Untied Shoelaces

Some girls just have a holiday in their eyes. At least, that's the best I can come up with to explain a nagging quality of this one girl that a lot of people, including me, got hung up on. Because there wasn't anything particularly special in the color, they had the same light blue as Connecticut Avenue on a Monopoly board. Other girls had Boardwalk or Park Place-blue, but pretty soon people started passing them over for cheaper real estate. Before we knew it we were hooked. She had us on a string.

What kind of impression did she make entering a room? Not much. Garden variety entrance. She never seemed interested in being the center of attention. She preferred being a member of the audience in welcoming somebody. From that setting she was a little more handy at distinguishing herself. She wasn't Don King in bringing her own one-woman-parade to welcome you, but she was sneaky about it. She perfected the art of sucker-punch compliments. It went a long way. You'd bump into her being in a lousy mood and she'd lick her suction cup dart compliment and fire it at you and it could stick for the whole week. She saw people and she let them know it with compliments. Everywhere else she was low-key. Anything about her was on the lam. She had four or five sisters homely as pack mules which only increased your curiosity about how she'd missed that bullet.

She exited a room differently than other girls and it stayed with you more and longer than even the really expensive ones. It felt like she disappeared every time. Nobody else could do that. She's the only girl I ever saw leaving a room who didn't have some kind of bumpersticker on her fender about what it meant. A girl's ass usually gives a helluva lot away about her. Not much of what any girl has ever told me has plucked the heart of her mystery more than just how she walks. She had a great ass too, but no matter how hard you tried you couldn't focus on it when she turned a corner. Where was she going? You'd over heard that already. She was going to go FOR A WALK. What fifteen year old goes for walks? What did she do last weekend? She went to a movie---BY HERSELF. By CHOICE. Wait a minute. This was all wrong. Nobody should be able to get away with these antics!

Fortunately this was right around the time of a miracle of earth shattering, BIBLICAL proportions. Saved By the Bell, the balm on legions of teenagers wounded lives, suddenly and magically was transported from Indiana to Bayside, California. Zack Morris had now ALWAYS been a California kid complete with an entirely rewritten background and new, lifelong, better looking friends. AND a sniper opened fire on the school!!! Miss Bliss had been rubbed out. Mikey was 86'd. Another female friend of Zack's that I can't remember the name of (ugly, curly haired) was knocked off too. Lisa Turtle survived the hail of bullets taking refuge in an obsession with beyond belief hideous fashion!

BUT WAIT!

What was the explanation provided for us to account for this incomprehensible bloodbath and seismic geographical and temporal shift in Zack Morris' high school universe?!

None. No explanation necessary. FUCK YOU, it's better this way. Here's a Kelly. Here's a Jesse Spanno. And fresh from wrestling practice, sipping from his water bottle apparently the fountain of youth, I GIVE TO THEE THE AGELESS, AC SLATER. We got a handle on this situation now. You're in good hands. We'll stick to this story line, no tag backs.

Which, albeit in a bit of a stretch, seemed to coincide with the girl I was talking about earlier and her trick: we were still under house arrest in the same classroom---which we could never leave---but everything outside had improved a million fold. And it was left to our imagination. And why? Just because...

We needed stuff like this. It was a tough time after we lost Hulk Hogan. Childhood was a breeze for me and a lot of people I knew for the very simple reason that we believed more in Hulk Hogan being REAL than any Christian we'd ever met believed in Jesus being real. The man's hair was spun from the fucking Golden Fleece! Hulk Hogan was on our watch provided we guzzled down vitamins, said prayers (I prayed to Hogan himself), and I forget the third thing he required but I know I blindly did it with zeal. Think about it, if Jesus showed up all of a sudden, parting the clouds or something, do you think HE could do a pose down routine for 30 minutes and have all of us crying and cheering him on to stay on stage for more? No. There'd be boos. Maybe some cracks about Jesus Christ Superstar or some Aramaic taunts and whistles. 20 minutes cheering for JC tops unless he deals from the bottom of the deck some 1st rate miracles to compete with body slamming the 8th Wonder of the World. Good luck, daddy.