Today's guest blogger is a man known only as Glacial Spain. Rumor has it that Glacial Spain has been friends with Diesel for nearly 30 years, so presumably he has some serious mental deficiency and should not be trusted.
Oh. Hi!
I, uh, wasn't expecting anyone to show up. Diesel asked me to look after the place while he was out, so here I am, just having a look around.
So... Do you want some raisins? There's plenty to go around. Help yourself. D won't mind. Before he left he said, “Yo G! Help yourself to the raisins.” So it's all cool.
Apparently I'm supposed to provide you with a window into the “real” Diesel. In case you haven't figured it out already, I haven't quite gotten around to doing that yet. “Mostly I expect people to just make stuff up, but in your case you don't have to,” was the way he put it.
I did write this whole big long testament of My Life with Diesel, which was maybe funny if you had been there, but it read like an encyclopedia. If I could sum it up with a simple illustration, this is what it would look like:
That wasn't the 1,000 words I was hoping for. I'd better explain.
One day back in fifth grade, during lunch recess, I was trying to impress a girl who liked horses. I tried to draw a horse on the chalkboard for her, but she wasn't impressed. That's when Diesel stepped in. Much to my chagrin, he picked up the chalk and added that dude up there on the left, smoking a cigarette, sitting on my horse.
As for the guy on the right, that's Mr. Sunshine. Diesel drew him in an art class. The actual size is about 18” x 24.” One night in college I was roused from my sleep by a tap at my second floor bedroom window. When I turned the light on, Mr. Sunshine was there, looking back at me through the glass.
We spent an inordinate amount of time in fifth grade drawing pictures like that one on the left. Then we drew pictures of torture chambers, and of Death decapitating people. We wrote goofy stories, played Dungeons & Dragons (R.I.P. Gary Gygax), teased his little brother and played Asteroids on his Atari 2600 until the score flipped back to zero, at about 4 a.m. You get the idea.
We hung around together in high school, and Diesel developed an unnatural affinity for Huey Lewis' music. Whatever you've read here in the past about Huey is all real. Maybe. Honestly, I'm not in a position to judge because I spent those years being haunted by U2's Bad.*
We lived together for a few years in college. We never shared a room, though. I don't know about Diesel, but for me the reason was that he's messy as hell and I'm obsessively tidy. I'm one of those “a place for everything and everything in its place” types, and a good part of my brain is dedicated to knowing where my shit is. Diesel, on the other hand, is always looking for his shit. “Where did I put that? I just had it in my hand a second ago!” I do that too sometimes, but for Diesel I'm guessing it's an hourly occurrence. He probably even dreams about misplacing things.
In Diesel's case the tradeoff for such inefficiency with tangible, real world objects is heightened powers of creativity, an efficiency with abstract concepts, if you will. It was always Diesel who took the lead in our imaginative pursuits.** He'd invent a story and I'd follow. I got pretty good at rewording things.
I'll leave you with one more anecdote. When we were kids, Diesel's dad decided to paint the bathroom in their house. He took the mirror above the sink down and set it aside while he worked. That three foot diameter mirror was an opportunity just waiting, waiting for its moment of glory. Diesel and I found the mirror sitting there and carried it outside. Diesel lived in a house at the top of a high, steep hill. A busy, four lane road ran past his house at the bottom of the hill. Across the street, about a hundred yards away, a guy was pushing a lawnmower around his oversized lawn. In school, catching the sun's rays on one's wristwatch and aiming them at the teacher's forehead is fun enough, but with a three foot mirror... This poor guy was pushing his mower with one hand and shielding his eyes with the other. And what could he do? Nuthin'. He gestured at us, and even started across the street once. There was no way he could have caught us, though, because by the time he had crossed the street and climbed the hill, we'd have been long gone. Poor guy. We had a blast.
Well, I hope this has been real enough for you. Which reminds me: before I leave I should scatter some raisins around the floor, make it look like the cat got into them.
Ciao,
GS
* "Do you mean Michael Jackson's Bad? Or U2's Boy?" "No, U2 had a song called 'Bad.'" "Oh, ok. Then it should be in quotes, not italicized." "That's your job." "Ok, I'll be sure to change it."
**But not in a queer way. - Diesel
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