There are many things in the standard childhood canon LabKitty did not experience as a child. I didn't have a dog. I didn't join the scouts. I didn't participate in pee wee this or little league that. (My family once went to watch a baseball contest and it got rained out. The incident permanently soured us on sport.)
My father in particular didn't seem to understand childhood. While other dads took their kids fishing or to the demolition derby, mine took me to lectures on reconstructive surgery. On weekends we would cruise garage sales for old math books and discarded lab equipment bought for pennies on the dollar (as a teen, I had one of the most impressive collections of scientific glassware in the Circle Pines metro area). Dad also taught me to shoot, which in retrospect is a right puzzle. It's as if I was being groomed for a curious kind of zombie apocalypse demanding equal aptitude for executing unerring headshots and executing Laplace transforms in the quiet moments between attacks.
One Christmas I got a fetal pig.
Additionally, and pertinent to our story today, my parents never took me to an amusement park. That job was outsourced to my Aunt Belladonna. Matron of the New Jersey branch of the LabKitty clan.
Every summer we would pile in the Oldsmobile and make for the east coast, windows down, dad refusing to use the air conditioner on the forty-hour drive, I guess in order to study the effects of flutter vibration on my cognitive development. Too windy back there? mom would mouth as I saw demons along the interstate.
My aunt was only marginally less crazy than my mother, and my cousins were only marginally less crazy than theirs. They had horses, for one, which they insisted on riding. We would pair up, a qualified equestrian cousin at the helm and me or my city-slicker sister sitting behind on the part of the saddle that was just horse, which I thought was called "barebacking" until being told the term means something else in New Jersey.
Usually, the four of us would leisurely clop around the asphalt country backroads of Morristown. This trip, however, my sister decided to try soloing. Somewhere around apogee her horse bolted, and we spent long hours searching for her+it fearing the worst until discovering the beast had simply returned to the barn, albeit at speed. We found my sister sobbing in the hayloft. It had sensed weakness in her, much like a goth mercenary.
To soothe everyone's frazzled nerves Aunt Bel took us to the shore.
Asbury Park, if I recall. Not that it mattered. There was ocean and sand and a boardwalk and I found none of these appealing. The ocean had an undertow that could drown Michael Phelps, the sand was hot in both the temperature and the viral sense, and the boardwalk had great spinny contraptions that made me throw up. There are few things more humiliating than spending twenty minutes with your head inside a public garbage can after some carny discombobulated your otoliths for pay, all-the-while getting mocked by your ostensive blood relatives. Greetings, indeed.
In response, I did what I always do when confronted with reality which is to retreat into the life of the mind as far as possible. Like Anthony Swofford reading The Iliad under the shade of a humvee in the Iraqi desert when there were no Iraqis to snipe, I searched for intellectual pursuit in this teenage wasteland and let my cousins wander off to tilt on more whirls to their heart's content.
Most boardwalks have a low-rent district where the lesser park patrons gather, the shell-shocked dads and the sunburnt babies and the adolescents with eartubes looking for intellectual pursuit. In old timey days, these featured tents where the working girls would show you their bloomers. Jersey now laboring under the iron yoke of the Morality Police, contemporary fare has turned more family friendly.
My favorite was a booth offering an upturned lawnmower to which you attached a square of cardboard (or canvasse, in the huckster parlance), dripped on some paint, then summoned a gaunt woman with disturbingly veiny arms who gave your starter cord a tug. Viola! A masterpiece emerged, approximating, presumably, what the visual cortex of my cousins was experiencing as it soaked in diesel fumes and screaming. You would then carry said spin art around for the remainder of your visit, plausible deniability why you could not ride the Wild Mouse or Parachute Drop.
Well the good news does not stop there, because thanks to the Internet it's now possible to enjoy the joy of spin art creation without suffering a trip to the boardwalk. I give you: JSpinArt. A JavaScript implementation of the spin art experience.
The instructions are simple: 1) click/tap on the canvasse to add paint drops of the selected color, 2) press the spin button. Viola! A digital masterpiece emerges, angular momentum exploited to pleasant effect for once. (You can also use the spatter button to add handfuls of random paint drops if you're into the whole brevity thing.)
Press the start over button as many times as you like to start over as many times as you like. If you produce something particularly pleasing, take a picture! Show to friends, email to LabKitty, use as your MySpace avatar or phone background.
Or simply view your spin art and reminisce. Holidays must end, as you know. All is memory, taken home with me; the opera, the stolen tea, the sand drawing, the verging sea. All years ago.
With just three days more I'd have learned the entire score to Aida.
UPDATE: JSpinart now has it's own site for an improved user experience. Take me to jspinart.blogspot.com please.
My father in particular didn't seem to understand childhood. While other dads took their kids fishing or to the demolition derby, mine took me to lectures on reconstructive surgery. On weekends we would cruise garage sales for old math books and discarded lab equipment bought for pennies on the dollar (as a teen, I had one of the most impressive collections of scientific glassware in the Circle Pines metro area). Dad also taught me to shoot, which in retrospect is a right puzzle. It's as if I was being groomed for a curious kind of zombie apocalypse demanding equal aptitude for executing unerring headshots and executing Laplace transforms in the quiet moments between attacks.
One Christmas I got a fetal pig.
Additionally, and pertinent to our story today, my parents never took me to an amusement park. That job was outsourced to my Aunt Belladonna. Matron of the New Jersey branch of the LabKitty clan.
Every summer we would pile in the Oldsmobile and make for the east coast, windows down, dad refusing to use the air conditioner on the forty-hour drive, I guess in order to study the effects of flutter vibration on my cognitive development. Too windy back there? mom would mouth as I saw demons along the interstate.
My aunt was only marginally less crazy than my mother, and my cousins were only marginally less crazy than theirs. They had horses, for one, which they insisted on riding. We would pair up, a qualified equestrian cousin at the helm and me or my city-slicker sister sitting behind on the part of the saddle that was just horse, which I thought was called "barebacking" until being told the term means something else in New Jersey.
Usually, the four of us would leisurely clop around the asphalt country backroads of Morristown. This trip, however, my sister decided to try soloing. Somewhere around apogee her horse bolted, and we spent long hours searching for her+it fearing the worst until discovering the beast had simply returned to the barn, albeit at speed. We found my sister sobbing in the hayloft. It had sensed weakness in her, much like a goth mercenary.
To soothe everyone's frazzled nerves Aunt Bel took us to the shore.
Asbury Park, if I recall. Not that it mattered. There was ocean and sand and a boardwalk and I found none of these appealing. The ocean had an undertow that could drown Michael Phelps, the sand was hot in both the temperature and the viral sense, and the boardwalk had great spinny contraptions that made me throw up. There are few things more humiliating than spending twenty minutes with your head inside a public garbage can after some carny discombobulated your otoliths for pay, all-the-while getting mocked by your ostensive blood relatives. Greetings, indeed.
In response, I did what I always do when confronted with reality which is to retreat into the life of the mind as far as possible. Like Anthony Swofford reading The Iliad under the shade of a humvee in the Iraqi desert when there were no Iraqis to snipe, I searched for intellectual pursuit in this teenage wasteland and let my cousins wander off to tilt on more whirls to their heart's content.
Most boardwalks have a low-rent district where the lesser park patrons gather, the shell-shocked dads and the sunburnt babies and the adolescents with eartubes looking for intellectual pursuit. In old timey days, these featured tents where the working girls would show you their bloomers. Jersey now laboring under the iron yoke of the Morality Police, contemporary fare has turned more family friendly.
My favorite was a booth offering an upturned lawnmower to which you attached a square of cardboard (or canvasse, in the huckster parlance), dripped on some paint, then summoned a gaunt woman with disturbingly veiny arms who gave your starter cord a tug. Viola! A masterpiece emerged, approximating, presumably, what the visual cortex of my cousins was experiencing as it soaked in diesel fumes and screaming. You would then carry said spin art around for the remainder of your visit, plausible deniability why you could not ride the Wild Mouse or Parachute Drop.
Well the good news does not stop there, because thanks to the Internet it's now possible to enjoy the joy of spin art creation without suffering a trip to the boardwalk. I give you: JSpinArt. A JavaScript implementation of the spin art experience.
The instructions are simple: 1) click/tap on the canvasse to add paint drops of the selected color, 2) press the spin button. Viola! A digital masterpiece emerges, angular momentum exploited to pleasant effect for once. (You can also use the spatter button to add handfuls of random paint drops if you're into the whole brevity thing.)
Press the start over button as many times as you like to start over as many times as you like. If you produce something particularly pleasing, take a picture! Show to friends, email to LabKitty, use as your MySpace avatar or phone background.
Or simply view your spin art and reminisce. Holidays must end, as you know. All is memory, taken home with me; the opera, the stolen tea, the sand drawing, the verging sea. All years ago.
With just three days more I'd have learned the entire score to Aida.
UPDATE: JSpinart now has it's own site for an improved user experience. Take me to jspinart.blogspot.com please.
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