À la recherche du WULAD perdu, vol. I
Last weekend, during my visit to the golden metropolis of Sacramento (the fair capital of our state and incipient home of Governor Notatumor), I was given an assignment by C-baby: to visit my late-boyhood home and come back with as many embarrassing examples of the irrepressible yet eminently razz-worthy creativity of my youth as I could dig out of my dad's overflowing garage in the time allowed. This is because, for reasons I may never completely understand, the handiwork I spent the past twenty years hiding from the public to avoid being beaten up during recess is now finding an enthusiastic one-woman audience.
Over the next few weeks I'll be presenting you, the readership, with snippets, scraps, tidbits, morsels, numnums and what-have-you from the three bags full of my youthful effluvia (say that five times fast) I was able to retreive from that Black Hole of Folsom, since, firstly, I believe a thoughtful reader will be able to piece together the formation of the inimitable WULAD style from the embryonic mists of the past; and secondly, because it saves me the from having to come up with anything new that day.
As an appetizer for the delicious hearty servings to come later, we present the following poem, written while the pre-WULAD was in eighth grade and the Internet was not even a glint in Al Gore's eye; as you can see, it is full of heartbreaking adolescent angst and the crippling ennui that the youth of our society confronted in those not-so-halcyon days. I call it Return of the Jodi.
Like I live like in the Valley
My name is like Jodi
Like my friend Sally
Thinks she's like totally grody
We're like sittin' in like the kitchen
Sally thinks she's like bitchin'
My salad I'm like tossin'
Sally thinks she's like awesome
My boyfriend was like totally rad
He was a biker like named Brad
But now he thinks Sally's like gnarly
'Cause her brother's got a Harley
I didn't know it
So when we went to scarf
My friend Suzy told me
And I was like gonna barf
Now I've got a runny nose
Plus I've got a run in my hose
And now like to add on to that
I'm totally bummed because I'm fat
I was about to kill myself
One grody afternoon
Like but I heard Sally croaked
She gagged herself with a spoon
