That’s why I so fondly recall many of the horrors of junior high. First there was the change of venue…and social situation. Growing up in one of the most sheltered, WHITE areas of Long Island, I understood that some of my favorite singers like Donna Summer and Michael Jackson were, you know, black, but I wasn’t aware I’d actually meet a black person! Okay, I exaggerate. We actually had one black girl transfer into my sixth grade class the year before, for a couple of months, and then disappear just as quickly after because, as my teacher explained to the whole class, her house burned down. Her house burned down??? I’m no conspiracy theorist, but even my pre-adolescent mind at the time was like, ‘The house of the new, only black family in town burned down???”

Anyway, the cool thing about my junior high was that it was smack dab in the middle of a notoriously ghetto town! My school district was set up so that kids would go to the elementary school and high school in their own town, but for those two middle years of junior high, kids from every school in the district were sent to the single junior high in the district. So here you have all these naïve white kids who never met a black kid before thrown into a school that actually had a slight black majority. The majority standing we took for granted was wiped away in an instant, our obsession with the Go-Go’s and A Flock of Seagulls was wicka-wicka-wicka scratched into the street beats of Grandmaster Flash, childish one-on-one fights were replaced by serious knife-wielding gang fights in the schoolyard, and a 13-year-old black girl dropped out of school after the first two weeks not because her house burned down, but so she could give birth to her baby, which she brought back to school two weeks later to show off to all her friends in the schoolyard…and you would think that would be what ignorant white pre-teens would have to worry about. Nope. You wanted to become friends with the black kids—so they could protect you from all the evil white kids in the school! Yeah, junior high was definitely a lesson in the truths about race relations.

The first real challenge with junior high was the fact that the school was over a mile from my house. The thought of not being able to run 8 short blocks home in times of trouble was terrifying. We had to get up extra early to go stand out in the cold on the corner ‘bus stop,’ which is where the bullying begins. You tried to stay hidden behind, well, the STOP sign, which never gave you full coverage, and simply hoped the bullies would target your BFF since you were both in diapers instead of you. You’d try avoiding any trouble by using the timing method—figure out about what time the school bus arrived every day, then wait until the last second and RUN all the way to the bus stop to catch it. If you didn’t, you’d have to go home and tell dad the awful news—that he had to drive a mile and a half out of his way on his commute to work.

Missing the school bus was also something you never wanted to do AFTER classes. If you missed the bus, you’d have to hang around for the ‘late’ bus, which didn’t show up until like five (and was reserved for the WORST kids in the school who were there late for detention!). As for the bus itself, well, here’s where the irony comes in. The COOL place to sit was the last three seats on either side of the aisle in the back of the bus. So…a little more than three decades before, crackers (oh sorry—we called us honkies back then) made African-Americans sit at the back of the bus, which ended up becoming the place white kids wanted to sit the most in my youth. I know, it’s obviously because that’s where you can do the most inappropriate things without the bus driver seeing. And man, did the bullies take advantage of that cover. Things could get pretty brutal back there for the geeks. The best was when an occasional geek would try to take a stand and run on the bus first and claim one of those coveted back seats defiantly—until one of the biggest bullies walked right up to him and dragged him, kicking and screaming (sometimes with bloodshed) from the seat. It was like a metaphorical Roman Empire conquest being enacted before our very eyes.

There were fun moments on the bus as well. My personal favorite memory is of the tipping attempt. See, right near the end of our bus route, the bus had to turn onto a major turnpike at a 45 degree angle. The bus driver was a pretty cute young dude who liked to speed and flirt with the tough mean girl bitches who sat in the back through his rear view mirror (I always pretended he was pouting this lips and batting those eyes at me). So the girls (and the male bullies as well), would instruct the driver each day to hit the turn at maximum speed, and then command all the other kids on the bus to run to one side of the bus to see if we could tip it. Of course, we all complied, because death was a better option than saying no to a bully. Usually, the bus driver would tease us, driving fast until right before hitting the turn. But one particular day, he must have been feeling feisty (one of the hottest mean girls actually bothered to come to school that day), and he hit the turn at what felt like 90 miles an hour. All we scared peons rushed for our lives (or deaths) to one side of the bus as instructed (with just one dirty look). The bus screeched around the turn. The two wheels on the other side of the bus lifted off the fricking ground. We all screamed in terror as the road right outside our windows came closer and closer to our faces…. Needless to say, not even the bullies were brave enough to ever try that game again.

The dependence on the bus actually caused a problem when it came time to go home sick, especially if you had a mother who didn’t drive, like me. Being a very anxiety inducing time for a pre-teen, my junior high years also found me very often getting some major stomach ‘viruses,’ to put it nicely (It didn’t help that I didn’t know back then that I was lactose intolerant and would have cereal and milk for breakfast every morning). I don’t know how I even graduated junior high, because I went home sick all the time. As for the stomach virus part, which made a bathroom a necessity, here was another catch—the stalls in the junior high boys’ room DID NOT HAVE DOORS. Yeah. No kid ever used a bowl in a school filled with cruel pre-teens. So if you ever had to take care of business, you’d go to the nurse’s office, where she had a single person bathroom. All you had to do was say you weren’t feeling well, and she would reply, “Do you need to use the bathroom?” Clearly, she KNEW what the issue was. You’d think the damn school would spring for some doors. Anyway, I was very often in the single person bathroom—I mean, nurse’s office—waiting for my mom to come pick me up. And you know what that entailed? My mom calling a cab company and waiting for them to come pick her up to then drive her to my school to get me as I sat on the nurse’s office single person bathroom bowl sweating it out. Ah, the good old days.

Gym was also an interesting experience. Naturally, dodge ball was the worst, with even the gym teacher taking pleasure in watching the bullies throw the ball like a fricking bullet at the geeks. I still don’t understand where they found the ability or coordination to throw a huge spherical object with one hand with such force. When you were lucky enough to avoid the cannonball and it instead slammed against the bleachers behind you, the sound of the contact could shatter your eardrum. But the bad boys were knocked down a notch when we played football. Talk about awkward moments—our gym teacher was obsessed with making us do it like the professionals, making sure that when we were doing that whole ‘hut, hut, hike’ thing, the back of the one kid’s hand was firmly placed up against the other kid’s perineum. He even demonstrated on one of the students. Boy, talk about a WTF moment in hindsight (literally). And of course, we had a crazy female gym teacher who found her teaching inspiration in the newly released mega hit “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John. For the ten weeks that song was at number one, she had the 45 RPM record blasting on repeat on a turntable in the gym ALL DAY, Olivia’s sweet and sexy voice echoing through every hall in the building. Do you know how hard it was for me to keep my gay ass in class for nine periods when all I wanted to do was run out in the halls in sweats and a head band and do the jumping jacks routine Olivia did in her HBO concert???

Not surprisingly, my fondest memories revolve around food—and experiences that made you want to puke from fright. All the dreadful things that occur in the lunchroom in teen movies are REAL. Junior high lunch was terrifying. First there was the greasy frozen pizza they served us with soggy French fries as the side dish EVERY DAY (One of my all-time favorite meals). But then there was the evil waiting at the end of the lunch line. See, just as you finished paying the lunch lady at the register, two of the biggest, meanest bullies in the school would be waiting for you to walk by while putting your change in your pocket. The change never made it there. You would immediately be asked the rhetorical question, “Got any change?” So you turned it over without argument (and without even a ‘thanks’) because you didn’t want to end up being held outside the school bus window on the way home when the gang was trying to make it tip over.

It being 1982 and all, I was very fond of the classic zippered, hooded sweatshirt, as was everyone that decade. The first thing you did when a food fight broke out in the cafeteria was pull the hood over your head, zip up, and pull those drawstrings so tight you looked like a jawa (which you never said out loud because that kind of geek talk is just asking for it). Of course, the food fights were one-sided, because only the bullies and mean girls threw food. The goal was simply to try and avoid it until the cafeteria monitor—a disgruntled teacher assigned the task during a free-period—decided to put a stop to it. There was one out of control food fight in particular that began when a jealous bully blew a fit because his mean girl girlfriend joined the other mean girls in catcalling when the incredibly hot sports coach walked into the cafeteria one afternoon. I was so proud of myself for surviving that one unscathed. Or so I thought. When I sat down at my desk in my next class after lunch, my friend who sat behind me very carefully tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Um, Dan. You have some food stuck to your back.” I quickly removed my hooded sweatshirt and found…an ENTIRE piece of greasy cafeteria pizza clinging to the back of my sweatshirt.

But that wasn’t the grossest experience of the lunch period. The real danger was in going outside at lunchtime. See, right outside the cafeteria was an area where you could go and hang out after you finished eating, because the disgruntled teacher covering cafeteria duty was so dedicated to actually monitoring what went on between students outside the building. You learned pretty fast that a pizza on the back was a better option than some fresh air. Right outside the cafeteria windows, all the bullies would play handball against a wall. Across from that wall was another wall lined with a fenced off stairwell leading to a maintenance room in the basement. As the bullies used the handball and bricks to practice for crushing skulls in dodge ball, they would often send the ball flying…down into the stairwell. When this happened, the bullies would send the closest unfortunate geek within reach to go get the ball. Said geek would be thrust through the gate and onto the stairs, the gate slamming closed behind him with a very final echo. As the terrified geek ran down the stairs to retrieve the ball, the words “SPIT PIT!” would ring through the schoolyard.  Everyone in shouting distance would come running to the stairwell, surrounding the gate, leaning over it, and…you guessed it. Making the stairwell a spit pit. By the time the poor geek raced back up the stairs with the hand ball, he would be ‘clam’ chowder.

Fortunately, I never fell victim to the spit pit. Which is what makes it one of the fondest memories in my return to junior horror high…

I also had to keep my eyes diverted from the limb tearing and flesh sucking feast. Gross. I mean, if you have to eat an animal, let someone else do the slaughtering so that it comes out in a cute little patty on a bun for you. Well, as a result of keeping my eyes closed to all the disemboweling going on around me, I stuck a ketchup covered French fry in my mouth, bit down hard…and saw stars! Okay, maybe they were more like starfish. Somehow, I managed to shove my own ketchup covered finger into my own mouth with my fry and sank my own teeth into my own tender flesh. This has to be the most heinous act ever. I could not BELIEVE the pain. Amazingly, I did not break the skin, but the throbbing was so bad it led to yet another distraction from enjoying my burger and fries. And then my mind got to wandering, thinking of the horrible possibility of piercing the flesh with teeth.

I looked at J and said, “You know, I am in SO much pain from biting my finger—“

“That you can’t imagine how bad it would hurt if you were eaten by zombies,” she finished matter-of-factly.

“Yes!” I cried.

“I knew you were going to say that,” she replied. “That’s my worst nightmare.”

This was a straight up serious conversation for us, so imagine our surprise when my partner Danny starts laughing and rolling his eyes at our discussion.

Some day he’ll learn. He enjoys occasionally stumbling over to me while I’m sitting on the living room couch with his arms raised in front of him and groaning “Brains. BRAINS!” I keep telling him I’m not like those wooses in the movies who can’t bring themselves to blow away their loved ones even though they’ve become ravenous zombies. I keep warning him, “If you cry zombie too often, someday it’s going to be YOUR brains, and they’re going to be splattered all over your nice 46” flat screen television over there.”

Fricking zombie skeptics.

My friends asked me how big the snake was, and my simple reply was, “Ever seen the movie Anaconda?”

But there it was: a spider, crawling on the wall right above the sink. I hurriedly filled my glass of water, but I couldn’t have peace of mind if I just left the spider there, knowing it could work its way across the room at some point and into one of my orifices if I dared to fall asleep.

So I stood waiting for the spider to approach the sink–the direction in which it was heading. It got closer, closer, finally reached the lip of the sink, then worked its way into the sink.

I quickly dumped my glass of water over the side wall of the sink to send that sucker down the drain!

Instead, what do I frickin’ see in the shadows??? The water SWOOPS down one wall, across the base of the sink, and up the other wall! And there goes the spider, surf boarding off into the darkness as I jumped back in terror!

Now there’s no telling WHERE the creepy crawly is. And you KNOW that spider has every intention of enacting its revenge on me. The hairs on the back of my neck are sticking up right now–I can FEEL it watching me…

So, on a total whim, I’m in the cheapo discount store Big Lots (white trash central–guess that’s why I feel so at home there), and I walk down the Easter aisle, and there, before my very eyes, are bags and bags of Easter STRAW, at one dollar a bag!!! I dropped kicked a bag of green Saran wrap out of the way and grabbed every last bag of green straw they had (they also had it in blue and pink. Heinous).

Back home, I yanked out my decades old straw to replace it with the new. I had no idea just what bad shape mt old straw was in. Compared to the new fresh green straw, let’s just say the old stuff looked like my dogs had made a few pit stops on it.  Of course, since my new straw was bought at a discount store, it’s not exactly the same quality as the classic stuff. The strands aren’t completely cohesive, causing messy runaway strands to flake all over my living room rug. On top of that, the straw isn’t as shredded as it could be. Each bag has a couple of really thick pieces that make it look like there are snakes slithering through my Easter baskets. I considered reaching into my basket to pull out those huge strands, but I was convinced it would gulp down one of my Easter eggs and I’d have to  sit there and watch the entire egg being digested along the length of the snake’s body! What can I say? I’m still afraid of the Boogeyman under my bed–and the shark that I know is waiting underneath the floats in any pool I might consider swimming in….

I’ve managed to relive the spirit of the past in a handful of ways. Let’s start with the video games. Naturally, if you still have an old Atari or Colecovision collecting dust somewhere in your house, blow off the cobwebs, plug it into a TV (you know, one of the HDMI-less clunkers that accepts a videogame switchbox), and start playing. If those classic gaming systems were sold in a garage sale years ago when you’d decided you were too ‘adult’ for them, then you have another option. Most gaming systems from the past decade have numerous compilations of classic home system and arcade video games. There are awesome Atari, Intellivision and Activision console game collections, plus arcade compilations from video game companies like Namco, Sega, Konami, Data East, and Midway. You can also download many Nintendo Entertainment System games onto your Wii. There are even a variety of joystick controllers you can buy for some of the game systems to get a more genuine arcade experience. Your best bet is to tell your friends to forget the kids, forget work, forget all adult obligations, and to just come over for a night of classic gaming—Galaxian, Pac Man, Frogger, Asteroids, Space Invaders, Dig Dug, Ms. Pac Man, Defender, Mario Bros. Then crank up a good mix of 80s music, preferably on that old boom box you still have that most likely has a wire hanger jammed into the place where an antenna used to be, and remember the past.

Next, we have the movies. You could go for the obvious, like E.T., The Breakfast Club, Fast Times, Better Off Dead, Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller, Flashdance, Footloose, or Back to the Future. These films definitely capture the music and fashion of the decade, but they can also tend to be as ineffective at bringing memories flooding back as some of those overplayed tracks you hear on the radio every weekend on “Saturday at the 80s.” You need to go for the real cheesy movies you saw on cable a million times that are so 80s in style that they actually look like they are mocking the 80s rather than being genuine artifacts. I’ve got a great collection of them, including movies such as Breakin’, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, Real Genius, The Last Dragon, Just One of the Guys, Girls Just Want to Have Fun, The Pirate Movie, The Last American Virgin and Looker. You also can’t go wrong with any slasher movies that aren’t Halloween, Friday the 13^th, or A Nightmare on Elm Street. I’m talking about the kinds of slashers that feature actors who never made a second film, and elongated high school gym dance scenes focusing on some new wave/power pop band that never got signed to a label despite the blatant attempt at exposure. Some good 80s slasher titles include Graduation Day, Sleepaway Camp, The Prowler, Blood Song, The Initiation, and The Intruder. And just for an added dose of authenticity, most of these films, even on DVD, have that warm and fuzzy (aka: grainy) look that you thought only a VHS tape could offer.

And of course, there’s the television outlet. There are great television shows you should watch on DVD in a major marathon for hours and hours. Personally, the obvious, like The A-Team, Cheers, or The Cosby Show, don’t totally do it for me because they fail to focus on the true teen experience in the 80s. You need to get the lone season of the totally awesome Square Pegs and Fame Seasons 1 and 2 for the ultimate in capturing 80s fashions, trends, music, and hopes and fears of the Gen-X set. Also you might want to DVR the “Totally 80s” segments on VH-1 Classics, because watching cheesy 4 minute music clips seriously brings back the vibe of the 80s mind. Every time I watch them, I expect the rockin’ MTV guitar theme to start with the graphics of the man landing on the moon. Sadly, that beautiful clip was taken away from us forever in the mid-80s after the space shuttle exploded.

Finally, there’s the music. Listening to one of those compilations of the most obvious 80s songs that never went away doesn’t work much (Come on Eileen, Too Shy, She Blinded Me with Science, Who Can It Be now, Roseanna, etc.). But there is a way to revive your listening experience to totally bring you back while reawakening the emotions those songs evoked in you in the first place. As a huge music collector, I have the necessary resources at my disposal, which helps. I have a massive 80s folder on my iPod, and the playlist does indeed start with the hits. But here’s the trick. All the hits are placed in the order that they entered the Billboard charts. So, when you listen to the songs, you are hearing songs that all hit the airwaves at around the same time, which leads to some wicked drug-free trips down memory lane. You will literally be catapulted back to that particular summer, fall, winter or spring that you were hearing all these songs back to back on the radio and on MTV.

But the top hits of the 80s are just the beginning of my folder. What I’ve done is gone through all the albums I have from the 80s (which, I kid you not, consists of most albums released by most artists during that decade), and pulled songs that, even if they weren’t hits, just absolutely reek of 80s production, in all genres: mainstream pop, new wave, synthpop, arena rock, goth, hi-nrg dance, club, power pop, hip hop. And of course, there are a massive numbers of soundtracks that saturated the market back then, which really serve as the soundtrack to life in the 80s. Put it all together in a little piece of 21^st century technology (iPod killed the CD star), and you basically have my personal greatest hits of the decade and beyond. After I finish listening to the charted ‘best’ of the 80s in chronological order, I let the rest of the 80s takeover, and relish what feels like an all new 80s experience—hearing songs that I’ve rarely ever or never listened to, but which are the epitome of 80s sounds. It’s like I’m back in the 80s, sitting in front of the radio waiting for the debut of some great new single. As a result, when I start listening to my 80s folder on my iPod, I find myself constantly reaching for it because I simply have to know who is singing the amazing track I’m hearing—and unlike DJs on the radio, my iPod tells me the song title and artist every time.

Next, the reviewer despised all the name dropping. Wasn’t quite sure what that meant at first, but then I surmised that it was referring to my use of pop culture references like Good Charlotte, Silent Hill, and Resident Evil. What can I say? I grew up on popular media filled with name dropping, like Stephen King’s books, the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the movie Scream, and songs by Eminem…

And finally, my writing has too many phrases that sound like they are lifted from someone’s idea of bad writing. Nope. No plagiarized ideas or phrases. Those phrases are 100% my own bad ideas.

My only regret is that the reviewer failed to explain just how bad the content, plot and narrative of my stories are. I would have assumed the reader just didn’t have the patience enough to get past the spelling error on the very first page of the book (so graciously referenced in the review), however, there was also an error referenced from the very last story in the book. Gosh. I wish I had the time to highlight every spelling error and typo I find in every book I read from cover to cover. Heck, if I did, I might make corrections in a copy of my own book.

So there it is. I felt like a failure as an author…until now. My first bad customer review. Finally! Luckily, my years of experience in a retail environment have taught me the most important lesson of all: customers only think they’re always right. Now excuse me while I go print out the review, frame it, and hang it on my wall.

Well, this year, I finally came up with a plan to make the usually chaotic task of decorating the house a breeze next year. Instead of bringing 20 boxes down from the attic and randomly tossing decorations in the places we THINK they were last year (sort of like the Grinch returning all the stolen items to the Who’s down in Whoville after his heart grew three times that day) we’re going to be able to almost exactly replicate this year’s décor.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to come up with this one, but it only took  40 years for this particular Christmas light bulb to go off in my head. Instead of just boxing items away in any old box as we took the decorations down, we instead put all items from a single room all in the same box and labeled it as such. So for instance, we have one ‘kitchen’ box, one ‘library’ box, one ‘dining room’ box. This way, next year, I open up the ‘living room’ box and find all the items that are meant for the living room. It’s going to take NO time to decorate this way. Sure, changing it up might be part of the charm of Christmas, but nothing is written in stone (just black Sharpie), so if we want to take something from, say, the ‘master bedroom’ box and use it in the bathroom, that’s fine. Just as long as we understand that now that item will be packed away in the ‘bathroom’ box!

Oh, how excited I am for Christmas 2010. If my plan works and saves as much time as I think, there WILL be popcorn strung on my tree come December!