He had a full beard, but a shaved head, so his sideburns rose up alongside his ears and then just... stopped. He wore an Army-surplus field jacket; knee-length cut-off jeans with frayed leg openings; and black athletic shoes with what appeared to be black Lycra leggings, or possibly pantyhose. And he didn't appear to be homeless, either. He was striding along as happily and confidently as any runway model.

Now... I have an allergy to neckties, I don't even own a suit, and I've long maintained that I was lucky to be born well after that era when men couldn't leave the house without a hat. But there are days when I really wish I saw fewer people who looked like my chrome-domed-but-bearded friend and more who looked like this:

Whatever happened to elegance, people? Or dignity? Or just plain looking in the mirror before you leave the house? I think I'm going to go watch North by Northwest now and try to drive the image of those weirdly freestanding sideburns from my head...

No disrespect intended, but I wasn't much of a fan of the actor Corey Haim. I was a couple years too old and had one Y chromosome too many to share the enthusiasm of the Tiger Beat demographic for him and his partner-in-crime, Corey Feldman. In fact, I can recall seeing only one of his movies, and it's the same one everyone else saw, The Lost Boys. Oh, and also a nearly forgotten but sweet little movie called Murphy's Romance, in which he played the son of Sally Field.

Still, if you had any awareness at all of pop culture in the late '80s, you had to know who he was. He was as much a part of the texture of that era as jelly bracelets and Aqua Net, a familiar and likable-enough presence hovering somewhere in my peripheral vision, if not somebody to whom I paid a lot of attention. So, being the huge bleeding heart that I am, I felt genuinely bad when I learned a couple years ago just what a wreck he'd made of himself after the Awesome '80s melted down into the Ironic '90s. Yes, I admit I was an occasional viewer of The Two Coreys, a squirm-inducing reality series that revealed the grown-up Corey Haim as a bloated, dissolute, unhappy man who barely resembled the apple-cheeked kid in the photo above. I didn't see a single episode of that show in which Haim didn't reminisce about The Lost Boys, obviously his personal high-water mark, and I found -- somewhat to my surprise -- that I had a great deal of compassion for the former teen idol whose career and life peaked before he was old enough to buy cigarettes. I've struggled enough to find my own path in life that I feel for anyone who is so visibly lost as Haim appeared to be.

When I heard the news of his death early this morning of an apparent drug overdose... well, I'm still not sure how I feel about it. Frustration, perhaps, at the pointless waste of a life. I certainly wasn't surprised. It seems an inevitable and perhaps even an appropriate outcome for this particular life. Corey Haim, like so many others who are given everything at an early age by an exploitative industry that has no conscience and then have it all cruelly snatched away again, seemed to be happy only when he had the public's attention. And nothing grabs attention like the final flicker of a burnt-out star.

Haim was 38, two years younger than me. For anyone else, I'd say he had a lot of years ahead of him; in this case, though, I think it was the years behind him that mattered most. At least to him. I may be guilty of frequent and maybe even excessive bouts of nostalgia, but -- in spite of how it sometimes appears on this blog -- I'm not spellbound by my past the way this poor slob was.

I'm sad for him and his inability to find some way to move on, but in a weird way, I think I feel even sadder for Corey Feldman, who has always been so closely equated to his costar, so interchangeable, that he reportedly felt the need to tweet that he wasn't the one who had died. (His Twitter feed appears to have evaporated; at least, I can't find it to confirm this.) I can't imagine the sorrow he must be feeling tonight. And I can't help but wonder what effect this might have on him. I hope I won't be writing another of these entries for the other Corey anytime soon...

Spotted an interesting story over at NPR last night about the WASPs, the Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II, whose primary role was to ferry freshly minted warbirds from the factories where they were made to the airbases where they would be dispatched overseas. The idea was to free up male pilots from mundane flying duties so they were available for combat missions.

My Loyal Readers know that I'm fascinated by the aviation exploits of that era, so naturally I've heard of the WASPs, but I confess I really didn't know much about them until today. They have a pretty awesome story, and I advise all of you to click that link and "read more about it," as the old TV PSAs used to say. I've been reading more about it all day during my odd moments of free time, and I'm frankly amazed no one has made a big feature film about these ladies yet. Incredible anecdotes abound. But perhaps the most striking detail I've gleaned from various articles about them is the casual sexism these women confronted nearly every step of the way.

We take women in the military more or less for granted these days. There have been female support pilots flying cargo and tanker planes as long as I can remember, and women fighter pilots for least a decade now (in the U.S. services, anyway -- other nations had women flying combat long before we did). But in 1942, there was a debate over whether women could even physically handle a warplane. (To be fair, this concern wasn't without warrant. The big bombers, in particular, demanded a lot of upper-body strength to operate; I've read that the joke used to be that you could always tell a B-24 captain because of his overdeveloped left arm, acquired through wrestling with his controls during 12-hour -- or longer -- missions.) The military didn't want to expend any extra resources training women pilots from scratch, so basic piloting licenses had to be earned on the ladies' own dime, before they signed up. (By contrast, male recruits could come into the AAF without ever having touched an airplane.) Their parachutes weren't even properly fitted to their bodies, because they were designed for male pilots. And for the 38 WASPs who died in service to their country, there were no funds to ship their bodies back to their families and no flags for their coffins, because they were technically civilian volunteers. The WASPs would be classified as such until the mid-1970s, ineligible for veteran benefits and unrecognized by history until that time.

But in spite of all this crap -- or maybe because of it, because they had something to prove -- the WASPs prevailed. They mastered every type of U.S. aircraft used during the war, from light trainers to high-speed fighters to the lumbering bombers I love. When male test pilots complained that the new B-29 Superfortress was a deathtrap because of various developmental problems, a pair of WASPs demonstrated that it could be flown safely, and repeatedly. (It was likely male egos, as much as anything, that led to the disbanding of the WASPs in 1944... the menfolk figured the war would be ending soon, and they didn't want the competition for aviation jobs.)

Do you get the idea that I admire the hell out of these women? Well, you're right. I am inspired by stories of people who are constantly told they can't do something, for whatever reason, and who then proceed to excel at it, usually to the utter consternation of those who put them down. And my antennae always go up when I get wind of some chapter of history that's been largely neglected.

This morning, these awesome ladies finally got their due, as they were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor our government can bestow. Of the 1,100 women who served as WASPs, only about 300 are still alive, and roughly two-thirds of them were present at the award ceremony, along with family members of all the others. living and dead, who couldn't make it.

It's about damn time.

Incidentally, if you like that picture up there at the top -- one of the most famous WASP-related images, I believe -- check out a related NPR article for some gorgeous and rare color photos, all shot by one of the WASPs named Lillian Yonally. This one of a PT-19 at sunrise is breathtaking...

Even so, I do have some memories of those years that don't involve driving or classrooms. My class schedules often had lengthy periods of free time built into any particular day, especially during my freshman year, and I managed to explore the campus pretty thoroughly during those gaps.

One of my favorite spots was a sort of lounge in the student union, a section of the main dining area that was elevated a bit above the rest of the room, and which boasted a big-screen TV, one of the old-fashioned rear-projection models that were about the size of a bank vault. Nine times out of 10, it was tuned to MTV... and this was back when MTV was still playing actual music videos instead of The Real World or whatever the hell they run nowadays. I spent a lot of time in that lounge... studying, watching girls, meeting friends, vegging out. That was the place where I developed a taste for coffee and bagels with cream cheese.

There are a handful of videos I very clearly remember watching on that massive old dinosaur of a television, songs that instantly remind me of what it felt like to be 18 and filled with vinegar and romantic notions. The soundtrack of my late teens, and the last few moments of my wide-eyed innocence. Here's one of them...

Slaughter-Fly To The Angels
Uploaded by SirDroopy. - See the latest featured music videos.

Yeah, I know... hair metal. It's supposedly the nadir of western civilization, mind-numbingly stupid and terminally uncool. Whatever. I'd still rather listen to this stuff than all those mopey guys from Seattle who drove a stake through the heart of real rock and roll. And this particular video includes a gorgeous old airplane and automobile, which is probably the reason why it's stuck in my head all these years. I have no idea what kind of car that is, but I think the plane is a Lockheed similar to the one Amelia Earhart was flying on her final expedition.

Watching this again after all these years, I'm struck by how damn young the lead singer looks. I remember thinking back in the day that all those guys in the rock bands were so much older than I was... they were adults out there doing grown-up stuff, and I was just a stupid, punk kid. Or so it seemed then. I now realize that a lot of them weren't much older than I was, and they all look like stupid punk kids to me now. Even the ones with enviable hair.

Incidentally, the leader singer of this particular band of punk kids, Mark Slaughter, has done some interesting things in the years since "Fly to the Angels." He's now a voice-over artist who worked on Animaniacs, among other things. That same series also employed Jess Harnell, who's currently singing his heart out for the awesome (and very hair-metal-ish) Rock Sugar, which I wrote about a couple weeks ago. The entertainment industry is very small sometimes.

And I'm just babbling, killing time here at the office until Mr. Slate pulls the tailfeathers on that little dinosaur-bird. I think I'm going to get out of here... enjoy the music, folks. And if I don't manage to blog again for a couple days, enjoy the weekend, too. Savor the few minutes of real life you can manage to snatch before The Man drags you back into whatever veal pens you're locked in during the week...

(Be warned before you hit "play" that there are manga-style cartoon boobies in this, so some people might consider it NSFW and/or offensive.)

I've found in my online wanderings that Kirsten is something of a binary proposition: people seem to either really like her or they really do not. Her detractors tend to become especially fixated on her uneven teeth, for some reason. Personally, I think she's adorable, teeth and all. Not conventionally pretty, perhaps, but she's got something that works for me. I especially like that sultry eyebrow-lifting thing she does sometimes -- you can see it in this video at about the 2:37 mark. Is that TMI? Probably...

Anyhow, as you saw in the opening title card, this video was directed by McG, the guy responsible for the most recent entry in the Terminator series as well as those two Charlie's Angels movies a few years ago; the producer, Takashi Murakami, is a Japanese artist who works in a variety of media. My understanding is that the video was played on an endless loop at the entrance to Murakami's recent "Pop Life" exhibition at the Tate Modern in London.

Now, you may wonder what the heck a mid-list starlet in a blue wig singing a 30-year-old one-hit-wonder has to do with an art exhibition. I've read that it supposedly articulates the cliche'd Japan of Western imagination, i.e., Murakami's notion of Anglo-American stereotypes about his native country's pop culture. Or some damn thing. The really important point is that it gives us an excuse to see Kirsten Dunst in a blue wig and a really short skirt singing one of the most terminally catchy tunes of the '80s, The Vapors' "Turning Japanese." Which is really not about masturbation, as the old urban legend we all heard in middle school claimed. At least, The Vapors say it's not about that, and they oughta know, right?

Damn, she's got long legs... and there's that eyebrow thing again...

[The device] will make a successful sound when successfully entering data into a field, and will make an unsuccessful sound when the scan does not successfully enter data into a field.

What the hell is a "successful sound," anyhow? Is it one that owns a big house on the east side and a summer cabin up in the Uintas? One that skis in Vail every other weekend, and drives a black Escalade that never seems to have mud-splashes on the rear quarters?

What does a successful sound actually, you know, sound like? Is it like a bell? A chime? A bird tweet? The contented sigh of a bikini-clad teenage girl sunning herself on a hot summer day? For that matter, what does an "unsuccessful sound" sound like? The first thing that comes to my mind is the truncated raspberry sound at the end of the opening credits for Monty Python's Flying Circus. Which tells you an uncomfortable lot about my mind, probably.

Lest you think I've pulled this sentence out of context for comic effect, let me assure you that this is the only line in the entire document that addresses these rival sounds. There is no further description -- or even mention! -- of them.

I think I'm done at the office for today. I'm blowing this pop stand and heading for home... ibuprofen and whiskey await.

We can thank Sullivan for this horror show.

And now back to the regularly scheduled grind...

Diane is a copywriter at the ad agency where I work, but before that, she was a journalist and a staff writer for Catalyst magazine, a Salt Lake alternative monthly. She had quite a run there, stirring the muck, sticking it to The Man, earning a number of awards, and even having a creepy Silkwood moment or two while investigating what really goes on at Utah's infamous Dugway Proving Ground. (Trivia note: Stephen King was inspired to write The Stand after he heard about some of the scary crap that happens out there.)

These days, Diane's only work for Catalyst is a regular column called the Urban Almanac, a monthly compilation of timely factoids about what's happening in the natural world right outside our patio doors, as well as tips for how readers can improve their gardens, their diets, and their connection to something more authentic than the suburbs. I know Diane gets a lot of satisfaction from her column, but she's often said she'd hoped to do more with her writing (a familiar lament among us word-slinging types).

Just last week, quite out of the blue, as they say, she got a message from her editor at Catalyst; it seemed that someone from a local publishing house was trying to track her down. They want to turn Diane's Urban Almanac into a full-blown book, an illustrated hardcover, no less. Whereas the Catalyst version is region-specific for SLC, the proposed book will be more global (or at least national) in scope... and they want it by October.

Diane is understandably over the moon about this, especially the way it just fell into her lap during something of a low moment, and I'm very happy for her myself. (Also a little jealous, but we won't tell her that.) I'm already on the list for an autographed copy. And who knows... depending on when the finished volume hits the stands, it may make my Christmas shopping much easier this year!

And I feel for Andrew as well. He was a nice-looking guy, only a year older than myself, and I can identify with him to a certain extent. I, too, tend to be sensitive about all the injustice in the world, as he apparently was, and about my own shortcomings and failures. My emotional default often seems to be melancholia, and I know I've gotten into mental states that would probably have been diagnosed as clinical depression, had I bothered to see a doctor about it. But even as lousy as I've been feeling the past week, as far down as I've gotten in the past, I have never considered taking my own life. It's hard for me to imagine getting so far down. Or why people who are that far down can't find one thing, just one thing worth sticking around for.

A number of years ago, the little brother of a good friend killed himself. He was only in his mid-twenties, a nice kid with a whole world of possibilities out in front of him. He always seemed happy-go-lucky, but apparently he had a darker side that nobody knew about, and one afternoon, he hanged himself in his closet. And I was baffled and angry with him that he'd gone and done such a damn-fool thing. I remember that the day of his funeral, I'd recently seen a Charlie Chaplin movie at The Organ Loft -- or maybe there was one scheduled for later that week... something. Anyhow, I remember thinking over and over on that awful day that killing yourself just didn't make sense as long as there were still Chaplin movies in the world.

I still think that from time to time. I'm thinking that right now about Andrew Koenig, a guy who maybe wasn't so unlike me, but who somehow never saw the real value of Chaplin movies.

Walter Koenig's website has a nice tribute to his son up right now. I'm sure he wouldn't mind if I copied a bit of his statement over here:

“My son took his own life... If you're one of those people who feel they can’t handle it any more, if you can learn anything from this: it’s that there are people out there who really care. You might not think so… but there are people who really, really care. And before you take that final decision, check it out again… talk to somebody. And for those families who have members who they fear are susceptible to this kind of behavior, don’t ignore it, don’t rationalize it. Extend a hand."

Amen to that.

My condolences to the Koenig family, and I hope that Andrew found the peace he was seeking. I wish I'd known him, so I could've suggested we see The Gold Rush together...

If you don't have any first-hand knowledge of the so-called "disease of kings," consider yourself extremely lucky. I wouldn't wish this shit on anyone, not even Dick Cheney, and my Loyal Readers all know how I feel about that guy. I can honestly say without exaggeration or hyperbole that I cannot imagine any pain worse than what I experience at the peak of a full-on outbreak of gout, except maybe a burn. A napalm burn, to be exact.

But Bennion, you're asking, what exactly is this horrible affliction, and how can it be so horrible without having its own telethon?

In any event, the extra uric acid that I'm not managing to pee away has to go somewhere, so it turns into tiny needle-shaped crystals, which then accumulate in my joints. Gravity tends to draw them down into the extremities; like most gout victims, my symptoms present in my feet. The crystals themselves don't cause the painful outbreaks, though. Rather, your body's own immune system will suddenly take notice of those foreign interlopers hiding between the bones and send the troops to try and roust them out, and that in turn inflames all the surrounding tissues. And that's when the fun begins.

Imagine waking in the middle of the night with your big toe swollen to nearly twice its normal size, the skin stretched taut and shiny red, and hot to the touch as if you have a fever. The joints are stiffened so you can't bend the toe normally, and the affected area is shockingly tender to the touch. You realize you can't find any comfortable angle, no way to position your foot so it doesn't hurt. Even the weight of a thin cotton sheet across the toe is impossible to bear -- again, I am not exaggerating or making this up! You swear you can feel gravity itself pressing down around the sore digit like a lead sock. And placing your full body weight on the toe is a 180-proof shot of pure agony. The first time I had an attack, before I was diagnosed, when I had no idea what was happening, I thought I'd somehow broken the damn thing. (I spent a couple of days wracking my brains trying to figure out what kind of damn-fool thing I'd done to accomplish that; learning I had a chronic disease usually associated with much older, much fatter men somehow failed to soothe my wounded pride.)

Fortunately for me, my outbreaks are intermittent and usually pretty short. The peak discomfort levels typically last only two or three days, followed by a week or so of slow, incremental improvement, during which the hissing-inhalation-through-the-teeth kind of pain fades, but the whole damn foot still aches and throbs like a cavity-riddled tooth. Normal walking becomes a sort of dream, something you remember doing in a previous life that now seems impossibly remote. You can't wait to be able to put on a shoe without feeling like Kevin Costner struggling with his boot in the opening moments of Dances with Wolves. (I can hardly stand to watch that scene, I relate so fully with it!)

And then one morning you wake up, and the gout is just... gone. Like a summer thunderstorm that blows away as abruptly as it boiled up out of the desert. The relief I feel taking my first step on a pain-free and fully functional foot is nearly impossible to describe without sounding more melodramatic than I already have. Let's just say it's a wonderful feeling indeed.

As you might have guessed by now, I'm currently in the midst of a gout attack. It's relatively minor compared to some I've had, but it's the first in quite a while -- over a year, as best I can recall -- and it's really gotten to me this time. I've been feeling downright despondent, to be honest, and I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe because it has been so long since the last one, I allowed myself to start thinking it wouldn't ever come back. I don't know...

Exhaustion probably has something to do with it. As I said, it's hard to get the inflamed foot into a comfortable position, and very hard to sleep with a constant, pulsing pain clamoring for your attention. Not to mention the quietly nagging thought that if you twist the wrong way, put too much pressure on the foot, get it tangled in the covers, any one of a hundred innocent mistakes that you wouldn't even notice during a normal week, the pain you're managing to tolerate right now will rocket up the scale and knock the needle right off the gauge. I think I've only managed three or four hours a night for about a week now.

Sleep deprivation aside, this condition is mentally taxing in other ways, as well. You become extremely conscious of your feet when you have gout: their size, where they are in relation to everything else, and especially what possible dangers might be around. The ordinary bumps and stumbles that everyone inflicts on themselves everyday must now be avoided at all costs, because a stubbed toe will seem like the end of the world, believe me. Pets and small children tromping carelessly into your personal space are cause for alarm, and finding yourself in a milling crowd can lead to an outright panic attack. Riding the train to work probably elevates my blood pressure ten points; I can't tuck the foot too far back under the seat, because bending it hurts, so I just have to glare at the the oblivious college students and middle-aged commuters, and hope nobody stumbles over me when the train lurches into motion.

You also become hyper-aware of what's going on during the mere act of walking, how many bones have to flex just so, and in what directions they're bending and deforming, how much pressure is placed on various parts of the foot at any given point during the step. And you learn how everything connects to everything else, and how much posture and gait affect the rest of the body. After a week of limping around and favoring my left side, I feel about 157 years old; my back hurts, my hips and knees ache, and a whole assortment of muscles keep threatening to charley-horse on me.

As I sit here thinking about it, I realize that the worst part really isn't the pain, after all, it's the exhaustion... the complete mental and physical fatigue generated by being in pain and on your guard every minute for days on end.

There's emotional fatigue as well. Me being me -- prone to over-analyzing everything, making mountains out of molehills, and generally taking the weight of the world onto myself -- I feel guilty for not managing to be more stoic about this. As I said, I'm having a minor outbreak. It's not even in my toe this time, it's in the ankle and the bones across the top of my foot, the ones that bark at you if you lace your shoes too tightly; this is pretty uncomfortable, but it's not nearly as crippling as when the toe flares up. At least I can get my shoe on without biting on a stick. By contrast, one of my coworkers who suffers from gout was recently out of the office for over a week because he couldn't walk -- the shit had attacked both his knees -- and I know another guy who has such constant, unrelenting pain from his gout that he's had a morphine pump implanted. A fracking morphine pump. Like they give cancer patients.

And then there's my friend Diane, who does not have gout but instead had her first hip replacement at the age of eight and has endured three since, who walks with a cane and prays that today isn't the day when the current hip finally breaks and who hurts every damn day of her life. What right do I have to feel any self-pity at all when I see what she goes through just to go walk from our cubicle-island to the break room for a cup of tea?

But it's hard to keep others in mind when you're hurting yourself, and obsessing over the perfectly ordinary things you can't do today because your damn foot won't support your weight. That plays hob with your self-image and your self-esteem. I was never much of an athlete, but when I look at old photos and remember how effortless and un-self-conscious I used to be about moving, about simply walking, the way I took it for granted that everything would just work... when I think about how much walking I did in England and Germany and New York and all the cool places I've been and still want to go, and about the horrific possibility of having a gout attack while traveling... well, it's just one more damn reason to feel like I'm getting old. Like my prime years are behind me. I know other people are worse off than me. And I feel for them, I really, truly do. But that doesn't mean I'm not feeling what I feel.

Dejected? Hell, yes, I'm dejected.

And now that I've got all that off my chest, I'm going to the kitchen for another fistful of ibuprofen and an icepack...

It looks like it's going to be a nicely done set, with a 36-minute retrospective documentary (rare for these old television shows), a number of photo galleries and episode commentaries, and a collectible booklet. That's impressive treatment for a series that lasted only one season way back in 1982! And I even like the package art, which is usually a big weak spot for TV-show DVDs. Although I do have to admit that the Gold Monkey artwork looks a lot like what was done for the Young Indiana Jones series; I guess Gold Monkey never will manage to shake off that particular association, will it?

In any event, this makes me irrationally happy... the last week or so has been pretty crappy, for reasons that will be revealed shortly, and this little jolt of good news is welcome distraction indeed.

Oh, and if you have no idea what the hell I'm even talking about, I've previously written about Tales of the Gold Monkey here and here.

The song is called "You Can Sleep While I Drive" (if you hadn't surmised that already), a somewhat obscure track from the 1989 album Brave and Crazy by Melissa Etheridge. As I recall, this song was my introduction to her... I have vague memories of hearing it on a short-lived but wonderful radio station called The Mountain (105.7 FM) not long after I returned from my summer sojourn in England, way back in 1993. Melissa broke out (and came out of the closet) that same year with the monster-selling album Yes I Am, but I'm pretty sure I first heard "You Can Sleep" before that happened. I honestly can't recall for sure at this point, but no matter...

I've always loved the mood of this one, the plaintive earnestness, the restlessness, the slight tinge of wee-hours-of-the-morning desperation that seasons but doesn't overwhelm the song. It was the perfect articulation of everything I was feeling after coming home from a big adventure that I knew even then was going to end up being a singular experience for me. I was struggling with going back to my movie-theater job, knowing that it was time to move on but having no idea what to do next. I was struggling with a lot of things, actually. And hearing a woman's voice sweetly suggest that we shake off the familiar dust of home and just... drive... well, anyone who reads this blog knows that's still an alluring fantasy for me.

Despite my long affection for this song, however, I'd never seen this video before today, and it's really kind of a trip. The pre-coming-out Melissa looks like a tougher version of a friend's wife, and she also has a certain something that reminds me of a girl I used to know a long time ago and still think about sometimes. If I'd seen this back in '93 (or earlier, since the video was apparently made in 1990), I probably would've developed a big crush...

Not much to say, I just really liked this photo I spotted over at SamuraiFrog's place.

It amazes me how alive The Muppets, and especially Kermit, still seem to me, even after all these years, and even when I'm looking at a picture that ought to shatter any remaining illusion that these things are anything but a cloth tube -- a decorated sock, really -- with a human being's hand up the bottom. And yet, looking at this all-too-recognizable pose, this reminder that a gentle man and an insanely creative artist left us way before his time, brings a lump to my throat because, for just a moment, I know exactly what that silly cloth frog is "feeling."

I miss him, too, Kermie... we all do.