Punk Rock and Hand Chickens

I attribute the love of punk rock I developed in 5th grade to my mother. Allow me to elaborate: I believe that the my love of punk rock, starting around 1993, was the end result of a subconscious incubation that began on August 22nd, 1987.

The occasion was my 4th birthday party. At the time, I was a toehead. As I was running into the house to see what was taking my mom so long with the Kool-Aid, The Beast was stepping out with said Kool-Aid. The next moment was incredibly just like something from a slapstick comedy.

As many punk-rockers of my generation have learned, Kool-Aid is excellent at dying hair. As many hair-stylists will tell you, light colored hair is exceptionally easy to dye. My hair up to this point was so blond, that it was transparent. Let's just say that immediately, I looked like my aspiration was to be an extra in "SLC Punk!" when it was to be filmed 11 years later.

At the time, I cried like a 4-year-old, mostly because I was one, and also because it looked like (and very well MAY have been) a mean joke played by The Beast, but 10 years later I began doing stuff like this to my hair of my own volition.

A couple hours later, after the laughing, crying, opening of gifts, crying, eating of cake, crying and futile attempts to get Red Dye #5 out of my all-too-permeable hair, Hal and The Beast dismissed my little 4-year-old friends and crammed my gifts, the half-eaten cake, Ben and Myself into our stuffy car and drove us the 3-hour distance to see our relatives in Bellingham, WA.

At that time of year, Bellingham is probably the most hustle-and-bustle-y it ever gets. This isn't saying much, seeing as the town was founded by hippies, but any hustle is a lot for a 4-year-old; don't even get me started on bustle. The source of the H&B? A county fair in the next town over.

So, it's my birthday, I've been given bright pink hair, and I've just been in a car for 3 hours thinking about it and probably getting carsick from playing Car Bingo. The obvious next step? Take me to a hot, dusty, over-sized parking lot, filled with the stench of fried food, farm animals and people who were conceived in El Caminos.

While passing a cage of turkeys, I heard their concerned gobbling and my 4-year-old frustrations came to a head. So that I could hear more of the amusing sound, I placed each hand on a bar of the cage, and began shaking the bars as hard as my body weight would allow and screaming at the turkeys. The result was a cacophony of gobbles that escalated to unspeakable volumes, representing clearly the combined frustrations of a hot, grumpy birthday boy and four or five hot, grumpy turkeys.

It is a birthday memory that has been dear to my heart my entire life. To this day, I can't hear the sound of turkeys gobbling without simultaneously laughing and bursting into tears.