Category: Summary

THE NOBLE GASES are the student council. HELIUM is the nice guy who will come out of the closet in college. XENON is the ridiculously hot salutatorian candidate who is also a minister’s daughter; she will resist all romantic advances until the senior graduation party, when she’ll get drunk and make out with KRYPTON, captain of the glee club, who is resultantly quite gleeful indeed. Nobody likes NEON, who unsurprisingly goes into pre-law.

BORON is the nose tackle for the football team. He doesn’t like to be called “Bo,” so nobody does.

RUBIDIUM is the quiet kid who draws all the time and sometimes has unpleasant diabetic reactions. Nobody will remember his name after graduation.

The ACTINOIDS run the A/V club, and sometimes, when the coast is clear, put illicit slides of Bettie Page into the projector and honk at the images. They are furtive and sly and fearful of VANADIUM, who for reasons known only to himself, stalks the hapless Actinoids with single-minded fury, and has a penchant for dishing out cruel titty-twisters.

YTTRIUM is the foreign exchange student who roams the halls with a quizzical half-smile on his face, wondering why nobody will talk to him. (Because he’s different, of course.) Finally, gregarious SODIUM one day invites him to a party, where he stuns everyone with his unearthly capacity for alcohol. BISMUTH vomits unceremoniously into a houseplant.

BERYLLIUM has a sniggering reputation for terrible flatulence that isn’t really justified, but rather lives on through the typically cruel rumormongering so prevalent amongst teenagers. He will show up for the ten year anniversary driving a BMW, feeling pretty good, but will nonetheless be tormented with an onslaught of fart jokes anyway.

TUNGSTEN is just as comfortable smoking in the parking lot with HAFNIUM as he is playing D&D with dorks like LAWRENCIUM and TIN. He is friend to many and enemy to none; sort of the polar opposite of the widely loathed STRONTIUM, who resembles a malignant ox.

NIOBIUM reads Sylvia Plath, and is aggressively upfront about her sexual proclivities. She will briefly run away from home with the sinister and violence-prone COBALT, but will return amidst vague, hoarse rumors of gunplay and extradition, none true. They just ran out of money.

SELENIUM will break your heart every day if you let her, and you do.

You are IRIDIUM, bright and rare and largely unnoticed, and you’re just all fucking right with me.

We hang out with MOLYBDENUM, so there’s usually no trouble. Let’s go play pinball.

Hoobastank 4Ever

Affable Nebbish

This Tombstone Redeemable For $25 Off Your Next Interment

Medical Research Is Richer For His Comical Demise

Frequent Crier

Move Along, Nothing To See Here

Has Finally Shut The Fuck Up

Active Culture Below

He Knew Exactly What Hit Him

He Knew Exactly Who Ate Him

He Thought It Was Gin

Goodbye, Stupid

No Spitting

Still Looking For The Head

BOO YA!

We Will Miss Trouncing His Terrible Fantasy League Teams

Well, after a long decline and a stint in the nursing home, my grandmother passed away this weekend. It was, to employ a cliche, not at all a surprise, and a bit of a relief, as a few strokes and Parkinson’s had exacted their toll, not to mention her heroic battle with the marauding timberwolves.

As you might expect, she got a bit wacky towards the end, but she was a tough old broad. The last time I saw her, she had her moments of being with it, such as when Mom served her a thin, awful-looking cup of coffee, and she insisted on it “Hot and strong. Like my men.” A naughty gleam in her eyes. Meanwhile at night she would get a little wonky and complain about odd events involving “tiny men.” She claimed they were sneaking in and stealing her clothes. We would ask her who they were. “Mexicans. Tiny Mexicans. They wear stripes.” It is this attention to sartorial detail that set her delusions apart from boring, mundane hallucinations. Fuck you, Woodstock Nation! My grandma sees striped Mexican midgets bent on fashion larceny!

She certainly made life interesting as a child. I would spend my summers in LA with her and my grandfather, both of them Estonian immigrants who fled Europe when the USSR annexed the Baltics. Unsurprisingly, they utterly loathed all Russians, and filled my young skull with long, lurid denunciations of the hated oppressors. Also being from the Old World, she had a compendium of folk superstitions that she good-heartedly terrified and warped me with. Here’s a few of the howlers that she told me as a kid. There’s no way I’m going to tell you how long I held some of these nuggets as gospel.

1. Whistling inside the house is evil and invites bad luck. Ooookay.
2. If you sleep with your underwear on, you will cut off your blood supply to your legs (and, it did not need hinting at, other things). For a long time I slept naked, rubbing my ostensibly oxygen-starved legs before I dozed off to improve circulation.
3. If you do the (admittedly disgusting) trick of snorting the snot back up your nose and then swallowing it, it will just sit in your stomach, forever. This one was a real peach, as I was haunted by the image of an ageless, indestructible wad of goo forever sloshing around poisonously in my gut.

And on and on. But like many immigrants, certain aspects of American life she took to with an erratic, half-assed glee. One year, when she was about sixty, I guess, she announced she wanted a new car, and bang, out the door she went. Everyone waited for her to return with the Oldsmobile, the Caddy, you know. You can see where this is going. She rolled up in a cherry-red Camaro muscle car, with her tiny homonculus fists clutching the steering wheel and her gleaming eyes staring squarely at the dashboard. She was a fucking terror in that thing, too, because she couldn’t drive at all. She had a carefree, sphincter-loosening way of conversing with you as she drove down the freeway, nearly facing you full on, leaving in her wake blood-curdling oaths, vows of vengeance, and smoking, twisted piles of metal and blackening human flesh. I was in the car with her once in a parking lot and she drove over one of those little concrete abutments for your tires; we were doing about thirty. After I climbed out of the glove box, I noticed that she hadn’t stopped, and was looking at me with high humor. “This car,” she said in her great accent, “has very good suspension.”

And one final memory–or story, rather–that I take with me and put into that place reserved for things that you’re never, ever allowed to forget. Near the end, Emmy (that’s what I called her, and lay off)–who was multilingual–started babbling everything in Estonian, which meant that only her husband and my dad could understand her. My mom spent days and days pleading with her to please, please don’t speak Estonian, she can’t understand! Nuts to that. The Estonian kept coming. Finally, after a solid week, Emmy caved.

And started speaking German. So now nobody could understand a fucking word she said. Hearing that just made me laugh and laugh. She always traveled her own road, and it was a long road, and, I think, a good one. It leads to the same damn place that all the roads end up at, but not everyone gets there in a fine red sports car, a fast, crazy car that could go anywhere she wanted to until, alas, the suspension finally gave out.