the daily word count, wishing I could be up north or down south, any damn where but here. I'd rather be running through the woods, disc golfing, just walking down the street, and instead I'm here. I guess it's time to go. Johnny Cash - Sunday Morning Coming Down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED5s1-Fe9FA Kris Kr...

There are dreams and then, there are those dreams, shiny opalescent, glittery baubles bursting on the seashore of shattered horizons, the clattering of teeth in the cold dark, imaginary fingertips under blankets, stretched over my childhood bed. Recurring transactions with sandmen unknown, standing tall and imposing in darkened doorways, shuffling on flat feet, fidgeting in the early morning breeze, silvery frying pan in hand that turns slowly into a gold plated Ruger. Please mom, make it stop. I can't go on -- but I must, screaming with tattered voice, as the large visitor hovers, pointing its amorphous weapon. Paralyzed nightly, I see its slick face and fear that I might die, blanketed in a real cold sweat, trapped under the weight of lumbering fear. Is the door closed or open? Movement isn't an option anymore,  whether it ever was, trapped in stasis, awake or asleep, the gun or the knife. I can't see it, except in the periphery, behind my line of sight, yet clearly in my...

I have a special affinity for limericks, perhaps because my grandfather was always reciting his favorite. He tended toward the whimsical, telling tall tales, reciting jokes, and attempting to scare me with made up stories about a monster that only killed fools known as the Flowage Fool Killer. I can only count a handful of times that I was scared as a child. The Fool Killer is undoubtedly the top scariest childhood memory I have. I recall several other instances. A man was knocking on the door in the middle of the night and I awoke scared. Apparently, he worked with my dad and wanted to stay at our house. My father didn't know him too well and sent him on his way. There was also a country road that I remember riding down with a sign proclaiming "Beware of the Fritz;" I never knew what the Fritz was, but it still haunts my dreams. I imagine now that it was a vicious terrier with a thirst for human blood and a penchant for melodrama. Being lost in East St. Louis with my f...