I only saw one episode of Beavis and Butt-head
I was at my friend Sonya’s party with an odd
assortment of her friends --
there was Lydia, with safety pins down the sides of her jeans,
sitting in her boyfriend Jason’s lap
they broke up a week later; she said he was too
clingy
and my friend Jason, not the same guy
and my best friend Michelle, her slim elegance
the eternal contrast to my less model-like build
and many others whose names I don’t remember
or never knew
the episode was one where the dumb duo get
lice and use one of those glowing blue electric
bug-zappers as a treatment
most everyone thought it was hysterical
I thought it was kind of stupid
Sonya’s black light was much more interesting
it made white, the most boring color in the spectrum,
the color of the universal T-shirt
an awesome fluorescent purple
(and that was my purple stage, too)
she’d also borrowed a strobe light from her neighbor
and it was even more impressive
we were batting balloons around in its light
and believe me, it’s harder than it looks
and these other friends that lived on her street
offered me a cigarette when we were all walking
down to the nearby cemetery for no good reason
besides to be a large group of kids
going somewhere Big and Important
if I were full of crap I’d say that we were
addressing the issues of our own mortality
or something like that
but I’m not and I won’t
we were just a bunch of middle-school brats
who’d just gotten done screwing around
with a Ouija board
(which actually some of my friends and I
were manipulating via conspiracy
to make the gullible ones think
that a malignant spirit wanted a cookie)
and I turned down the cigarette because Beavis
or maybe Butt-head said fire was cool
so I knew it wasn’t
Back to Stuff I Wrote.
© Cynthia 2002.